Real-Estate Opportunities for Compact Architecture in Istanbul's Üsküdar District

Istanbul, like many developing cities across the world, is the epicentre of a massive housing bubble  that has seen house and land prices jump beyond the reach of most people. The situation is particularly bad at the central parts of the city. Waves of gentrification have rendered “hip” neighbourhoods such as Cihangir, Galata, Karaköy and Moda unaffordable to their previous inhabitants.

Outside the city centre, numerous fancy housing developments have proliferated. These are aimed at middle-class office workers and their newly-found families. Many such projects lie far away from the city and, while remaining slightly more affordable than the centre, are likewise priced way above their real worth. Most often, their sterile exteriors conceal horribly utilitarian lifestyles in which no human being can discern a meaningful existence. They are dormitories for slaves, bound not by shackle and chain, but by mortgage, rent, car and school payments, and Sisypean “careers” that pay far less than their equivalents in the rest of the world.

 Broadly speaking, a young, well-educated person, living solely on his or her entry-level white-collar wage, has only two choices - either live in a squalid, overpriced apartment at the centre, or be resigned to live away from the city and waste hours of his or her life in traffic every day.

However, while jogging across the Asiatic shores of Istanbul around the borough of Üsküdar, I began to imagine an alternative scenario. Property prices in Üsküdar remain lower than their counterparts on the European side of the city. However, the area is strongly connected to the city centre, mostly by a network of very pleasant boat and ferry rides and a newly-opened underwater crossing (see map above, the red areas are the Üsküdar district.) The only reason Üsküdar’s property prices remain low is due to its conservative population and lack of well-built housing stock. 

Despite these shortcomings, Üsküdar is a very suitable location for a young professional to live in. Rents remain low and it only takes a brief boat ride to cross over to the European side. Life is affordable, and the streets feel far away from the noise and grind of big city life. Although the resident population is made up mostly of conservative immigrants from Anatolia, Üsküdar used to have a diverse, multi-ethnic population of Jews, Armenians and Greeks back in the Ottoman days. Neighbourhoods of Üsküdar still reflect this heritage in their architecture. While running through Üsküdar’s streets, I saw many small, quaint buildings, some left over from past non-Muslim inhabitants, and others built by recent immigrants in a more clumsy style. 

Here are some such buildings from Üsküdar's environs:

Greek house from the 19th century, İmrahor district, Üsküdar.

Colourful row of small immigrant houses, İmrahor district, Üsküdar.

Colorful house, İmrahor district, Üsküdar.

Colorful row of immigrant houses, İmrahor district, Üsküdar.

Greek or Armenian-built single block home, İmrahor district, Üsküdar.

Small modern apartment, possibly built in the 1950s-60s, İmrahor district, Üsküdar.

One-room immigrant house, Bağlarbaşı district, Üsküdar.

One-storey Greek house, Murat Reis district, Üsküdar.

Two-storey Greek or Armenian apartment, Zeynep Kamil district, Üsküdar.

Eclectic triangular two-storey apartment, Bağlarbaşı district, Üsküdar.

Old wooden house, Bağlarbaşı district, Üsküdar.

Small three-storey Armenian or Greek shop, Sultantepe district, Üsküdar.

Beautiful Greek shop and house, Sultantepe district, Üsküdar.

Two-storey immigrant house, Bağlarbaşı district, Üsküdar.

Two-storey Greek house, Zeynep Kamil district, Üsküdar.

One-storey Jewish house, Kuzguncuk district, Üsküdar.

Two-storey Armenian or Greek house, Bağlarbaşı district, Üsküdar.

Two-storey house, Kuzguncuk district, Üsküdar.

Eclectic two-storey house, Kuzguncuk district, Üsküdar.

Set of two small houses, Kuzguncuk district, Üsküdar.

Strange corner apartment, Kuzguncuk district, Üsküdar.

Two-storey house with large balcony, Bağlarbaşı district, Üsküdar.

1960's-style summer house, Bağlarbaşı district, Üsküdar.

Ottoman-era wooden house, Bağlarbaşı district, Üsküdar.
This property was up for sale for nearly 150.000 dollars - a very small sum for a central-location house in Istanbul.

One-storey Greek house, İcadiye district, Üsküdar.

19th-century wooden house, İcadiye district, Üsküdar.

Ramshackle immigrant house, İcadiye district, Üsküdar.

Restored and refurbished house, Kuzguncuk district, Üsküdar.

Slanting house, Selamsız district, Üsküdar

House built against historical wall, Burhaniye district, Üsküdar. 

Real estate office built around old Greek store and house, Emniyet district, Üsküdar. 

Mosaic-covered immigrant building, Emniyet district, Üsküdar. 

Concrete building in the shape of an old Turkish mansion, up for sale, Bağlarbaşı district, Üsküdar. 

Old Greek house with shop below, Bağlarbaşı district, Üsküdar.

Splendid old Greek house, built in 1913, Bağlarbaşı district, Üsküdar.

Wooden Turkish or Greek house, Bağlarbaşı district, Üsküdar. 

Old house with grandma, Bağlarbaşı district, Üsküdar. 

Beautiful old Greek building, Bağlarbaşı district, Üsküdar.

I looked at all these houses, and thought of all the neat compact buildings made by inventive architects in developed countries. I came to believe that Üsküdar, (and other similar neighbourhoods in Istanbul,) had great potential for such further development.

Compact house in Tokyo, Japan.

Compact house with garden from London.

Compact home from Melbourne, Australia.

Compact house, built on top of three parking spaces, from Sydney, Australia.

After buying such land lots and buildings, one can restore them, or rebuild them as seen above in the examples from the rest of the world. The main point here would be to preserve (or build) each property as a single home, and avoid the temptation to turn them into ugly, multi-storey apartment blocks.

The target audience of such compact houses can be young, mostly single urban workers and expats with an inner-city lifestyle, who commute from their houses in Üsküdar to their jobs in the European shore of the city via boat. Similar buildings across the world have become very valuable investments and desirable properties to live in. If (and when) Istanbul’s real-estate bubble bursts, such houses will retain their desirability while the Kafkaesque housing projects outside the city will evaporate. 

 While the exact financial details of such a project need to be further worked out, I am confident that turning Üsküdar’s small houses into clean, well-designed compact houses can be a lucrative financial opportunity, and a chance to enrich Istanbul with some beautiful and exciting buildings.

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Encounter With a Sea Hare (Aplysia dactylomela)

In May 2014, I turned thirty, during a brief-but-pleasant vacation to Cyprus with my family. On the first morning of my thirtieth year, I went for a swim in the seawater-flooded swimming pool of the hotel we were staying in. Little did I know that the pool held a pleasant birthday surprise for me - in the form of a giant sea slug known popularly as a sea hare, Aplysia dactylomela.

The sea hare looked like a cross between a slug, a hamster and a disembodied heart. It released a brilliant, purple dye when I first caught it - but I could not photograph that moment.

Here is the sea hare in its full view. It was distinctively patterned with large, black, circular spots. These identified it as an Aplysia dactylomela, the spotted sea hare.

Here is a close-up of the little critter's face. Its bushy-looking antennae do not support its eyes as in terrestrial slugs or snails. Instead, her eyes are located on the white, pimple-like protuberances between them.

I released the animal into the sea after taking a few photographs. The encounter with the sea hare impacted me with a strange bout of melancholia, no doubt related to quiet retrospection I was submitting my life to at my thirtieth birthday - an important, if purely imaginary, threshold in many people's lives.

My feelings were further aroused by the importance this pool, and this hotel had for me and my family. Decades ago, I took one of my first  seaside vacations at this hotel with my parents, grandparents and extended family. It was here that I bathed in the sea for the first time, mikvah-like, in the shallow section of the tide-pool. The years went by, my grandparents passed away one by one and death made its presence felt in my parents' generation as well.

More than a decade after my last visit, I was here with my parents and my wife - another generation facing the assault of time. The sea hare reminded me how life was full of unexpected surprises, people, opportunities and dreams - not to mention fear, mistakes and bouts of regret. I guessed everyone went through such tribulations, and everyone had to face them, one way or the other...

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A Walk on the Hills Above Ortakoy

In the first week of April, 2014, I took a long and refreshing walk on the hills above Ortaköy, one of Istanbul's picturesque seaside neighborhoods. Although Ortaköy is surrounded by the masses of ugly urban sprawl, this certain hill was spared due to its proximity to a historical Jewish cemetery.

Spring was beginning to assert itself and scores of tiny animals were frolicking among the green grass and the blooming flowers. It was a welcome respite from the soul-grinding chaos of Istanbul's traffic and rude people. Here re some animals I encountered:

I was familiar with these fleet-footed spiders since childhood. My friends and I even had a name for them - to us the yellowish, improbably fast spiders that ran, jumped and hunted among grass blades were cheetah spiders. This was my first chance to take decent photographs of them.

The "cheetah spiders" were known commonly as nursery web spiders, Pisaura mirabilis. This individual was a male, as evident from its patterned back and boxing-glove-like appendages on its pedipalps. The males pumped these organs full of sperm and inserted them into the females' genitals when mating. I'm not kidding. The human equivalent of this action would be someone ejaculating into his hands and fisting his partner in order to get her pregnant!

Another beautiful arachnid I saw was this brightly-coloured jumping spider of the family Salticidae, sucking on some sort of fly while basking on the marble of a 30-year-old Jewish tomb. I love jumping spiders - their faces are adorned with cute, owl-like eyes and they have an incredible variety of rare species. Identifying them was an arachnologist's nightmare. I's never seen a jumping spider of this colour before, it could even have been a new species.

Two other spiders, from the crab spider family Thomisidae were displaying to each other, perhaps as a mating dance, perhaps as part of a territorial battle, or perhaps a bit of both.

These two dazzlingly-coloured flies, Diptera sp. were getting it on on a milkweed leaf. They sat without moving, mounted together in a statue-like embrace. They reminded me of ravers with colourful sunglasses. Note how the male's eyes had a touch of red, compared to the female's blue-green tincture.

There was a sudden rustle from the tall bushes behind me. I first thought it to be a cat, but then out came this old, friendly-looking tortoise, possibly of the species Testudo gracea. I felt very happy that such an animal could live to old age in the middle of Istanbul's concrete inferno. Perhaps all cities needed more cemeteries to preserve what was left of their wildlife.

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Childhood Games, Movies and Adventures

Recently, my father, an esteemed photographer, sent me a batch of childhood photos showing the various crazy "games" me, my brother and other friends played as we were growing up. I had always been a creative and mischievous kid, and had no shortage of interesting games and adventures to put my friends and little brother through.

This photo, taken all the way back in 1991, shows me and my baby brother turning a fireplace into an "altar to the snake-god" with plastic toy snakes, seashells, candles and other natural paraphernalia. My brother and family friends would sing and clap, while I would utter nonsense riddles and incantations, supposedly conveyed to me by the "master of the serpents."

It all sounds very esoteric, but I clearly remember being inspired by the Mumm-ra character from the epic early 1980s cartoon show, Thundercats. Far from mysticism, this game was all about cartoon fandom.

We really liked playing with plastic snakes of all sorts. I had a bag of about 8 or 10 such toys, and carried it everywhere I went.

I also had faint memories of these weird, fish-like toys, a gift by our grandfather from a business trip to Paris. We would bury them in the beach and pretend to "uncover" them in front of shocked onlookers.

By the mid-1990s, my interest in "weird stuff" was growing considerably. This photograph, taken in 1996, showed me and my brother chilling in our double bed. I had decorated our room with H.R. Giger prints and images of animals.

We were also big movie aficionados. After watching Back to the Future Part 2, I built this fake "howerboard" out of cardboard, aluminum foil and parts of discarded electronic devices. Too bad it couldn't fly for real.

One of our family friends, Necdet "Neco" Sahin, (now a successful graphic designer,) was with us through most of our games and adventures. In this dream-like picture, the three of us are exploring the mirror-like surface of the great Salt Lake (Tuz Gölü) in the middle of the Anatolian plain. The hypersaline water, only an inch deep, was covered with a brittle layer of salt crystals at the bottom. Beneath the salt, there was a sticky layer of dark mud. We all ruined our shoes during this particular excursion, all the way back in 1997.

I used to collect broken computers and other electronic garbage, and use them to build an altar-like "master computer" in our parents' storage closet. I'd then line up my brother and friends in front of this insane contraption, and force them to undergo a "trance," claiming that the machine could read their minds.

Here is a close-up of the insane "master computer." Circuit boards, broken keyboards and hard disks, and parts of a flip-display clock are visible.

As we grew, it occurred to me to film our games, and a bustling mini-industry of weird movies developed in our household. We shot dozens of funny adventures and short sci-fi stories with our father's Hi-8 camera. The method we had for "editing" the movies was simple: we simply rewound the tape to a desired part of the shot, and filmed the countershot on top of it, praying that the segments would match.

Our adventures in this "MemoWood" can fill dozens of blog posts like this. Here, I am testing a "superhero costume" made out of aluminum foil and fireproof gloves.

In this picture, I am helping my brother put on an improved version of the aluminum suit shown above.

In 1999, a great earthquake struck Turkey and thousands of people, including my grandmother, perished in the disaster. In this dark period, MemoWood shielded us from the traumas of the earthquake. My father shot this picture only a day after we had found our grandmother's body in the rubble. We were keeping ourselves busy by filming a DIY version of The Matrix in a construction site. I can only imagine the harrowing feelings my father must have been going through when he took this photo. Perhaps, our games may have given him hope.

As we matured, so did our films, with more detailed props, better cameras and improved storylines. But they were still about outlandish heroes and crazy science-fiction battles. An example: this movie was called "Triangle Man vs. Nazis." By this time I had decided to become a film director, but I could simply not bring myself to shoot a boring film about emotions, or "strangers whose lives intersect," and so on. My movies had to have explosions, chases and weird villains, preferably played by myself. Perhaps the earthquake (and the subsequent tribulations of our family,) had cauterized my feelings about people - MemoWood was our way of escaping that reality.

On the set of Kırkayak, with friends Can Evrenol, Melis Aydan and Kerem Sevinçli, in 2008.

In one form or another, MemoWood lasted until 2008, when I shot my last and most complicated picture, "Kırkayak" (The Centipede,) about a drug dealer who turned into a pointy-headed superhero who could shit out explosives and battled an army of supernatural ninjas.

The closest I got to being a professional filmmaker was in the mid 2000s, when I directed music videos, short commercials and was featured in a TV show about life as a college student. Films like Kırkayak gave me a limited "cult" recognition among young arts and film enthusiasts in Istanbul.

Afterwards, I drifted away from films and was interested more in art and books. I still want to make more films, not just crazy MemoWood adventures but also documentaries as well. Time and circumstances permitting, MemoWood may rise again. But sadly, we will all have outgrown the cheerful innocence of its earlier incarnation.

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