LA Review of Books | 06/18/2022
WHEN TOURISTS take the shuttle out of the Istanbul airport, they are likely to notice a deep crater across from the last stop, overlooked by a bunch of hollowed-out pastel houses. This mess was supposed to be a shopping mall, convention center, theater, hotel, and more — an “international fun system,” in the words of Selim Dalaman, the architect behind the project.
People would come here to forget, buy, laugh, swim, dine, dance, and sleep. Dalaman was used to larger-than-life projects, but this one, he said, was the biggest he could ever hope to build in such a central spot, in a city of 15 million, on “virgin” land.
Yet as the story goes in most cities, especially ones several millennia old, the land wasn’t virgin. For 175 years, it had held the Armenian Catholic Surp Agop Hospital and its appendages, including a retirement home, a mental asylum, and low-rent housing. The foundation that ran them helped the congregation survive some of the darkest days in the region’s history: it gave free schooling to children orphaned by the 1915 Armenian Genocide and free care to members crippled by discriminatory taxes in 1942. It also pooled wealth in the community to keep it there, even after entire families moved continents.
However far or high the city stretched, and however tense the days for Armenians in Turkey, the buildings stayed put, a reminder that they were inked into the skin of Istanbul. But on paper, the property was itself orphaned. With nothing but a sultan’s decree and a 1936 record to its name, it had no owners, at least in the modern legal sense. This left it under the yoke of the Turkish state — until the state made amends, and the hospital plot vanished.
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Naomi Cohen | journalist 
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