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No Half Measures. In the first spurt of the Premier's enthusiasm, whole forests of unsightly shacks were swept away. Wooden sheds lining the shores of the picturesque Golden Horn disappeared overnight. The cluttered squares at both ends of the old Galata Bridge were widened and lengthened by demolishing half a block of buildings at either end. Bulldozers roared up the coastal road along the Bosporus sweeping away fountains, buildings or anything else that stood in their way. Many a corner of old Constantinople looked as though the barbarians had swept down on it; in fact Byzantine purists, who think the Turks are, at best, indifferent to the ancient Greek glories, looked on with foreboding.
This spring, after a winter of thought and a quick second glance at the city, Menderes went to work on Istanbul in even greater earnest. "Half measures," he announced, "won't do." When Istanbul's mayor raised a feeble protest, the Premier, it was said, suggested he take a long vacation and promptly pre-empted his office. Where before only the facades of buildings were condemned, Menderes now tore down whole structures. By last week, more than 10,000 buildings had been "Menderazed."
On business in Baghdad recently, Menderes jumped out of bed in the middle of the night to send a cable announcing, "Have decided to tear down house opposite Spice Bazaar on Eminonu Square. Proceed with expropriation." One night he spent five hours in the sidecar of a motorcycle supervising the construction of a new superparkway that will stretch from Beyazid Square to Emperor Theodosius' 5th century wall.
Other jobs the Premier hopes to encompass are the doubling in size of the city's five most important squares and the widening of every street leading into them, the completion of an opera house at the end of famed Taksim Square, paving of the city's streets, removal of the present monument to Kemal Ataturk and the building of a still bigger and finer one, clearance of the tangled slum area along the Golden Horn where the Roman patricians once had their finest villas, and, last but not least, a subway under the Golden Horn and a bridge over the Bosporus, connecting Europe and Asia. But though new ideas for construction and destruction buzz in the Premier's head from dawn to dusk, no detailed plan of this vast reconstruction program has ever been published. Many a local critic suspects that Menderes is just making it up as he goes along. They cite the case of the State Monopoly Building, which Menderes first remodeled and then, in a fit of impatience, decided to tear down. But the Premier insists to one and all that he knows exactly what he is doing.
Meanwhile, the work goes on apace to the general approval of most people of the long-neglected city. "Unfortunately," said one Istanbul businessman last week, "this is the only way Istanbul can get a new look. We Turks just don't have such refinements as responsible planning boards. Besides, if he did print the plans in advance, the land speculators would move in and raise the price of the whole project ten times."
*Neutral Turkey declared war on Germany ten weeks before V-E day, thus qualifying for charter membership in the U.N.