Avcılar

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Avcılar is a suburb of İstanbul,Turkey out of town on the European side of the city, just to the west of the Küçükçekmece inlet of the Sea of Marmara.

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[edit] History

The Marmara coast road bridges the mouth of the inlet, always an important route in wartime. Therefore when preparing the conquest of Istanbul the Ottoman forces were keen to populate the Küçükçekmece area with Turks, the Turkish presence in the area dates from this period.

The road from Istanbul to Europe has become increasingly important ever since and by the time of the population exchange with Greece at the founding of the Turkish republic there were 50 Greek families in the village, the property they vacated was then used as a military depot. Little is left of this history; the church had long been converted to a mosque and was pulled down in 1977 for a new mosque to be built; fountains and ruins have disappeared. There is some remaining Ottoman architecture including a hunting lodge belonging to the sultans,(the name Avcılar means 'hunters' in Turkish), and some traditional farm houses.

[edit] Avcılar today

Until the second half of the 20th century Avcılar remained a smallish village on the coast with lots of open land behind. Not any more. Avcılar has grown enormously since the 1980s with people from all over Turkey coming to live here. An incredible amount of housing has been built here in the last twenty years, avaricious speculators have built huge estates of large blocks of cooperative housing, some of the ugliest development in the whole of Istanbul, all of it grim, some of it desperately poor, with very little infrastructure to brighten the lives of the people who live in all this housing, far from the amenities of the city of Istanbul. Avcılar is quiet in the evenings. And a cold wind blows from the sea across the inlet.

There has also been a great deal of industrial development, around the port and also on the road out towards the village of Firuzköy, which overlooks the inlet.

At one time the seashore at Avcılar was a retreat from the city but now the port at Ambarli is very busy and although you can walk along the seafront, the shoreline is very polluted, (the sea has been too dirty for swimming since the 1980s) and of course the road to Europe carries more traffic than ever, it is now a busy highway, littered with billboards and heaving with trucks. Travelling into the city from Avcılar requires winding up onto this highway from Avcılar's network of bridges and narrow underpasses, waiting at every turn.

Apartments in the centre of Avcılar near the sea are expensive and here the lifestyle is better. There are places to sit outside, and the centre of Avcılar has many restaurants, one or two cinemas, an active night-life (although very traditional Turkish music) and a busy shopping area with pedestrianised shopping streets full of nice high quality shops, and lots of little side-streets full of cafes, and everywhere young people wandering about among people selling quality goods on the sidewalk, and every inch of every side-street crammed with pedestrian traffic; in other words a classic Istanbul suburban scene.

[edit] Istanbul University

IU's new campus is sited in Avcılar, housing the faculties of engineering in particular. Trekking out to this dismal campus (at least three hours from the Anatolian side, tightly squeezed into a standing-room only bus ) is not popular with the university's students, but it must have helped the economy of Avcılar. There is parkland in the campus and around the Küçükçekmece inlet.

[edit] Earthquake vulnerability

This suburb was badly hit during the 1999 earthquake. A major fault-line follows the Marmara shore and Avcılar is built on low-lying sandy soil, some of it landfill, right on this shore. This and the fact that the buildings are tall and were very cheaply built make it a particularly vulnerable area. Buildings damaged in 1999 have been repaired but an earthquake centred nearer to Istanbul will damage this area severely.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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