On the street where I live, women walk in g-strings and there are hookers and transvestites hunting at night. There are quite a few locations in Istanbul where this is a common sight. Usually these streets are sandwiched by the districts of middle income group. Not far away, there are the streets of poor working class-people and the streets they live in closely resemble the villages and towns of Eastern Anatolia they originated from.
These people built their homes on land illegaly seized from public property. With so many houses built like this, they soon form a neighborhood and gradually become large illegal districts where hundreds of thousands of people live bereft from public services such as water and electricity (both of which are often stolen from public property).
In Turkey, illegal housing shows a mad increase before elections. Politicians and municipalities offer ownership certificates in those newly formed districts. These are the times when land mafia makes it big in a completely tax free environment. These mafia type organizations pave the road for crime, violence and bigotry in these surroundings.
Naturally, these people live as aliens to the host culture. Having said that, this host culture is actually formed by older generations of emigrants. It is hard to find a family living in Istanbul since five or six generation ago. That means the present city culture of Istanbul has hardly been an amalgamation of the past and present. Instead, it is a consequence of a wide scale pillaging of its propery and amassing of its domestic culture by villagers who have become both the perpetrators and the victims of this cultural slaughter.
Edited (3/15/2010) by vineyards
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