The Arapkirlis—A Migratory Tradition in the Nineteenth Century
From the end of the eighteenth century on, the presence of Arapkirlis in Kasap ƒlyas is abundantly recorded in official documents. The death of Ispanakçızâde Mustafa Paœa, the destruction of his konak in the fire of 1782, and the subsequent dispersal of his family did not deter migrant Arapkirlis from coming to our neighborhood. Their effective concentration within the Ispanakçı Viranesi cannot be documented before the 1885 census, but the Davudpaœa court records refers to many of these Arapkirlis who appealed to the court or were called to testify in their capacity of inhabitants of Kasap
ƒlyas throughout the nineteenth century.
As early as 1785, for instance, the inheritance of a native of A™ın living in Kasap ƒlyas is the object of litigation and was brought to the Davudpaœa Court. The way in which the deceased person is mentioned in the Sicil (religious court record) is typical: “…Hüseyin beœe bin Abdullah, a seller of
charcoal, originating from the village of Pezenka(?), a dependance of A™ın, who died a while ago as a resident of the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle.. ..”19 A few years later, in 1792, the court recorded a deed of sale concerning a piece of agricultural land. This field, situated in a village called Bostancık near Arapkir
was being sold for the sum of forty-eight kuruœ. The buyer and the seller were residents of Kasap ƒlyas, and they were both Arapkirlis.20 The manner in which these two Arapkirlis are recorded in the Sicil stresses equally their place of residence and their place of origin. This 1792 record tells us that the seller of the field was “…Kara Ahmet bin Mehmet, from the village named Bostancık, a dependance of Arapkir in Anatolia, and a resident of the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle near the Davudpaœa wharf,…” and the buyer “…ƒbrahim beœe bin Abdurrahman, from the same village….”21
Throughout the nineteenth century, the Davudpaœa Religious Court records contain many more instances where residents of the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle, qualified as people from Arapkir (Arapkir ahâlisinden) appear either as plaintiffs or as witnesses.22 In all of them, the Arapkirlis are designated by their place of origin. The records include cases of divorce, of inheritance with litigation, registrations of powers of attorney as well as a number of registrations of deeds of sale of land in or around Arapkir, and so forth. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, approximately one inhabitant of Kasap ƒlyas
out of four was born in or around Arapkir and about two thirds of these Arapkirlis were located in the Ispanakçı Viranesi.
The French Orientalist and geographer Vital Cuinet, in his monumental four-volume work on the economic, social, and human geography of the Asian part of the Ottoman Empire published in the 1890s, devotes a whole chapter to the province of Mamuretülaziz, of which Arapkir was a district
(kazâ). One of his comments on the inhabitants of the district of Arapkir is another confirmation of our observations in the small Kasap ƒlyas mahalle:
Immigration—Most of the inhabitants of the rural areas of Arapkir, either because of the prevailing low level of wages and of frequent unemployment, or perhaps because they prefer to have other kinds
of occupations, often migrate to Constantinople or to other large cities, so that there are practically no important urban centers where one does not meet a few Arapkirlis.23
Arapkir and the surrounding area were the point of departure of a real migratory tradition. Quite a few of the migrants from Arapkir and from its surroundings became prominent political, artistic, and literary figures in the Ottoman Empire and in republican Turkey. Yusuf Kâmil Paœa (1808–1876),
Grand Vizier in 1862, was born in Arapkir. So was Dr. Abdullah Cevdet (1869-1932), one of the founders of the Party for Union and Progress. Such important republican political figures as Refik Koraltan (1889–1974) and ¥emsettin Günaltay (1883–1961), prime minister in the late 1940s, had moved from Arapkir to Istanbul just before the end of the nineteenth century.
Such well-known Arapkirlis as Osman Nuri Ergin (1883–1961), Ismail Saib Sencer (1873–1940), and Sedat Çetintaœ (1889–1965) became an integral part of Istanbul’s artistic and intellectual scenery, on which each left a particular imprint. Osman Nuri Ergin was born in Malatya and came to Istanbul when he was ten years old. He worked all his life in the Istanbul municipality, and became the Secretary General, a post that he occupied for twenty-two years. His numerous works and publications on Istanbul are a very substantial contribution to the history of the city, and they are still very widely referred to by urban historians. Ismail Saib Sencer also had been born into a family of Arapkirlis. A very cultured individual, he served for more than twenty years as head librarian of the largest public library of Istanbul.
As for Sedat Çetintaœ, another native of Arapkir, he was an architect and worked as a restorator of historical monuments. He planned the repair, conservation, and restoration of many historical sites and monuments of his city of adoption. Except for Ismail Saib Sencer, however, we have no evidence as
to whether any of these figures lived in or anywhere near Kasap ƒlyas.24 Kasap ƒlyas was probably not the only point of landing in Istanbul for the newcoming Arapkirlis.
Arapkir’s rural hinterland was probably not very prosperous in the eighteenth and ninetenth centuries. As to the town itself, Cuinet estimates its population at 20,000 in 1892. Arapkir does not seem to have grown much during the nineteenth century, although its cotton cloth manufacturing industry was expanding. An estimate for the 1830s had put the population of the city at about 15,000 people.25 In 1930 Arapkir became a district of the Turkish republican province of Malatya. Its population had by then fallen to only 8,000, according to the first republican census of 1927.
The city of Arapkir itself was, in the nineteenth century, best known for its production of two particular types of thick cotton cloth called manusa and kezi. Weaving developed in Arapkir after the 1820s and 1830s and mostly used imported British cotton yarn.26 Cuinet tells us that there were no largescale manufacturers in town and that the production of these local cottonades was put out by local traders to hundreds of spinners, dyers, and weavers who worked at home. The final product was then exported, mostly to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and to other cities of the eastern Mediterranean, through the ports of Beirut and Alexandretta. Arapkir is said to have contained up to a thousand looms in the late nineteenth century. Cuinet gives 75,000 meters as being the total yearly output of manusa cotton cloth in Arapkir.27 Forty years after Cuinet, a local historian from Malatya complained in the 1930s: “Most
of the male inhabitants of Arapkir frequently leave their home town in order to earn a living and help the families left behind.”28 In the meantime, local textile products had been isolated from their traditional eastern and southern outlets by the First World War and by the border changes that followed. The import of British cotton yarn had ceased for the same reason, and production had greatly declined.
As for the neighboring town of Keban, the town with the silver mines—one of the superintendents of which, in the second half of the eighteenth century, had been Ispanakçızâde Hâfız Mustafa Paœa—it did not fare much better. The extraction of silver was totally abandoned in the early 1870s, the inhabitants progressively left and, as Cuinet indicates in 1892, the prosperous town “which contained 3,000 houses has today only 300.”29
To summarize, during the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the retinue of an Ottoman Paœa and a governor of the provinces posted in Arapkir, and the personnel of his konak in the capital had made up the first nucleus of the large group of migrants whose descendants, more than a century later, came to be counted as residents of Kasap ƒlyas in the 1885 census. The flow of migrants from that small district of east-central Anatolia to the small Kasap ƒlyas mahalle in Istanbul continued, for all we know, for almost two centuries.
Notwithstanding their progressive and successful integration into urban life, their being Arapkirlis remained part of the identity of the migrants and of their descendents. Whether these Arapkirlis ever met with reactions of resistance or of rejection coming from the urbanites of Kasap ƒlyas or from
those of Istanbul at large, has not transpired into the documents. However, it is highly unlikely that such a specific cultural “urbanite-peasant” rift could have been part of the urban culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Istanbul. “Urban problems” were then perceived as almost exclusively con-
nected with security, political troubles, and deviant morals. And on all of these counts, the group of migrant Arapkirlis who settled in Kasap ƒlyas performed quite well. Besides, it is not in a peripheral, almost semirural neighborhood of Istanbul such as the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle that this sociological duality, if any, would have first been felt and voiced.