Many of you know that I lived in Izmir, Turkey for just under three years in the mid 60’s. My brother, Tony and I went to an American/International school and my sister, Linda, was born there.
Izmir is the third largest city of Turkey, in 1965 at just under 800,000 people and now about 3 million people. So things weren’t the same, the growth was both exponential and hard to fathom. Surprisingly I could still find my neighbourhood and I could almost find my way to school except the old two story building was now a nine story commercial building.
Now stop trying to do the math and figuring out how old I am, just read the story, which is dedicated to my sister, Linda.
As much as Izmir has grown, our neighbourhood, Alsancak has had only minor changes. Our street has two striking visual differences, our wide boulevard has palm trees on a big median strip now. There were no stores on the boulevard then, now there are masses of stores at street level. It’s very Double Bay. It is on the southern shore of the gulf of Izmir, a giant harbour. We lived one street back from the harbour and Birinci Kordon or the esplanade. The Kordon seems much wider as if they have reclaimed some of the harbour.
This quarter, Alsancak, both now and then was home to upper middle class Turkish people and it was always a lovely place to live. It looks to me, that they have added to the Kordon to add parkland, bike paths and parking by putting it over the harbour. Izmir was a very European city then and still is today.
We had a car but much of our day to day travel was in a horse and carriage. Today they seem to be mainly for tourists but the horses are still lovely.
The bread sellers would come up our street, with a huge tray of bread balanced on their head.They would call out the types of bread they had, “bread man, bread man, get your fresh bread” . We had a basket on a very long string that Raphon* or my mother would put money into the basket and lower to the bread man, who would take the money and put in the correct bread. There was a bit of calling out in the neighbourhood.
This is an apartment just around the corner that looks like the one we lived in. The actual buildings we lived in have been retrofitted for earthquakes and when they did that, they added more floors to the buildings.
There is quite of bit of parkland and public space in the city. The harbour is a long semicircle and in the 60’s, there was no sea wall and the water was also filthy, Linda’s Dad got a call to see if he would join a search and rescue, when a taxi went into the harbour on a stormy night during a gale. This is fine weather but you can see there is no wall or barrier here now and that is what most of the harbour was like in 1965.
He was one of the scuba team that braved the gale and hepatitis to go down on a few occasions and bring back the bodies, including one of his colleagues.
There are two sights that I remember from Izmir. The clocktower built in Ottoman Rococo.
and a wonderful statue of Ataturk at the end of our street. Ataturk created the modern secular Turkey you find today. Freedom of religion is practiced. Now women are allowed to wear scarves but they didn’t in the sixties.
*Raphon was Linda’s nanny.