The Destruction of the Pashas' Mansion: A Sad Tour of the Streets(1)

  The Pamuk Apartments were built at the edge of a large lot in Nisantasi that had been the garden of a pasha's mansion. The name itself, meaning "target stone," comes from the days of the reformist westernizing sultans of the late eighteen and early nineteenth century (Selim III and Mahmud II), who placed stone tablets in the empty hills above the city in those areas where they practiced shooting and archery; the tablets marked the spot where an arrow landed or where an empty earthenware pot was shattered by a bullet; they usually carried a line of two describing the occasion. When the Ottoman sultans, fearing tuberculosis and desirous of western comforts ( as well as a change of scene), abandoned Topkapi Palace for new palaces in Dolmabahce and Yildiz, their viziers and princesbagan to build their own wooden mansions in the hills of nearby Nisantasi. My first schools were housed in the Crown Prince Yusuf Izzeddin Pasha Mansion, and in the Grand Viier Halil Rifat Pasha Mansion. Each would be burned and demolished while I was studying there, even as I played soccer in the gardens. Accross the street from our home, another apartment building was buit on the ruins of the Secretary of Ceremonies Faik Bey Mansion. In fact, the only stone mansion still standing in our neighborhood was a former home of grand viziers that had passed into the hands of the municipality after the Ottoman Empire fell and the capital moved to Ankara. I remember going for my smallpox vaccination to another old pasha's mansion that had become the headquarters of the district council. The rest--those mansions where Ottoman officials had once entertained foreign emissaries and those that belonged to the 19th century Sultan Abdulhamit's daughters--I recall only as dilapidated brick whells with gaping windows and broken staircases darkened by bracken and untended fig trees; to remember them is to feel the deep sadness they evoked in me as a young child. By the late fifties, most of them had been burned down or demolished to make way for apartment buildings.