On its last day of business, the 79-year-old wood-panelled Kelebek corset shop on Istanbul’s central İstiklal Avenue is too crowded to move around in. Shoppers have flocked to the small, Jewish-owned boutique to protest against rampant gentrification and urban change that has turned Beyoğlu, one of Istanbul’s most diverse districts, into a bland, homogenous shopping and tourism spot.
“This really is the end of an era, the end of a certain shopping culture in Beyoğlu,” said Ilya Avramoğlu, 54, the shop owner who started working at the shop when he was 18, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. “I wish we did not have to give up. Under current circumstances it will be almost impossible to find a new location elsewhere in this district.”
His shop – the oldest on İstiklal Avenue and the only one still bearing traces of the horrific pogroms against non-Muslim minorities in September 1955 – closed earlier this month after falling victim to an amendment of commercial jurisdiction that came into effect last year and allows landlords to evict tenants of 10 years or longer without cause.
“This law denies tenants all protection, and makes it very easy to arbitrarily eject them from their shops,” said Eren Can, a lawyer volunteering with the Beyoğlu City Defense, a group that, among other things, supports small business owners in resisting evictions. “It’s a law that supports rabid profiteering and gentrification, and it is contrary to any definition of justice.”
Kelebek is the latest in a growing number of local businesses and Beyoğlu landmarks forced out by a flurry of urban planning and commercial laws. Others, such as the famous İnci profiterole shop or Emek Sinemasi, Turkey’s oldest cinema, are already gone.
Almost 3 million people crowd İstiklal Avenue every day, and commercial rents have increased to eye-watering levels, making it almost impossible for small merchants to hold on to their shops. Beyoğlu’s mayor, Ahmet Misbah Demircan, was clear in his vision for the district when he recently described the street as one giant shopping centre.
“Beyoğlu used to be able to surprise me, one could establish real relationships with people here,” said Sevgi Ortaç, 31, an artist living in the area. “Now İstiklal could be a commercial street anywhere in the world, with the same brands and fast-food chains one finds in other big cities.”
But activists do not only blame gentrification for the rapid changes in Beyoğlu. Some argue that the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, still has an axe to grind with a neighbourhood that made headlines in 2013 when hundreds of thousands took to the streets to oppose the planned demolition of Istanbul’s central Gezi park, just off İstiklal Avenue, to make way for an Ottoman-style shopping centre, a project pushed personally by Erdoğan, then the prime minister.
“Beyoğlu has seen oppressive occupiers [in 1918]. It has seen those who long for the old Turkey,” Erdoğan said at the opening of the renovated Beyoğlu municipality building this year in reference to his political opponents. “[Beyoğlu] has also seen the Gezi protesters. Beyoğlu will hopefully also be the place where we will start to build the new Turkey.”
Small business owners said the municipal police in charge of overseeing commercial practices and laws have increased controls after the Gezi protests. Activists and lawyers underlined that the interventions most often target businesses perceived as supporting the political opposition and that others get away with breaking the rules.
“It started out with the ban on tables and chairs outside bars and restaurants in Beyoğlu,” said Gürsel, 39, the owner of a small bar. “Since then physical violence by the municipal police has been on the rise, sometimes they descend upon bars and small street traders like a gang.”
Can said: “Of course we don’t promote lawlessness, and rules need to be followed. But in Beyoğlu we can clearly see that rules only apply to the people the government doesn’t like or approve of.
“They are trying to take Beyoğlu away from us, make it a place where there is no more room for students, people with lower incomes, political activism or anything that is outside their definition of ‘the new Turkey’.”
While resistance comes too late for the Kelebek corset shop, others remain defiant. “They can have İstiklal,” said Gürsel. “In the backstreets, there will always be us.”
