TURKISH ARCHITECTURE

The architecture of Turkish traditional houses is influenced by a variety of climactic and natural resources, by the traditions of earlier houses remaining in Anatolia from the Byzantine era, and by traditional Turkic culture, which was brought from Central Asia by the Turks. Local materials, both natural and inorganic, give Turkish houses their character and identity; in North Anatolia, the wooden houses from rich forests; while in Central Anatolia, the stone and sun-dried brick houses; in West Anatolia, stone; and in South Anatolia, stone and wooden houses. In conjunction with these principals, the interiors of Turkish houses were planned for different purposes, like the winter and the summer rooms. In addition, Islamic and Turkish customs played a great part in shaping the house. This factor brought on a common plan, which made Turkish houses more homogenious, though there were still climatic and regional differences.

The Turkish house in an urban setting was a reflection of the requirements of family life. The women were excluded from public life and their existence was confined within the walls of a single house. The various domestic chores performed jointly by the women of the extented family required the organization of the house around open interior spaces, enclosed and hidden from the outside world. The front of the houses facing the street were blank or had very few windows. An upstair room with view of the street had windows concealed by wooden lattice-work screens so that women could observe the activities on the street without being seen. The rooms had built-in divans, fireplaces and wall niches with very little movable funiture required. Their arrangement, size, and decorations were always austere.

Reference: E. Akurgal. The Art and Architecture of Turks., NY: Rizzoli International Publications, 1980; Önder Küçükerman, Anadolu Mirasında Türk Evleri. İstanbul, 1995.

BEYPAZARI HOUSES

A one and a half hour journey on the old Ankara-Istanbul highway takes you to a hill towards the İnözü Valley where Ankara’s Beypazari district is located. The town is divided into two settlement areas, the old and the new. The older sections of the town are situated in the northern part of the old İstanbul highway, along the deep slopes of the mountains and in valleys while the new section is situated on the plains to the south of the old highway. The marketplace (Çarşı) and the neigbourhoods in the town are traditional and the houses and shops display old Turkish architecture. The shops, which are generally one storey high, are used as workshops where coppersmiths, silversmiths and bronzesmiths work metals into beautiful artifacts. There are also carpenters` and shoemakers` shops here. The streets are narrow, mostly 3 to 6 meters wide and are lined with houses and garden walls on both sides. The houses, which are usually 3-storey high, were built with the same materials as other traditional Turkish houses. The ground floor is faced with flat stones. Stables, sheds, store-rooms, and pantries are usually on the ground floor. Just above the ground floor there are cupboards and a kitchen used in the winter. The upper floors are the most frequently used areas. In the outer, inner or middle areas, there is the Turkish “sofa” (hall anteroom). The bedrooms, toilets and kitchens are situated around the sofa. There are also the “haremlik (quarters for women) and selamlık(quarters for men) on the second floor. According to the Beypazarı custom, an architectural element on the upper floors of these houses is left incomplete during the owner’s lifetime. These elements are called “Çanti” or “Çandı” in the local dialect. These features are finished when needed. Beypazarı houses have a sofa on the middle floor which sometimes opens out to a balcony. The middle floors have large, arched windows which allow light to enter. The old streets and market place in Beypazarı reflect a typical Turkish town.

TWO OLD BURDUR HOUSES

Two magnificent old houses in the city of Burdur in southwest Turkey have recently been restored are both outstanding examples of traditional architecture, dating from a time when extended families of three generations lived together under one roof. The ground floor consists of a byre for livestock, hay store, larder and similar service areas, while the living quarters are situated on the upper floor. In addition to the private part of the house, known as the harem, there is a room known as the basoda (main room) or selamlik, where the master of the house conducted his business affairs and received his guests. The basoda was the most important room in the house, and you are left in no doubt of this by the ornate decoration and finely worked fittings. This room has two demarcated areas reflecting the status of master, guest and servant. The most prestigious area of the room was the raised section surrounded by a balustrade, into which only honoured guests were admitted, the lower area being used by other guests and servants. The harem where the family spent their daily lives consists of individual rooms opening on to a large gallery known as a sofa which runs along the side of the house. The rooms were used not only for sleeping, but served as the private apartment of their occupants, who also used them for sitting and eating away from the rest of the family. The sofa was both an access area to the rooms and a communal area where the family gathered together and spent most of their time, particularly in summer. At one end of the sofa is a section known as tahtabos where members of the family sat together and guests were entertained.

Although the earliest title deed record dates from 1890, architectural features of the house suggest that it may have originally been built much earlier. The same applies to Kocaoda. Both houses were purchased by the Ministry of Culture in 1988 and restored. A double doored gate covered by a pitched roof leads into the grounds of the house, which is constructed of stone, adobe and wood. The eastern wall of the basoda and the stable area which has a pointed archway and is open on two sides are made of tufa. A wooden staircase leads up to the sofa on the second storey. Rooms lead off the south and west sides of the sofa, and to the north is a raised area known as the kösk. There are wooden lattices in the exterior walls of the sofa, so providing privacy for those sitting there, while preserving its airy character. The extended eaves of the main roof cover the sofa. The ceiling is decorated with painted designs and gold and silver leaf, the decoration being particularly ornate over the kösk and at the entrance to the basoda. Motifs in various shades of blue are painted above the doors and windows. Light streams into the basoda through the many windows. It has fitted wooden cupboards and a chimney hood over the fireplace. The ceiling and window frames again have painted decoration richly highlighted in gold and silver, as appropriate to the most important room in the house. On the panels of the doors and window shutters are Ottoman Turkish inscriptions praising the house and its owner. The stained glass upper windows have plaster tracery. A secret door inside the cupboard leads into the adjoining room. On the south side of the gallery are two rooms, one large and one small. The rooms were heated by open fires and by braziers. Kocaoda, the second house, is also known as Bakibey House. According to the records it was built in 1830 by Resit Bey, but again this may not reflect its original construction date. This is one of the loveliest historic Turkish houses to have survived. The two-storey house has a stone foundation, with walls of wood and adobe. The pitched roof is covered with gutter tiles. Again the lower floor is reserved for livestock and storage areas. A stone staircase leads up to the second storey, where a long narrow sofa runs along one side of the building. The rooms all lead off the south side of the sofa, which has a kösk or seating area whose ceiling is decorated with the motifs typical of the period.

Reference: Ilhame Oztürk/Skylife

SAFRANBOLU HOUSES

Safranbolu is the best preserved town in Anatolia. A rare blessing for those who would like to picture how an Ottoman town looked 200 years ago, Safranbolu, with its little-changed cobbled pavements and authentic marketplace is a virtual open-air museum.

The sloping terrain at Safranbolu, which is situated in a deep canyon carved out by three rivers, produced interesting architectural solutions. The stone-built ground floors of Safranbolu houses, most of which are two- or three-storey mansions, generally follow the natural gradient of the street. The upper stories meanwhile, supported by buttresses, may project over the street. Although the houses are built on small, oddly shaped lots, thanks to this building technique the upper level rooms are nevertheless rectangular and spacious. Another aspect of the technique is that the house’s axis can be rotated slightly on the upper stories according to need or exposure to the sun! The houses along the narrow streets of the marketplace thus rise twisting and turning like screw shells over the narrow and sloping plots of land to which they cling.

The interiors of the houses are as elegant as their exteriors. The low-ceilinged middle stories used in winter are cozy and warm like a womb while the upper floors, used in summer, are airy with high ceilings. The master bedroom, the most beautiful room with the best view, is usually situated on the topmost floor. This room, decorated with woodwork and stenciling, is where the master craftsmen exhibited all their skill. In typical Safranbolu houses, each room was furnished in such a way as to meet all the needs of the nuclear family. It is not for nothing that Safranbolu residents called each one of these rooms a ‘house’ since they could be a sitting room in the daytime thanks to divans running around the wall, simultaneously a kitchen thanks to the hearth, a bedroom thanks to the floor mattresses taken out of the cupboard at night, and a bathroom thanks to the washstand concealed in the cupboard! Because they were designed as independent units, each of the rooms was assigned a name such as ‘storage house’, ‘guest house’ or ‘dining house’.

During the years when Safranbolu was becoming a popular destination for tourists, there was a constant stream of visitors to the traditional houses. The house owners, who at first welcomed the tourists hospitably, naturally tired of this human traffic with time. But just at that point the museum houses came to the rescue. The first of them, and perhaps the most beautiful, is the Kaymakamlar Evi, a house that was opened to visitors in 1981 following a restoration by the Ministry of Culture. This mansion is one of the most flawless examples of the Safranbolu house. Meanwhile the Turing Havuzlu Konak, or Mansion with Pool operated by the Touring Club of Turkey, which began serving guests in 1989, is the first historic mansion in Turkey to have been converted into a hotel. The nicest surprise of this mansion, which greets visitors at the entrance to the town and was once owned by one of its wealthiest families, is the approximately 1.8 meter-deep pool that holds several tons of water in the living room—restored and used as a café today.

Reference: Ozgur Gezer/Garo Milosyan, SKYLIFE.

SAFRANBOLU HOUSES

Safranbolu is the best preserved town in Anatolia. A rare blessing for those who would like to picture how an Ottoman town looked 200 years ago, Safranbolu, with its little-changed cobbled pavements and authentic marketplace is a virtual open-air museum.

The sloping terrain at Safranbolu, which is situated in a deep canyon carved out by three rivers, produced interesting architectural solutions. The stone-built ground floors of Safranbolu houses, most of which are two- or three-storey mansions, generally follow the natural gradient of the street. The upper stories meanwhile, supported by buttresses, may project over the street. Although the houses are built on small, oddly shaped lots, thanks to this building technique the upper level rooms are nevertheless rectangular and spacious. Another aspect of the technique is that the house’s axis can be rotated slightly on the upper stories according to need or exposure to the sun! The houses along the narrow streets of the marketplace thus rise twisting and turning like screw shells over the narrow and sloping plots of land to which they cling.

The interiors of the houses are as elegant as their exteriors. The low-ceilinged middle stories used in winter are cozy and warm like a womb while the upper floors, used in summer, are airy with high ceilings. The master bedroom, the most beautiful room with the best view, is usually situated on the topmost floor. This room, decorated with woodwork and stenciling, is where the master craftsmen exhibited all their skill. In typical Safranbolu houses, each room was furnished in such a way as to meet all the needs of the nuclear family. It is not for nothing that Safranbolu residents called each one of these rooms a ‘house’ since they could be a sitting room in the daytime thanks to divans running around the wall, simultaneously a kitchen thanks to the hearth, a bedroom thanks to the floor mattresses taken out of the cupboard at night, and a bathroom thanks to the washstand concealed in the cupboard! Because they were designed as independent units, each of the rooms was assigned a name such as ‘storage house’, ‘guest house’ or ‘dining house’.

During the years when Safranbolu was becoming a popular destination for tourists, there was a constant stream of visitors to the traditional houses. The house owners, who at first welcomed the tourists hospitably, naturally tired of this human traffic with time. But just at that point the museum houses came to the rescue. The first of them, and perhaps the most beautiful, is the Kaymakamlar Evi, a house that was opened to visitors in 1981 following a restoration by the Ministry of Culture. This mansion is one of the most flawless examples of the Safranbolu house. Meanwhile the Turing Havuzlu Konak, or Mansion with Pool operated by the Touring Club of Turkey, which began serving guests in 1989, is the first historic mansion in Turkey to have been converted into a hotel. The nicest surprise of this mansion, which greets visitors at the entrance to the town and was once owned by one of its wealthiest families, is the approximately 1.8 meter-deep pool that holds several tons of water in the living room—restored and used as a café today.

Reference: Ozgur Gezer/Garo Milosyan, SKYLIFE.

WOOD CULTURE AND TIMBER HOUSES
by Andrew Finkel

Cut stone, marble and brick are the building blocks for monumental religious architecture, city walls and fortifications, palaces and great civic buildings, and provide a powerful visual link to the past. There is, however, also a strong tradition of architecture which makes use of one of a far more practical and curiously durable material, and one which endows those same urban centres with access to a different, more intimate history. That material is wood.

Turkey possesses an extraordinarily long and well-documented history of building with wood. The tomb of King Midas, ruler of the iron age kingdom of Phrygia, is made from juniper logs and sealed with pine planks. It is located in the centre of a 40 metre high funereal mound near the modern city of Polatli (ancient Gordiom) and is reckoned to be the oldest intact wooden structure in the world. Some 2700 years later, in 1898, came the construction of the world’s largest pure wood structure on the Istanbul island of Büyükada. It is a now disused orphanage and measures an astonishing 1025 metres by 25-35 metres and is 21 metres high. It was intended as a hotel before being sold to a Greek philanthropist after if failed to receive permission to open. The Sultan donated a daily ration of meat for the orphans and the royal ovens supplied bread.

The sheer variety of construction is enormous, from the Unesco-listed thirteenth century Great Mosque at Sivrihisar with its timber ceiling and internal wooden pillars, to the early twentieth century pavilion on the Asian side of Istanbul’s Bosphorus which served as the summer residence and painting studio of Abdülmecid , the Ottoman heir presumptive and last Caliph, forced into exile in 1924. The last great Ottoman Sultan, Abdülhamid II, was himself an accomplished carpenter and his palace workshop produced in only three weeks an elegant pre-fabricated bungalow which was used as a pavilion for Kaiser Wilhelm when he toured the silk carpet factories in Hereke in 1894.

Most rightly associate wood not with these royal structures but the more modest vernacular houses, the setting for everyday life in the Ottoman Empire. Preserving the fabric of those few neighbourhoods where there are still wooden buildings has long been a priority in Turkey and there is an extensive raft of legislation to protect listed historical buildings. Construction in wood represents not just an important aesthetic which helped define Ottoman urban life, but embodies a great deal of practical knowledge that in a country with Turkey’s seismic history, could actually promote both safer and more environmentally sensitive housing.

Most agree more could be done to find a better balance between the protection of properties and the encouragement of sympathetic renovation. Too many buildings – like the orphanage in Büyükada – are simply left to decay. At issue, argues a new generation of “timber activists” is not just the salvaging of pretty postcard views, but the preservation of skills and knowledge that can actually save lives. One noticeable property of timber houses is that they survive earthquakes. Wood houses are far more durable than popular belief. Istanbul was a city plagued by fire in the nineteenth centuries, but this was not because the houses were made of wood but because they were close together. Wood houses don't burn like kindling - the structure normally stands for an hour and a half. Steel frame buildings collapse much quicker. The other myth is that wood is a finite material and to use it for construction is to exhaust a natural resource. The reality is that demand creates rational husbandry. One of the UN's environmentalist slogans is "Cut trees to save the forests". In societies where people use more wood, the forest size increases.

Wood was clearly the material of choice before the First World War in Turkey, its popularity only affected by cost. Even the substantial merchant homes in the picturesque town of Safronbolu are half-timber (himis) with the space between wood supports in-filled with stone rubble and then covered in a lime plaster. Drawings from the seventeenth century show similar houses in Istanbul. The lime-plastered rubble facades were vulnerable to salt and sea air and the so the sea-side mansions (yali) along Istanbul’s Bosphorus were among the first houses to use timber cladding. In some cases the land side of the house remained in the same half timber side as a cost-cutting measure. The oldest existing house on the Bosphorus, the Amcazade Huseyn Pasa Yali built in 1698, clearly sported the affluence of its proprietor – a member of the Köprülü family, by being entirely covered in wooden planks.

As wood was used more liberally, wood clad town houses took a variety of forms with some interiors based on traditional Anatolian floor plans, others more directly imitative of Western European homes. Elements thought of as being typical of Ottoman include the taslik – or an entrance floor paved with stone, the oda – literally “room” but a multi-purpose room often with an elevated platform that was used as a seating area by day and a place to lay sleeping mattresses by night. Turkish houses typically contained reception rooms where men could receive guests (selamlik) and the private quarters of the house (haremlik). These quarters could be very distinct -- to the extent of being virtually separate dwellings with distinct entrances -- or a division of space no more complex than a European house where a “best parlour” is reserved for the outside world and the sleeping quarters generally out of bounds to non-family.

Those dwellings drawing from a more rural tradition in a sense turned their back on the street with featureless facades. Instead they focused on an inner courtyard or an elevated terrace floor (hayat). The radical contrast to this were western inspired mansions with imposing facades that openly indulged in a variety of borrowed styles from neo-classical pillars and pediments to art noveau fretwork along balustrades and jalousies. A tour of the summer houses on the island of Büyükada remains the best place to see the inventiveness of wood constructions with large ornate houses of all kinds including those with belvederes in the form of neo-baroque turrets.

Demand for housing in Istanbul itself rose during the nineteenth century due to the influx of refugee populations. Wood houses reflected this demand and more densely populated neighbourhoods arose of much smaller dwellings. A popular element of houses from this period were the bay extensions (cumba) or cantilevered overhangs in which the house itself appeared to stretch out in search of a better view. These not only provided extra space for upper storey rooms but shelter and shade for the pedestrians below.

Istanbul again possesses two neighbourhoods which provide an opportunity to see these more dense urban centres of wood housing - that around the Suleymania Mosque and Zeyrek further down the Golden Horn. Both areas are listed on the UNESCO prestigious World Heritage List. Projects exist to rejuvenate these neighbourhoods but progress has been slow. The neighbourhoods of nineteenth and early twentieth century wooden houses are evaporating as is the very craft that went into their creation. Even the Turkish word for “joiner”-- “dulger” -- is disappearing from the language. This has happened all over the last seventy years. Construction in wood is no longer on the university curriculum.

Those who promote the use of wood hope their efforts will encourage people not just to cherish old buildings but to use the knowledge those buildings encapsulate to create new traditions.