Troubled Urban Heritage in Istanbul: Simkeşhane as a case study

Abstract

The history of Simkeşhane, the imperial mint (for coin production) constructed in the seventeenth century over the Theodisus’s Forum, or the Forum Tauri which was the largest forum of the Constantinople constructed in the fourth century ACE., is particular because in each period, urban projects on Simkeshane created conflicts between various actors and institutions. In the 1930s, the republican regime invited the French expert Henri Prost for the preparation of the new master plan of Istanbul. One of his projects proposed the destruction of the Simkeshane giving visibility to the Triumphal Arc of the Forum Tauri in the courtyard of the Simkeshane. The project of Prost, who was already accused for favoring Byzantine monuments over Ottoman ones, was terminated by the Commission for the Preservation of Antiquities (Eski Eserleri Koruma Encümeni). In the 1950s, a decade in which the republican government’s power was passed to the opposition, the goal of secularization was already abandoned and the new government had launched an ambitious urban project in the second half of the 1950s which mainly proposed road constructions through demolishing or removing old structures. Also Simkeshane was destructed for the construction of Ordu Avenue.