Cemil Topuzlu

Cemil Topuzlu, around 1900

Cemil Topuzlu , also Cemil Pascha (born March 18, 1866 in Üsküdar ; † January 25, 1958 ), is considered to be the co-founder of modern Turkish surgery and was the first Turkish surgeon trained in Western Europe. He was also the personal physician of the ruling family of the Ottomans and mayor of Istanbul on several occasions around the First World War . The Gülhane Park can only be traced back to his initiative . He also founded the Darülbedayi Conservatory , which still exists today as a metropolitan theater.

Mediciners

Military Medical Academy Gülhane , 1898

Cemil Topuzlu was born in Üsküdar and studied medicine until 1886, then worked for three years as an assistant to the French doctor Jules-Émile Péan and developed into a heart specialist. From 1890, Professor Topuzlu worked at the School of Military Medicine , where he introduced Western European standards. In 1909 the schools for military and civil medicine were merged into the Medical Faculty of the Ottoman Academy of Sciences . Topuzlu married Aliye Hanım (1862-1936), the daughter of Sheikhulislams Cemaleddin Efendi. Eventually he became the personal physician of the Ottoman ruling family. He was mayor for the first time from August 18, 1912 to November 7, 1914, then from August 28 to December 15, 1918 and a third time from May 5, 1919 to February 28, 1920. He remained an advisor to the city for a long time Planning offices.

Mayor of Istanbul

In 1912 Topuzlu received an offer from the Grand Vizier (sadrazam) Ahmed Muhtar Pasha to take over the office of Mayor of Istanbul . The trigger for this decision is said to have been the visit to Topuzlu's house and his garden, which made a European impression on him, which is why he trusted him to build Istanbul. On his first drive through the city, the new mayor noticed that the winding, unpaved roads had no sidewalks and were in very poor condition. Only the streets with trams were paved. There was a lack of theater and actors, but also Turkish-Muslim waitresses in the restaurants, as these activities were all considered immoral. Cemil Topuzlu, on the other hand, looked to Europe, whose “order and cleanliness we admire”.

At the beginning of his term of office, refugees came to Istanbul before the Balkan War in October 1912, many of whom were sent on to Anatolia . Still, Topuzlu wrote, 40,000 to 50,000 ragged and sick people remained in the city.

As a doctor, he pursued the enforcement of hygiene regulations, such as in the bakery trade. The bakers were forbidden to knead the dough with their feet. The garbage collection was restructured following the example of Bucharest . Twenty Italian road builders and workers laid cobblestones in Istanbul, Üsküdar and Kadıköy . He had a special tax levied on bay windows because, in his opinion, these overhangs narrowed the streets too much. The French master horticulturist Deruvan had the Gülhane Park laid out because the mayor saw public gardens as a means of improving public health. A park was also built in Üsküdar on Dogancilar Square and in Fatih. He had military bands provide musical entertainment on Fridays and Saturdays, but sandboxes were also made for the children and puppet theater was performed. For the Gülhane Park alone, 20,000 plant species were procured from France, and a total of 6,000 gold coins flowed into the parks. He also had streams canalized in the city (Kasımpaşa, Tatavla , Yenibahce). It was not until the First World War that general maps were drawn in which the future shape of the city was drawn. A German company developed these maps, known as the "German Blue", on a scale of 1: 500, 1: 1000 and 1: 2000, which later served as the basis for cadastral plans.

Since 79 major fires were registered between 1908 and 1917, in which 25,000 buildings are said to have been destroyed, the removal of the burned areas and fire protection had high priority for the mayor. The chief engineer of the city of Lyon headed the Technical Office of Istanbul for three years before the war. The fire areas Circir, Sultanahmet and Aksaray were leveled . Sidewalks and sewers were built there. Loans from the French Perrier Bank made it possible to finance these major projects. The area between the Sultan Ahmed Mosque and Hagia Sophia , which had been expropriated after a city fire, was to be redesigned based on the model of the Place de la Concorde in Paris. However, the commission for the protection of antiquities accused the mayor of tearing down an old hammam there and of showing too little consideration for the historical buildings. However, this is not more than an indication that an awareness of the need for protection was developing at all, because the commission remained largely without influence. There were also rumors that the city government had started fires itself in order to be able to "rehabilitate" the affected areas. Topuzlu himself had been "happy" about the fire near Hagia Sophia, but the reason for these rumors is more likely that large-scale measures could only be carried out in areas that had been devastated by a fire.

Topuzlu visited the sewers in Paris, but he feared that such a project in Istanbul, which was unpleasant for the population, would lose support from the population and thereby from the Sultan, so he preferred to give the Istanbul people pleasure through parks first. Topuzlu's predecessor, Tevfik Bey , had lost his position because of a sewerage project. In the Gülhane Park, Topuzlu was supported by Talât Pascha and Cemal Pascha , two of the three "triumvirs" of the Young Turkish period, from the Sultan, who finally approved the park. Enver Pascha asked the mayor to forbid women from visiting these parks. As a compromise, certain days were set on which only women should have access.

Topuzlu's initiative for a municipal slaughterhouse led to the submission of six contestants, one of which was a French company, but the provincial government reluctance to put it on and so it was postponed. The First World War led to further delays, so that the project only started on November 27, 1919 by Vedat Tek and the Karaagac slaughterhouse was able to start operations on July 12.

The Istanbul Metropolitan Theater Darülbedayi , founded by Cemil Topuzlu on July 27, 1914 under his first director Muhsin Ertuğrul , still exists today, and in 2009 there were seven theaters and eight stages.

From the foundation of the republic

During the time of the republic, when Ankara as a planned city became a model for many urban redevelopments, Topuzlu postulated for Istanbul that this city, apart from the historical monuments, had to be completely demolished and gradually rebuilt. When asked what he loved about Ankara, the well-known poet Yahya Kemal replied: “The return to Istanbul”. Topuzlu still hoped in 1937 that Ataturk would turn to Istanbul to make it the most modern city in the world. In 1948 Topuzlu was a councilor in the city council. He demanded that the French Henri Prost's master plan , which had long been used as a basis for urban planning, but was rarely implemented, be revised by an international group of designers and business experts.

Today the Cemil Topuzlu Park in the Kurucesme district of Beşiktaş commemorates the mayor, as does an open-air theater, the Cemil Topuzlu Harbiye Açık Hava Tiyatrosu in Şişli . In Kadıköy the Cemil Topuzlu Caddesi, a main thoroughfare, was named after him.

memoirs

• Yarınki Istanbul , Istanbul 1937 (Turkish).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Andreas D. Ebert, Namal: Wilhelm Gustav Liepmann (1878-1939) - expulsion from the first chair for social gynecology at the Berlin University to the University of Istanbul , in: Matthias David, Andreas D. Ebert (ed.): History of Berliners University women's clinics. Structures, people and events inside and outside the Charité , Walter de Gruyter, 2010, pp. 238–250, here: p. 240.
2. ↑ İstanbul ansiklopedisi . NTV, 2010, p. 926 ( google.de [accessed on September 10, 2017]).
3. ↑ This and the following according to Şenda Kara: Guiding principles and principles of action of modern urban planning in Turkey. From the Ottoman to the Turkish city , Diss. Berlin 2004, LIT Verlag Münster, 2006, p. 89.
4. ↑ Ugur Ünit Üngör: Mass violence against civilians during the Balkan Wars , in: Dominik Geppert, William Mulligan, Andreas Rose (eds.): The Wars before the Great War: Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First World War , Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 76–91, here: p. 80.
5. ↑ Şenda Kara: Guiding principles and principles of action for modern urban planning in Turkey. From the Ottoman to the Turkish city , Diss. Berlin 2004, LIT-Verlag, Münster 2006, p. 90.
6. ↑ Ebru Boyar, Kate Fleet: A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul , Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 247.
7. ↑ Şenda Kara: Guiding principles and principles of action for modern urban planning in Turkey. From the Ottoman to the Turkish city , Diss. Berlin 2004, LIT Verlag Münster, 2006, p. 99.
8. ↑ This and the following according to Şenda Kara: Guiding principles and principles of action of modern urban planning in Turkey. From the Ottoman to the Turkish city , Diss. Berlin 2004, LIT Verlag Münster, 2006, pp. 90–92.
9. ↑ SG Kucuk: The story and conservation problems of an industrial heritage building in Istanbul: the Sütlüce Slaughterhouse , in: CA Brebbia, S. Hernández (Ed.): Structural Studies, Repairs and Maintenance of Heritage Architecture XIV , WIT Press, Southampton / Boston 2015, pp. 235–246, here: p. 240 f.
10. ^ Metin Heper, Nur Bilge Criss: Historical Dictionary of Turkey , Scarecrow Press, 2009, p. 69.
11. ^ Murat Gül: The Emergence of Modern Istanbul. Transformation and Modernization of a City , Tauris Academic Studies, 2009, Paperback, IB Tauris 2012, p. 80 f. and p. 207 note 32.
12. ^ Murat Gül: The Emergence of Modern Istanbul. Transformation and Modernization of a City , Tauris Academic Studies, 2009, Paperback, IB Tauris 2012, p. 92.
13. ^ Murat Gül: The Emergence of Modern Istanbul. Transformation and Modernization of a City , Tauris Academic Studies, 2009, Paperback, IB Tauris 2012, p. 125.