At the House of Sabatai Sevi

Here we are with the last post of my Great Smyrniote adventure. In my last day in Izmir, I had a chance to visit one of the most paradoxical structures in the entire city. This withered structure, right behind the building in the center with three windows, is nothing less than the house of Sabbatai Sevi.

The area containing the house was normally protected with a wire fence, but I found a way to sneak in through a good-sized hole in the fence.

It's hard to believe that this building is more than four hundred years old!

I found two dark hole-like entrances at the ground level, but I couldn't crawl into any of them.


A narrow stairwell leads up to the rooms above.

This chamber, colored in a various layers of faded green, blue and white paint, was one of the largest enclosed rooms of the house. Until recently this building was inhabited by Gypsy or Kurdish squatters from the nearby Kadifekale neighborhood. In the last few years, the squatters have been evicted and the house was reclaimed as a part of the Smyrniote Agora restoration program.

What's even stranger is that people have been reported to visit this site and light candles in it. One anecdote I've heard of recounts people from America coming all the way to this house and praying in it. Weird. I guess in a way, the Sabbatean heritage lives on.


Right next to the "blue room" lies a half-collapsed terrace with yet another staircase leading up to the upper floor.

On the upper floor is the famous "chamber of the eyes," which houses these bizarre, face-like arrangement of windows, doors and alcoves.

Is this a case of genuine, anthropomorphic architecture? Or just simple 17th century lack-of-planning?

More details from the "chamber of the eyes".


My expedition of Sabbatai Sevi's house came to an end when I walked up to the roof of the building and saw a nice vista of the Agora unfolding below. It was this roof that Sabbatai Sevi supposedly ascended to the skies, levitating during his intense meditations.

I find these tales incredulous of course, but I still have a deep fascination for the life and history of Sabbatai Sevi, and the remaining Sabbateans in Turkey and beyond. This is not the least because Sabbatai Sevi's teachings literally expressed something like proto-secularism in an era riven with religious madness.

This vista concluded my trip to Sabbatai's house. I ran back to the fence, crawled back out from the hole and ended my day with a deep sense of satisfaction and wonder.

A special bunch of thanks go to my friend Okan Çetin, who guided and accompanied me on the trip to the Agora and the house of Sabbatai Sevi.

The Synagogues of İzmir

My adventures in Smyrna continue this week with this selection of pictures from the Havra street, near the historic, but currently dilapidated Kemeraltı district.

Once a populous Jewish neighborhood, this small bundle of streets still has more than a dozen synagogues dotting every corner. This is the Sinyora Giveret Synagogue.

Izmir still has a large population of Jewish citizens, but they have long since moved away into more prosperous neighborhoods. Their temples, all dating from the 1500s or the 1600s, are still in active use. This is the Algaze, or Algazi Synagogue.

There's literally a synagogue behind every street corner. This is the Hevra Synagogue.

Another view of the Hevra Synagogue, showing its centuries-old walls.

The Ets Hayim, with surreal checkered tiles surrounding its door. It's a pity I couldn't get into any of them.

This imposing edifice was one of the oldest in the neighborhood. Informally known as the "Portuguese Synagogue," it was built in the early 1500s by Sephardi immigrants escaping oppression in Portugal.

The taste of history: Old, weird and cool at the same time.

A short way from the street of synagogues lies this house, purportedly that of a wealthy Jewish merchant that left no heirs. What an amazing, beautiful building. If I ever get to be rich enough, I'd like to buy, renovate and live in such a structure.

The rubble in front of this house is residue from archaeological digs in the Agora, the ancient heart of Smyrna. In my next post, I will reveal more mystery and historical oddities from that place. Until then... hold on tight!

A Trip to Prinkipo

This summer's photos are only now turning up on my blog. Here is a series from our most recent trip to Büyükada, or Prinkipo this August. Although I'd been living within twenty miles of it for most of my life, I'd never visited this beautiful island for almost ten years. Only with the arrival of Sofia and Kleio from Greece did I manage to lift that ass and visit Prinkipo once more.

Here, you see the port at Bostanci, on the Anatolian side, that hosts the boat to take us to Prinkipo.

Sailing on faith? I sneaked around to the machine room during the one hour + trip and took this picture. You can see the powerful engines that drive the boat below.

Buyukada is one of the several islands that lie off the City's coast, collectively termed as the Prince Islands. The boat thus made several stops at smaller islands before dropping us off at our destination. Here is Proti, known in Turkish as Kinaliada. (Henna Island) It had a spectacular beach in place of its main street and was arguably the best-looking of all Prince Islands, away from the crowds. I should visit it sometime.

All those stops made the journey a long and sleepy affair.

Finally, we arrived on Prinkipo. The port building has a highly unusual and impressive style, and is an almost obligatory photo moment for all those who land there.

This mini-clock tower at the center of the town is a very popular meeting point.

More views from Prinkipo town. Some Turkish readers get offended when I use the original names for places like Smyrna, Constantinople or Prinkipo, but rest assured - I am not a Greek nationalist nor an enemy of the republic. I am a Turkish citizen and I love my country.

More...

...and more views from sleepy Buyukada. I had a really cheap bargain calamari lunch on this street.

No cars are allowed here, so people get around mostly with horsecarts like these. However, they serve more as tourist rides than actual public transport.

This green building was staffed by horse-cart controllers who ceaselessly bark out the numbers of the carts as customers line out to hire them. Despite this technological advance, it's still a chaotic hurdle to get a ride, and the lines still stretch out around the square.

Not content with waiting in the buggy line, we ended up walking instead. We saw a large number of astonishing old buildings, preserved unchanged since the late Ottoman times.

Wow... I wonder how much this house costs.

Compared to the mainland, most of the houses are in good shape but very few people live here all the time. The few crumbling derelicts either have very poor owners, or the owners in question have been away in Greece for the last few decades.

A very nicely preserved house...

...and another one.

I stopped by this magnificent mansion to ask for directions to the local Synagogue, which I wanted desperately to see. It turned out that the inhabitants were one of the last few remaining Greeks, and our direction-asking adventure turned into a long, melancholic talk about the past and how things changed. That's me in the dorky shorts, trying to practice my vestigial Greek language skills.

We discovered this cute microcinema tucked away inside one of the small, two-story buildings. I'm not sure if foreign readers can get this feeling, but the whole place emanates with an extremely naive feeling of retro; like Istanbul used to be some decades years ago.

Actually, the whole island has that feeling of melancholia, like looking at a fifty-year old picture. In a social parallel to the situation of geographic isolation seen in islands like Australia and Madagascar, beautiful things that have been wiped out in the mainland continue to thrive on Prinkipo. Turks, Greeks, Armenians and Jews still coexist in comparable numbers without animosity, families leave their doors unlocked at night, and different languages continue to mingle on the streets. Here is the local Greek high school, closed but only for the summer holidays.

The island is still home to many churches of different kinds, here is the Panagia Church next to the horsecart station.

This, on the other hand, is the lavishly decorated door of the San Pacifico Latin Catholic Church. We couldn't go inside.

Prinkipos is one of the few places where Greek places of worship outnumber those of others, including mosques. Here is the Hagios Dimitrios, situated a little way off the town center.

We saw this strange marker stone in the courtyard of Hagios Dimitrios. The place was deserted, but we were told that the community still gathers here in important religious holidays.

Beyond the churches, however, the place I really wanted to visit was the Hesset Le Abraham Synagogue.

We almost missed the boat trying to get there, but no one was allowed due to security measures. These two were the only pictures I could get of this graceful building.

Soon afterwards we returned home to the mainland, but our visit to Büyükada - Prinkipo would still haunt me for days afterward, in the shape of diarrhea from my visit to the cheap calamari place. Perhaps I shouldn't be such a cheapo after all.

Beth Shalom

Possibly the best architecture I've ever seen in a Synagogue, this is the Beth Shalom in Athens. On Friday, 23rd of March, 1944, German troops surrounded the Synagogue and assembled all Athenian Jews they could find, between 700 or 1000 people. Some of them came to the Synagogue on their own accord, so that they wouldn't be separated from their families. Within fifteen days, they were bound for Auschwitz. Today, the Synagogue is only open on weekends, attended by a few old people who still live there.