"CHILDREN OF A DIFFERENT WORLD"
by Karin Çizmeciyan Skotiniyadis
İstanbul, the ancient city of two continents: a city which has once been the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Byzantium, the subject of many poems, a city of desire, fought over for centuries. Thus, the city of many peoples, of many languages, many religions and of many cultures.
Above all, once my home, my city. As nothing is permanent but change, my city began to change during the ‘60’s. Its peoples, textures, smells, sounds that gave the city its livelihood, started to fade slowly.
Its ancient citizens, the Rums (Greeks of Roman descent), Armenians and Jews who had been living in harmony with each other and with the Muslims, were unofficially convinced to abandon their homeland through political decisions. As their numbers decreased, the void they created were filled with a different mosaic: Immigrants form Anatolia looking for better jobs, new lives etc.
Via this demographic change, immigrants from Anatolia became elements of the new mosaic of Istanbul which no longer felt familiar to me.
In new neighbourhoods, in slums with poor infrastructures people struggled to find new identities, in my city where I once lived happily in my Armenian community.
Through decades, I tried to make myself at home during my frequent visits from Athens, my new home: Tried hard to feel at home among growing skyscrapers shadowing the slums and new social structures. New hotels, shopping centres and high rises giving the city a rather pretentious modernity and their lights glittering in the night skies have given me little comfort.
My city still tells me mysterious stories in its old town, makes me relax near the waters of the amazing Bosporus, and invites me to walk the narrow streets although it is no longer the Istanbul I was born and grew up in. It is not the city of my childhood and youth. Every time I travel from Athens where I have been living for the past 34 years, I see it more and more changed, different. Walking in these neighbourhoods, I close my eyes and try to remember Istanbul of my childhood. Its textures, cobble stone streets, street vendors, neighbours calling each other from window to window to gossip. I open my eyes and find comfort and consolation in the children I see playing on the streets. Children still play in the streets, carefree, innocent, filled with imagination and with huge smiles, just like in the past. Maybe this is why I am so motivated to capture them with my camera, "CHILDREN OF A DIFFERENT WORLD"; to carry me back to my comfort zone; to show me that some things never change…
