This paper follows the stories of Halid bin Zeyd Ebû Eyyûb el-Ensari, the Companion of the Prophet Muhammad who died besieging Constantinople in the 7th century. The miraculous discovery of his tomb in 1453 was understood by many to be the founding story of an Ottoman Muslim Istanbul, and stories describing his life were circulated in a variety of media over the centuries. Yet these stories about Halid bin Zeyd were also stories about the neighborhood of Istanbul -- Eyüp -- which grew up around his tomb. More than simply narrating Halid bin Zeyd’s life and death, these stories became one mode through which diverse actors made normative claims about the neighborhood and the city around them. As many of my interlocutors argued during my fieldwork, “If he’d [Halid bin Zeyd] never existed, this [the present neighborhood of Eyüp] would never have been.” Borrowing the concept of ‘enactment’, this paper explores how the telling of Halid bin Zeyd’s story in three different moments -- the 1920s, the 1950s, and the present day -- drew the writer, a specific reading community, and their urban surroundings into a particular arrangement. These three writers -- Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, Ziya Şakir, and H. Cemal Öğüt -- all used Halid bin Zeyd to both make particular claims about the neighborhood of Eyüp and to make broader arguments about the importance of the past, the nature of proper religious belief, and the charecter of the city in which they lived. This paper thus reads these writers’ individual stories and situates those stories within their historically and geographically specific contexts. Doing so, I argue, helps us understand both why this particular story is important to this place and provides one perspective on how Istanbul comes to be lived and experienced as a particularly blessed city. More broadly, focusing on the interrelationship between the story of Halid bin Zeyd and that of Eyüp provides an opportunity to ask more general questions about how, through the telling of stories like this, cities come to be lived as meaningful environments.

This paper explores the politics of infrastructure in contemporary Turkey, arguing that the material transformation of urban landscapes—most significantly, that of Istanbul—has been central to both the electoral success of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the growing challenges to its rule. At both the municipal and the national levels, the AKP has used infrastructure projects large and small to imagine and enact its political authority, grounding its claims to legitimacy and good governance in the transformation of the built environment and the provision of services to urban residents. Current Prime Minister and former Istanbul mayor Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has sought to leave his mark on the city through a range of high-profile of often controversial infrastructure projects, including new metro lines, a third airport, an Ottoman-style mosque on the city’s highest hill, and perhaps most ambitious of all, a canal that would link the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea. In mid-2013, one such project—the redevelopment of Taksim Square and Gezi Park—sparked mass protests against AKP rule, and construction contracts lay at the heart of the corruption scandal that engulfed the party later that year. The paper argues that the AKP’s attempts to reshape Istanbul—and the Prime Minister’s heavy-handed interference in what might seem like local questions of urban planning and architectural design—are not only about generating economic value: they are also about the construction and performance of political power. The paper traces the historical trajectory of urban transformation in modern Turkey, arguing that there are substantial and often overlooked continuities between the AKP and its Kemalist predecessors in this respect—both in their ideological approaches to infrastructure, and in the paternalist and often authoritarian character of their interventions in the built environment. Finally, it examines the Gezi Park protests and the AKP’s response as an example of how the materiality of urban politics may also form the grounds for protest and political change.

The extensive body of literature on the 2009 demolition of Sulukule, one of Istanbul’s largest and most well-known Romani (Gypsy) neighborhoods, has focused on issues of history and heritage, macro-economic and political processes such as urban development and neoliberalism, or rights discourses such as the Right to the City or Romani Rights (Karaman and Islam 2012; Uysal 2011; Robins 2011; Kuyucu and Ünsal 2010; Gürsoy 2009; Yolacan 2008). This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion around Sulukule by offering a perspective that accounts for the many people and things that were brought together because of the neighborhood’s demolition, and by exploring the lasting impacts of such assemblages on both Romani identity and the way Istanbul, as a city, is produced. Alongside the destructive actions of the bulldozers that left a razed neighborhood and a dislocated community, much was also produced in this particular moment and space, including new connections between Turkish and international rights organizations, emerging discourses and debates over Romani identity and citizenship, and flows of resources including funding and knowledge. Tracing such assemblages reveals the complexity of a particular event and its many reverberations. Drawing from primary ethnographic data collected during 14 months of fieldwork in Turkey, and engaging with work in the social sciences on urban assemblages (Coward 2012; McFarlane 2011; Brenner et al 2011; Robbins and Marks 2009; Phillips 2006; Ong 2005; Bennett 2004 & 2005), this paper proposes that viewing Sulukule through the lens of assemblage theory offers insights both into the urban as a process, and the power relations that go into producing cities.