Mayor says Levantine mansions in Aegean city under protection

Mayor Kamil Okyay Sındır of Bornova town of the Aegean province of İzmir said that the municipality would restore one of the Levantine mansions in their town.

"Our municipality will restore the Dramali Mansion and make it a tourism center," Sındır told the Anatolia news agency.

Sındır said tradesmen who were exporting cotton, grapes and figs from the Aegean Region and importing various products via Silk Road, were settled in Bornova town and built the Levantine mansions.

The mayor said most of the Levantine mansions did not need any restoration for their owners were living in them, so the municipality would restore uninhabitable ones.

Earlier, Yesil (Green) Mansion and Murat Mansion were restored. Another mansion located at the entrance of Bornova Agricultural Researches Center and owned by the Agriculture & Rural Affairs Ministry will be restored.

"This mansion can be turned into a center in which historical agricultural culture of Bornova is exhibited," mayor Sındır said.

Great Levantine mansions of İzmir refer to about fifty stately residences, dating principally from the 19th century and of which a significant number remain intact to this day, by being restored and continuing to be used and visited. They were built either by prominent Levantines or by European merchants or consuls residing in the city. These residences differ from the traditional Ottoman mansions (konak) in the city by a number of features, as well as by their history. The families who owned them, the notable visitors they hosted in these houses, their testimonial destinies through the historic events of the city, make them an important part of İzmir's common heritage.

Levantine mansions are mostly situated in the modern-day metropolitan districts of Buca and Bornova, which are located slightly inland, and which were the favoured residential quarters for the city's richer classes of Western origins or, in the case of a few built more recently, in the coastal district of Karsiyaka.

During the 19th century and early 20th century, Germans, Austrians, Russians, as well as people who were originally issued from the Christian or Jewish Ottoman minorities or even Turks, also followed suit, as long as they could introduce themselves to the tightly knit community. And although they usually shunned the term, it could be applied to settlers of British or American background as well, in function of their adoption of the elusive Levantine culture and lifestyle or integration into the local economy and social life. Typical Levantines acted at the top of the hierarchy of class of intermediaries governing the relations of the Ottoman Empire with the outside world; coming before, generally richer than, and individually collaborating and socially in competition with, respectively, Greeks, Armenians and Jews, all on the background of the decline of the Empire, in a regime characterized by the capitulations and other privileges, foreign debt and outside intervention into politics.

Practically extinguished in the course of the political upheavals that shook Egypt and Lebanon in the 20th century, Levantine background and culture remains the most vivacious in Turkey, where it is considered one of the inherent elements of the overall social tissue. While many migrated back to Europe, many others continue to live in Istanbul (mostly in the districts of Beyoglu and Nisantasi) and İzmir (mostly in the districts of Bornova and Buca). They characteristically preserve intense international ties.

Bornova was favoured very early by European/Levantine merchants and foreign consuls who sought to flee the sometimes stagnantly hot summer weather in central İzmir to seek the cooler breeze of the slopes of the Mount Yamanlar on which Bornova started out, about five kilometers inland starting from the tip of the Gulf of İzmir.

Some of the mansions in Bornova are the Charles Whittall Mansion, today the rectorate building of the Ege University; Steinbuchel Mansion, where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk stayed the day after the re-capture of İzmir by the Turkish army in 1922; Paggy, Charnaud, Kanalaki, Barry and Maltass houses (the residence of İzmir Metropolitan Mayor Aziz Kocaoğlu), the Well house, Paterson house.