Historic collective shelter as heritage: The cases in Hurşidiye, Kurtuluş and Sakarya neighborhoods in Konak, Izmir

Abstract

Historical collective shelters, yahuthanes or cortejos, are an alternative form of housing that were developed to provide secure sheltering of the groups who were disadvantaged in terms of economic, social, and cultural aspects in the Ottoman city. They have played a significant role in history as a building type that made possible cohabitation of groups, with moral and material problems, and struggling to maintain their integrity despite hardship. This study deals with a group of historical collective shelters in the traditional commercial center of Izmir dating mainly to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The objective is to understand the historic evolution of collective shelters (yahuthane, cortejo) in Hursidiye, Kurtulus and Sakarya neighborhoods of Konak district in Izmir, to define their cultural values, to analyze their social and spatial development, to present their physical characteristics and evaluate their preservation problems. Eleven collective shelters were documented in the studied site, which is a portion of the traditional commercial center of Izmir (Kemeralti). The site comprehends the ruins of the Roman Agora and the remains of the public buildings dating to the pre-modernization period of the Ottoman Empire as well as the late Ottoman urban layout. As a method, the preliminary studies were reviewed, the land registers were surveyed, the present base map together with the historical maps were overlapped and the case studies were conducted using conventional techniques of architectural and urban conservation. The study has documented the interaction of Muslim and Jewish communities and how the collective living habits of these ethnic groups living in collective shelters differed from standard residential life at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries in the traditional commercial center of Izmir. Though collective shelters in the historic center of Izmir have been studied in the literature, their specific location on the map was not available. This study has provided locations of the shelters and evaluated the architectural characteristics of their remains. The traces and remains of the historic collective shelters should be preserved as elements contributing to the integrity of the multi layered city.