On a recent November morning, I wandered the streets of Yeşilköy, an Istanbul neighborhood whose name in Turkish means ‘Green Village’. Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil, the first exponent of the realist novel in Turkey and the author of Aşk-ı Memnu [Forbidden Love], one of the most popular Turkish novels ever, lived here in a mansion in the 1920s. It was an unseasonably sunny day when I traversed Yeşilköy’s serene streets. The greenery reminded me of how Uşaklıgil led a quiet life here, one that suited his temperament. He devoted his time to gardening, a favorite pastime from his childhood, which alleviated his stress in old age. The novelist spent his last years in Yeşilköy and was buried there in 1945.

It was Uşaklıgil, our Gustave Flaubert, who proposed in 1930 to rename as the ‘Green Village’ the neighborhood known before as San Stefano. According to Evliya Çelebi, whose travelogue Seyahatnâme is a masterpiece of Turkish prose, that name derives from Stephen I of Constantinople, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople from 886 to 893.

On that warm November day, I walked beneath tall trees. I passed locals as they prepared to open their small, timeworn shops. And I realized something strange. I had never properly enjoyed this secluded sea resort before, despite having lived in Istanbul for 45 years.

Yeşilköy had long meant air travel to me. Atatürk Airport, the city’s central travel hub before Istanbul Airport opened in 2018, was located here. Also, my uncle lived in Yeşilköy in the 1990s, when he was single. I walked his dog, a Dalmatian named Dizzy, on Yeşilköy’s broad sidewalks, smoking Marlboro Lights and listening to Pink Floyd albums on my discman.

Yeşilköy was a fishing village until the early 19th century. Since the 1950s, thanks to access by sea and railway, it has become a beloved summer resort. Over the last 35 years, rapid construction has transformed it into a significant settlement. As a teenager with dreams of becoming an auteur filmmaker, I walked the energetic Dalmatian on the town’s pavements, listening to The Dark Side of the Moon in my earphones. I was curious about the neighborhood. I learned that it was where Turkish cinema was born.

In 1878, after two years of war, the Ottoman Empire and Russia signed a treaty in Yeşilköy, known as ‘the Treaty of San Stefano’. The armies of Abdul Hamid II were defeated, and the Russians occupied the Bulgarian fortresses and Rumelia; soon after, British armies approached Istanbul to save the sultanate, a counterforce to the Russian Empire, and established Yeşilköy as their headquarters, commencing peace negotiations. After ten days, the Treaty of San Stefano was signed there by the Turkish, British, and Russian ambassadors. The building on the coast where the agreement was signed in March 1878 was later demolished.

Yeşilköy was suddenly elevated to a symbol of international affairs. European newspapers published articles about the neighborhood and its role in rising global tensions. By 1893, Abdul Hamid II had accepted the Russian Tsar’s request to erect a large monument in Yeşilköy to commemorate the Russian soldiers who had died in the Russo-Turkish War. Many of these soldiers lay in scattered graves, and Colonel Pechkov, Russia’s military attaché in Istanbul, proposed to gather them in one place. Pechkov collected five thousand bones of the dead and buried them in Yeşilköy.

Why was Yeşilköy so significant for Russians? It represented the furthest point their army had reached in their advance toward Istanbul. Having purchased a portion of land there, the Czar hired the Russian architect Bozarov to design the monument with three symmetrical platforms on a square plan, culminating in a pyramidal tower with an onion dome.

"Istanbul feels infinite, both physically and temporally. Its population of 18 million is larger than that of 131 countries."

There were various platforms on this monument that no longer exists. From what I’ve read, the building featured magnificent gates and panels depicting saints, semicircular arches, and beautiful metalwork. The fortress-like design blended Byzantine, Romanesque, and neo-Slavic traditions. The last section of the monument, which served as a bell tower, was colored bright green.

After the Ottomans entered the First World War on the side of the Axis Powers, Russia became an enemy once again. Nationalists, still sore from the Russian defeat in 1878, now waged a campaign to demolish the San Stefano monument. They would have no rest until that green tower vanished. On November 14 1914, three days after the official declaration of the First World War, at around 8.30 in the morning, the monument was blown to bits in a public ceremony.

A young Ottoman officer, Fuat Uzkınay, filmed the demolition. Uzkınay’s film was shown as a propaganda newsreel in Istanbul cinemas. It would become legendary for two reasons. It’s the first film to be made by an Ottoman subject in Turkey. However, this film, like the monument it documented, has been lost to history.

L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat [Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat], the 1895 short film by the Lumière brothers, shows a life-sized train that caused panic during its first screening. The San Stefano monument plays a similar role for Turkish cinema, marking a fragile, precarious starting point. In Paris, two French inventors developed the cinematograph for commercial purposes and filmed a moving train to showcase their technical achievement. In Istanbul, an Ottoman army officer has the resources and authority to film ‘reality’ for the first time in the seat of the Islamic Caliphate. And he chooses to depict the destruction of this green symbol of an enemy state. Was Uzkınay’s merely an act of propaganda? I think it was an effort to conserve history and oppose the destructive force of modernity.