Hi I’m the History Guy, I have a degree in history and I love history,
and if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
One hundred forty years ago today at approximately 1:00 in the afternoon on June 5th,
1870 a fire started in the Armenian section of the great city of Constantinople. Although the
fire only burned for about six hours, it would in that time destroy nearly a full square mile
of the city. Destroying nearly 3000 homes and killed nearly a thousand people. While
fires were not uncommon in the 19th century, in fact the Great Chicago Fire was the same year,
in 1870, and fires were also not uncommon in the city of Constantinople. In the period of the
18th century there were 10 fires in the city of Constantinople that were the same size, or larger,
than the Great London Fire of 1666. And yet those fires garnered very little attention outside of
the city itself, but the fire in the section of the city called Pera in 1870 garnered worldwide
attention and forever changed one of the world's great cities, and it deserves to be remembered.
Greek settlers from the city-state of Megara founded the city of Byzantium in the 7th century
BC. It was renamed Constantinople when it was refounded by the Roman Emperor Constantine
the first in 330 AD. Between the 4th and the 13th centuries the city of Constantinople was
by far the largest, and wealthiest city in all of Europe. In 1453 the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire,
Mehmed II, conquered Constantinople and made it the capital of the Ottoman
Empire. Now contrary to popular belief, the city was not immediately renamed Istanbul,
rather the popular name Constantinople was used well into the 20th century.
The city straddles a waterway that's called the Golden Horn, and that is a horn shaped Inlet of
the Bosphorus Sea, and the section of the city that's called Pera is named after the Greek word
that simply means across, and all that meant was was that Pera was across the Golden Horn from the
city center. And in the Ottoman Era that section of the city started to become the foreign quarter,
when King Francis the First of France, the first European monarch to establish diplomatic relations
with the Ottoman Empire, built his embassy there in the 16th century. By the 18th century, all of
the embassies were located in the area of the city called Pera and it slowly started to develop a
European atmosphere. That section of the city grew as trade with Europe grew and a trade agreement
with Britain, as well as certain political reforms, drew nearly a hundred thousand Westerners
to the city in the later part of the nineteenth century. Non-muslim Westerners were generally
referred to as leaventeens and they did their business in the part of the city called Galata,
but they lived in the part of the city called Pera, and those two parts of the city became
centers of non-muslim life in the city, including the drinking of otherwise prohibited alcohol.
As these Westerners tended to be wealthier than the people living in the old city,
the section of Pera had larger more majestic buildings, and a much higher percentage of those
were built with stone, as opposed to wood, which was used through most of the rest of
the city. Created as a separate administrative district, Pera became a test case for European
ideas like street cleaning and street lamps. In 1865 there was a large fire in the old city,
but the feeling amongst the Westerners who lived in Pera, was that they were much better prepared
for something like that and that Pera could not suffer such a disaster. And they were wrong. The
fire actually started in the Armenian section of town, a young girl was carrying a hot coal
from her family's fireplace to the kitchen on an iron pan, a common thing to do, but she stumbled
and the coal tumbled out a window and landed on her neighbor's roof, it started there and quickly
spread to Pera. The alarm was raised from the tower at Galata but the fire crews were poorly
trained and ill-equipped. There were very strong winds that day and even the stone buildings had
inflammable roofs. The winds were said to push down the flames in great horizontal sheets that
engulfed buildings from the roof on down. The wind died down around 7:00 p.m. and the fires went out,
but in those six hours the fire managed to burn nearly two-thirds of Para to its foundations. The
American in Portuguese consulates were destroyed, the beautiful Naum Theater burned to the ground,
the Palace of the Armenian patriarch, the spiritual head of the Armenian Church was
completely destroyed, along with many other churches and mosques. The British Embassy,
which had been built at great expense and was seemingly invulnerable to fire,
had been gutted and nearly destroyed. And then like other fires in the old city, these fires
gained international attention because it was European buildings that were burned. The New York
Tribune summed up the disaster for all the world when it wrote, “The most graphic accounts of the
Great Fire of Constantinople failed to convey an idea of its horrors and destructiveness.”
Whereas the Great Fire of Chicago was seen as the consequence of the rapid growth of a modern city,
the Great Fire of Constantinople was seen as the consequence of the limits of the ability to
modernize an ancient city. But in rebuilding Pera took on even a more European design
and an even higher percentage of the buildings were great buildings built out of stone and brick,
as opposed to the old city where after fire they tended to just rebuild out of wood yet
again. And because the buildings were made out of stone, those buildings and that section of
town today are actually older than most of the other buildings in the ancient city which are
constantly being rebuilt out of wood. And still today some of the most beautiful buildings in
Istanbul are in the section of the city that used to be called Pera. And while the fire
deserves to be remembered just because of the breadth of the tragedy, it also deserves to be
remembered because of the way that it reshaped what is still one of the world's great cities.
The Fire doesn't mark the end of the history of the section of the city that was once known as
Pera and is now part of the area of the city that's referred to as Beyoglu. The thriving
multicultural community endured for nearly 100 years after the fire, but attitudes and policies
change. In the 1940s the government started to institute oppressive taxes against non-muslims
that were intended as a form of economic genocide to drive non-muslim residents out of the city. In
1948 when Israel became a state, many of the city's Jews abandoned the city for economic
reasons and moved to Israel. And in 1964 when there was a political crisis on the island of
Cyprus, the government was compelled to expel the city's remaining 40,000 Greek residents,
and with them went the multicultural tradition that defined the city of Constantinople. In
their void the area of the city actually became really rundown, it became an area of drugs and
crime and prostitution that was populated by marginalized immigrants, but in the 1990s it
underwent an era of urban renewal and is now again one of the most fashionable districts
of the city, a living reminder of the city's Constantinople past and its Istanbul present.
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