Currency : The New Yorker

Elvan 20/01/2014

Disquiet in a Turkish Fishing Village : The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2014/01/disquiet-in-a-turkish-fishing-village.html

Le 3ème pont à Istanbul vu par des pécheurs de Garipçe, petit village situé au Nord du Bosphore. Très intéressant.

Until a couple of years ago, Garipçe, a tiny village in metropolitan Istanbul, near the Black Sea, was known among Turks for being a retreat, a place that offered fresh fish beside a clean expanse of water but was still accessible by city bus. The village survives on fishing and light tourism; the latter slows in the winter, when cold wind blows off the water, through a narrow cove, and up the single paved street, sweeping Garipçe’s six hundred or so residents indoors. Visitors see romance in the quaint and ramshackle aspects of Garipçe, where many of the buildings lining the road are sunken and abandoned, their frames rotting in plain sight. But, for many year-round residents, life is hard. Fishermen scramble to afford technology that keeps them competitive; children are forced to commute to a neighboring village because the local primary school was demolished; women, in the religiously conservative village, complain about the lack of a community center where they can socialize. Because it is next to a historic fortress, Garipçe is designated a protected area, making renovating or building in the village an expensive, time-consuming process.
But the villagers, the vast majority of whom support Prime Minster Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.), are attached to their home. So when Erdoğan declared that it would be the European landing point for a two-and-a-half-billion-dollar bridge over the Bosporus—the third in Istanbul to connect the Asian and European continents —the announcement was met with hope. Villagers anticipated that property values would rise, tourism would increase, and blight would be repaired, while, in the meantime, they would be doing their part to help their Prime Minister unclog Istanbul’s overburdened roads and bridges. The bridge’s eight car lanes and two rail tracks were like a sword knighting the bedraggled town.
Around the time of those comments [corruption, Gezi], the mood in Garipçe was less than exuberant: residents, too, were starting to wonder whether the project was as positive a development as they had originally believed. Renovation on the fortress and other buildings had yet to start, and the only signs so far of the bridge were two columns coming up from the sea floor just off the coast and a huge bald patch in an otherwise green area of forest. Residents complained about the smell and noise from the construction. Local fishermen were anxious about the impact the construction would have on the fish population, which constitutes their livelihood. Everyone was thinking about what would happen to his or her property; even those most optimistic about a wealthy future also seemed resigned to the fact that the village would never be the same.

#Istanbul
#3ème pont
#environnement
#rente

Elvan