TURKEY: Benevolent Bomber

“I didn’t realize,” said a U.S. tourist in Turkey last week as he gaped at the devastation on all sides, “that Istanbul was so badly bombed during the war.” A guide promptly reassured him that Turkey’s largest and most famed city had never been a target for enemy bombers.* But what the explosives of wartime combatants had done in malice for the clutter of London and Berlin, the peaceful but restless ambition of Premier Adnan Menderes was doing for Istanbul.

Night after night, all summer long, the sleep of tired Turks has been interrupted by the blasts of dynamite. All day long, bulldozers roar and root through Istanbul’s cluttered slums and crowded business sections, sweeping away unsightly shacks and once busy office buildings. Bedrooms and bathrooms peep nakedly from the fronts of half-demolished houses. On only 48 hours’ notice, tenants are often forced to vacate condemned buildings and find new premises to live or work in. Istanbul’s face lifting is costing perhaps $1,000,000 a day, and Premier Menderes is in no mood to brook delays.

Crossroads Jumble. The ancient city has seen the glory and decline of two empires. Founded by the Greeks six centuries before Christ, and chosen as the site of a new Rome by the Emperor Constantine in A.D. 330, the city was known first as Byzantium. As Constantinople, it was a world capital for 1,100 years until it fell in 1453 to the founders of a new empire, the vigorous Turks of the Ottoman Conqueror Mohammed II.

Under Turkish rule, Constantinople’s famed Christian shrines, like the great basilica of Saint Sophia, were restored and refurbished to the glory of Allah. Slim minarets rose skyward alongside rounded Byzantine domes. New architectural jewels, like the Blue Mosque of Sultan Ahmed I, sprang up to rival the old, and the hiving humanity drawn by commerce to this natural crossroads of land and sea began to fill every available crevice with the insignificant architecture of its daily life.

When the new Turkish republic of Kemal Ataturk took over from the moribund Ottoman Empire after World War I, the ancient glories of Constantinople were already flaking away in a slow death of peeling paint, collapsed masonry, commercial clutter and neglect. Nobody much cared. The fashion then was to lavish attention on the bustling new inland capital of Ankara. As time passed, tourist interest and national pride in the possession of a great historical monument gradually restored Turkish affection to the city they now called Istanbul. Still, nobody did much about repaving its streets, restoring its buildings or clearing its slums until last summer, when energetic Adnan Menderes, cooling off on the Bosporus, chanced to rummage around in some old plans for refurbishing the city. Menderes put his army to work as laborers, to save money.

No Half Measures. In the first spurt of the Premier’s enthusiasm, whole forests of unsightly shacks were swept away. Wooden sheds lining the shores of the picturesque Golden Horn disappeared overnight. The cluttered squares at both ends of the old Galata Bridge were widened and lengthened by demolishing half a block of buildings at either end. Bulldozers roared up the coastal road along the Bosporus sweeping away fountains, buildings or anything else that stood in their way. Many a corner of old Constantinople looked as though the barbarians had swept down on it; in fact Byzantine purists, who think the Turks are, at best, indifferent to the ancient Greek glories, looked on with foreboding.

This spring, after a winter of thought and a quick second glance at the city, Menderes went to work on Istanbul in even greater earnest. “Half measures,” he announced, “won’t do.” When Istanbul’s mayor raised a feeble protest, the Premier, it was said, suggested he take a long vacation and promptly pre-empted his office. Where before only the facades of buildings were condemned, Menderes now tore down whole structures. By last week, more than 10,000 buildings had been “Menderazed.”

On business in Baghdad recently, Menderes jumped out of bed in the middle of the night to send a cable announcing, “Have decided to tear down house opposite Spice Bazaar on Eminonu Square. Proceed with expropriation.” One night he spent five hours in the sidecar of a motorcycle supervising the construction of a new superparkway that will stretch from Beyazid Square to Emperor Theodosius’ 5th century wall.

Other jobs the Premier hopes to encompass are the doubling in size of the city’s five most important squares and the widening of every street leading into them, the completion of an opera house at the end of famed Taksim Square, paving of the city’s streets, removal of the present monument to Kemal Ataturk and the building of a still bigger and finer one, clearance of the tangled slum area along the Golden Horn where the Roman patricians once had their finest villas, and, last but not least, a subway under the Golden Horn and a bridge over the Bosporus, connecting Europe and Asia. But though new ideas for construction and destruction buzz in the Premier’s head from dawn to dusk, no detailed plan of this vast reconstruction program has ever been published. Many a local critic suspects that Menderes is just making it up as he goes along. They cite the case of the State Monopoly Building, which Menderes first remodeled and then, in a fit of impatience, decided to tear down. But the Premier insists to one and all that he knows exactly what he is doing.

Meanwhile, the work goes on apace to the general approval of most people of the long-neglected city. “Unfortunately,” said one Istanbul businessman last week, “this is the only way Istanbul can get a new look. We Turks just don’t have such refinements as responsible planning boards. Besides, if he did print the plans in advance, the land speculators would move in and raise the price of the whole project ten times.”

*Neutral Turkey declared war on Germany ten weeks before V-E day, thus qualifying for charter membership in the U.N.