Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
semi-independent colony with its own podesta or governor, appointed
by the senate of Genoa. Although they were expressly forbidden
to fortify the colony, they almost immediately did so and went on
expanding its area and fortifications for more than 100 years. Sections
of these walls with some towers and gates still exist and will be described
later. After the Ottoman Conquest of 1453 the walls were partially
destroyed and the district became the general European quarter of
the city. Here the foreign merchants had their houses and their shops
and here the ambassadors of the European powers built sumptuous
embassies. For the rest, as Evliya Çelebi tells us, the inhabitants of
Galata “are either sailors, merchants, or handicraftsmen, such as
joiners and caulkers. They dress for the most part in the Algerine
style, because a great number of them are Arabs and Moors. The
Greeks keep the taverns; the Armenians are merchants and bankers;
the Jews are negotiators in love matters and their youths are the worst
of all the devotees of debauchery... The taverns are celebrated for the
wine from Ancona, Sargossa, Mudanya, and Tenedos. When I passed
through here, I saw many hundreds barefooted and bareheaded lying
drunk in the streets.” Even now, there are evenings in the back streets
of Beyoğlu when the scene is much the same as Evliya described it
three centuries ago.
As time went on the confines of Galata became too narrow and
crowded and the embassies and the richer merchants began to move
out beyond the walls to the hills and vineyards above. Here the
foreign powers built palatial mansions surrounded by gardens, all of
them standing along the road which would later be known as the
Grand Rue de Pera. Nevertheless, the region must have remained to
a large extent rural till well on into the eighteenth century; in that
period one often sees reference to “les vignes de Pera”. But as Pera
became more and more built up, it fell a prey like the rest of the
city to the endemic fires that ravage it periodically. Two especially
devastating ones, in 1831 and 1871, destroyed nearly everything built
before those dates. Hence the dearth of anything of much historic or
architectural interest in Beyoğlu.
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