Description

The map, made on tracing paper and contemporary mounted on linen, was based on a contemporary wall map of Istanbul, more precisely Fatih, the southern European part (please see below for the details), but instead of modern streets the present map marks old Ottoman streets, shops, monuments, printers’ and publishers’ shops, squares etc., as they existed before the war and the great fire, which destroyed large parts of Fatih. The map is of a great importance for researches of the Ottoman Istanbul.

Survey of Istanbul in the 1920s and Triangulation from the Galata Tower

After World War I, Istanbul desperately needed a new survey. Part of the city was still destroyed in the fire, people and new investors were immigrating massively in and out of the metropole and infrastructure desperately needed modernization.

Especially groundbreaking was the year 1923, when Turkey became an independent republic and moved the capital to Ankara. Many state offices were moved and governmental buildings needed to be rearranged.

Major factors, which were also calling for the reorganization of the infrastructure of Istanbul were secularization of the state, which changed the purpose of many Islamic buildings, and major demographic shifts, bringing new inhabitants, especially from parts of post-Revolution Russia.

Contemporary maps, such as the 15 sheet detailed tourist map of Necip Bey, printed in 1918, but only published in 1924 by Ahmed Ishan, was useless from the urban point of view, as it failed to show the topography of Istanbul with its hills and exceedingly steep streets.

New surveys, made after 1923, tried to show various aspects of Istanbul, important for further urban planning. They joined the information of previous and contemporary maps, older maps of streets for insurances, 1918-1919 German surveys of Istanbul streets, which were issued on gigantic sheets, today called Alman mavileri. (German Blueprints, often wrongly translated as German Blues) and the latest topographic measurements of Istanbul, made with triangulation from the highest point in the city – the Galata Tower.

First triangulations from the Galata Tower were made by French in 1911 and were followed by Germans during WWI. Based on these surveys three large wall maps of Istanbul were made by the Turkish Development and Construction Inc. between 1923 and 1928, which are probably most detailed wall maps of the post-war period, printed in the Ottoman language.

From the thee maps, the map of Fatih, in the European part of Istanbul, was a the basis for the present map.

References: Cf. Hicran Topçu, A Historic-Contextual Approach for the Identification of Built Heritage in Historic Urban Areas: Case of Galata District in Istanbul a Thesis Submitted to the Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences of Middle East Technical University, 2004.