Izmir, old Smyrna, was a cosmopolitan port in the Eastern Mediterranean, housing Ottoman Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Levantine communities in the nineteenth century. Each community were living in their own quarters in the city. Within this multi- ethnic panorama, neighboring Turkish and Jewish neighborhoods were the poorest in the city, experiencing plagues and frequent fires due to poor living conditions. Today, majority of the physical signs of the existence of this multi- ethnic quarters have been wiped out after a World War, an independence war, a major fire that took place in 1922, nation-building processes and brutal urbanization that started in the 1950s. Among the few remaining physical evidences of this cosmopolitan past of the city is located in the old Jewish neighborhood, Judeira district. It is a building type known as “kortejo” or “cortijo”. Cortijo, referred also as judeo, yahudihane (house of the Jews), and aile evi (family house), was a one or two-storey building organized around a courtyard, with rows of single rooms on every floor. Each room housed a poor Sephardi family, who shared the common facilities like the kitchen, toilets and the water well with the other families. While cortijos were located on busy streets, they were also completely isolated, and even hidden from the view via their gateways and blind walls. They were real and “absolutely” other places for the poorest members of a minority group. After the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 majority of the cortijo residents moved to Israel. Their emptied out rooms became home for other equally poor residents, first for rural migrants, then for mostly single, elderly people, who were without a job, lost contact with their families and with history of addictions. Today many cortijos are abandoned or demolished, and some took over by small production ateliers. With a concentration on the life in Izmir’s cortijos until 1950s, this presentation investigates the varying degrees of otherness and marginality established and sustained by both the physical environment and its residents. Through accounts and depictions of the lives in stories, newspapers, biographies and social documentary photo exhibits, it gives snapshots from the lives of the cortijo residents through history and opens up the discussion on the heterotopic character of these spaces.