If you were really Ayatollah wannabe trying to recreate the glory of an Islamic empire or Sultan Neo-Osman I, suffering from delusions of grandeur, would you set about paving over the legacy of your imperial capital and turn the area around one of the most important Ottoman buildings -- the Blue Mosque itself -- into a parking lot? Probably not. Yet this is not even the worst example of an İstanbul that bows not before the almighty but to mammon and the combustion engine.
My concern is not just over a car park but that the most celebrated part of İstanbul -- the historical peninsula and home to so many important monuments -- is teetering on the edge of irrevocable destruction. It is a view shared by one of the world’s most sluggish cultural custodians that has spent years rousing itself into a fit of censoriousness. The patience of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage Committee is about to snap. The organization is recommending that İstanbul’s historical peninsula be put on the list of World Heritage in Danger. The next step is for İstanbul to be struck off the list of World Heritage Sites altogether. This is tantamount to declaring the current custodians of the city’s history as unfit for purpose and would be a bitter finale to İstanbul’s status in 2010 as a European Capital of Culture.
Beneath the dry tone of an internally circulated document, which the World Heritage Committee will be asked to consider when they meet at the end of this month in Brasilia, is the whiff of incredulity and sarcasm. How can İstanbul contemplate building not just a public transport tunnel under the Bosporus but a second tunnel, part of a joint Korean consortium that will turn the coastal road along the Sea of Marmara into an international thoroughfare, and pipe into the historical peninsula traffic and congestion when the aim should be to keep cars away? “The World Heritage Centre and the Advisory Bodies regret that no details of the traffic plan have been provided as requested by the committee,” it politely complains.
Yet this is only one of a slew of issues in which the committee taps its foot in exasperation at İstanbul’s disregard for its past. The one that has received the most attention is the silhouette of the proposed bridge carrying the metro line across the Golden Horn. The report laments that the city authorities have not even considered a flat bridge that will not interfere with the jewel of Ottoman architecture, the Süleymaniye Mosque. However, almost as mind boggling is that İstanbul appears to be dragging its feet by not producing a site management plan -- a document that would set out its commitment to preserve and protect the historical peninsula. The reason why no plan has been forthcoming, one can but speculate, is that this would get in the way of the urban developers and the desire to bulldoze, ad hoc, the fabric of the old city.
The Anatolia news agency has reported out of Paris that UNESCO may well chicken out of its decision to put İstanbul on the danger list. Politics and backroom diplomacy continue to play its role. It is a dilemma that confronts the concerned citizens of İstanbul as well -- whether to encourage UNESCO to punish the city authorities even if this censure means washing their hands of İstanbul and losing leverage altogether.
It is not the most obvious comparison, I know -- but let me make it all the same. Turkey has gone off to the United Nations demanding that an international tribunal should hear its grievance over the fate of the Gaza flotilla. Yet here is the collective wisdom of the United Nations -- in the form of UNESCO -- begging İstanbul to care for the vast cultural legacy with which it is entrusted. And the city stuffs cotton in its ears.
