The postwar Allied occupation of Istanbul from 1918 to 1923 brought international geopolitics into the intimate sphere of daily life for all residents of the city. Every person, whether refugee, cosmopolite, foreign worker, longtime resident or rural migrant, felt the constraints of postwar poverty, and the landscapes of the city’s various districts were variously imbued with powerful mixtures of hope and/or anxiety regarding the city’s future stability and sovereignty. Although much has been written about gender tensions in early twentieth century Istanbul, particularly regarding the historic cultural politics surrounding women’s bodies in a modernizing society that retained an ideal mother role for women, the relationships between urban geopolitics and formations of gender in the occupied city remain an understudied topic. This paper integrates the themes of Turkishness, wealth, urban memory, territoriality, and religion to show their convergence in the problem of masculinity during the occupation. I mine memoirs, satirical essays, and caricatures written in Istanbul during the occupation by male Turks for depictions of urban masculinity and gendered political anxiety. For example, many male stereotypes in satirical essays and caricatures were failures: the wealthy but unsophisticated boor, the poor loser, the cuckold, the drunkard, and the ignorant hoja. Memoirs illuminate male grief for the Ottoman Turkish city and helplessness in the face of Allied power exerted on the streets of the city and at the desks of the Paris Peace Conference. This research demonstrates how the urban experience of occupation influenced cultures of gender for Istanbulite Turkish men.

After the First World War, Istanbul was under Allied occupation for five years. British, French, and Italian forces ruled the city and take advantage of this exceptional opportunity to engage in archeological excavations in the city as well as in related scholarly activities such as talks, publishing of scholarly works and planning of new schools of archeology based in Istanbul. In this paper, I track these activities and try to uncover the relationship and interaction between these activities and the Ottoman authorities as well as the Ottoman public. I ask why and how occupying armies engaged with archeology, what did they do with their finds as well as the impact of the archeological activities to the city and its peoples. While the political aspects of the Allied occupation of Istanbul are fairly well studied, the cultural aspects, especially archeological aspects are not studied so far. Accordingly, using sources collected from British, French, Italian and Ottoman archives, documents from British and French Archeological Schools in Athens which were engaged with the excavations in the Ottoman capital, and various contemporary scholarly publications and international and Ottoman newspapers this paper contributes to our understanding of the history of archeology and museums and the impact of the occupation to the city. It also contributes to our understanding of life in the occupied city, the dynamics between the occupiers and the occupied, and the uses of the city space by its diverse inhabitants.

Istanbul-based U.S. writers penned the name “Constan Town,” to the occupied, soon-to-be former Ottoman imperial center. The reference of “Constan Town” isolates the European-stylized district of Beyo?lu, captures the migratory elements to the city, including U.S. amateur musician sailors as well as touring black American jazz musicians. “Constan Town” provides a starting cue for mapping an early jazz geography onto the terrain of occupation. As the city had been a stopover for performers since the 19th century, various local and foreign entrepreneurial designs combined to establish a leisure industry in the predominantly non-Muslim district of Beyo?lu. By the post-Armistice period, more performers, refugees, relief workers, soldiers, and travellers arrived with a significant number funneling into Beyo?lu. The district’s neo-classical sensibility and polyglot score offset the Muslim topography and predominantly Turkish-speaking residents of Stamboul establishing a metaphorical and historical chasm between the districts spanning the Golden Horn. The early jazz geography of the city consisted of a variety of spaces—nightclubs, dance studios, multi-tiered hotels and restaurants, haberdasheries—any commercial or professional outlet that catered to a globally shared and expressed early jazz trend. Envisioning Beyo?lu through the lens of early jazz demarcates a complicated urban racial, sexual and spatial reordering at a time of occupation, and was part of scripting differences onto Beyo?lu’s social topography expressed through “bodily metaphors” of culture, geography, race, and ethnicity. (Ramsay Burt: 1998) The paper draws upon urban musical and spatial narratives emerging in the local illustrated and foreign press, and understands space as a charged site for competing and overlapping agendas—economic, political, cultural, ethical, and moral—that elucidates Edward Casey’s posit that “controlled geographies need not play a significant role in the experience and knowledge of places and regions.” (Edward Casey: 1997) In Occupied Istanbul, the unevenness of jazz culture—understandings of it, participation in, and access to it—made space for creative possibilities and expressions, reactions and responses that informed the material and symbolic borders of Beyo?lu.

In the aftermath of WWI, Russian Civil War refugees in Istanbul became one of the first big social groups that experienced a transformation of the notion of refugeedom. From being people in an unfortunate situation who fled from violence, looked for a safe place and relied on the humanity of their unwilling hosts, Russian refugees had been transformed to a degrading social category, an obstructive factor in politics and economy, an undesirable element whose movement should be controlled, who should be detained in camps, and who was expected to silently follow their fate designed for them by their “patrons.” Fleeing from one disfavor they found themselves unwelcome intruders on the other side of the border. In the perception of the governors of occupied Istanbul, those Russians merged with other undesirable people who were kept in detention and concentration camps throughout the colonial world from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century and during the WWI. In many cases, Russian refugees in the Istanbul area were treated in a similar way. To a certain degree, post-WWI Istanbul became one big temporary detention camp for Russian refugees until a territory for their disposal would be found. Furthermore, instead of relying on traditional charitable state institutions or private philanthropic organizations, Russian refugees found themselves subjects to institutionalized bureaucratic machinery of “scientific” humanitarianism and supranational refugee regimes. Economic devastation, political instability, and the scope of the refugee problem in the region forced the Allied representatives and the Ottoman governments in the city to evade any responsibility for the Russian refugees and to transfer it to an international body of any kind. As a result, the Russian community in Istanbul was fragmented, its people were categorized and ranked according to deserving help priority-levels by the institutions distributing humanitarian aid. This policy changed those people’s subjectivity, identity, and bodily integrity, eventually turning them into modern refugees. Studying the experience of Russian refugees in the Istanbul area allows us to identify initial patterns of refugee treatment in the Middle East and the world, which led to current international refugee politics. It also explains the public notion of refugees, which we routinely accept today as a norm. Additionally, the case of Russian refugees adds to our understanding of Turkish state relations to religious and ethnic Others covered by the romanticized and nostalgic image of the White Russians in Istanbul.