"I didn't realize," said a U.S. tourist in Turkey last week as he gaped at the devastation on all sides, "that Istanbul was so badly bombed during the war." A guide promptly reassured him that Turkey's largest and most famed city had never been a target for enemy bombers.* But what the explosives of wartime combatants had done in malice for the clutter of London and Berlin, the peaceful but restless ambition of Premier Adnan Menderes was doing for Istanbul.
Night after night, all summer long, the sleep of tired Turks has been interrupted by the blasts of dynamite. All day long, bulldozers roar and root through Istanbul's cluttered slums and crowded business sections, sweeping away unsightly shacks and once busy office buildings. Bedrooms and bathrooms peep nakedly from the fronts of half-demolished houses. On only 48 hours' notice, tenants are often forced to vacate condemned buildings and find new premises to live or work in. Istanbul's face lifting is costing perhaps $1,000,000 a day, and Premier Menderes is in no mood to brook delays.
Crossroads Jumble. The ancient city has seen the glory and decline of two empires. Founded by the Greeks six centuries before Christ, and chosen as the site of a new Rome by the Emperor Constantine in A.D. 330, the city was known first as Byzantium. As Constantinople, it was a world capital for 1,100 years until it fell in 1453 to the founders of a new empire, the vigorous Turks of the Ottoman Conqueror Mohammed II.
Under Turkish rule, Constantinople's famed Christian shrines, like the great basilica of Saint Sophia, were restored and refurbished to the glory of Allah. Slim minarets rose skyward alongside rounded Byzantine domes. New architectural jewels, like the Blue Mosque of Sultan Ahmed I, sprang up to rival the old, and the hiving humanity drawn by commerce to this natural crossroads of land and sea began to fill every available crevice with the insignificant architecture of its daily life.
When the new Turkish republic of Kemal Ataturk took over from the moribund Ottoman Empire after World War I, the ancient glories of Constantinople were already flaking away in a slow death of peeling paint, collapsed masonry, commercial clutter and neglect. Nobody much cared. The fashion then was to lavish attention on the bustling new inland capital of Ankara. As time passed, tourist interest and national pride in the possession of a great historical monument gradually restored Turkish affection to the city they now called Istanbul. Still, nobody did much about repaving its streets, restoring its buildings or clearing its slums until last summer, when energetic Adnan Menderes, cooling off on the Bosporus, chanced to rummage around in some old plans for refurbishing the city. Menderes put his army to work as laborers, to save money.