Modernity and Leisure: The Construction of Florya Beach in Istanbul (1935-1960)

Abstract

The seashore can be a place where political authorities seek to achieve social progress by offering modern performative spaces for leisure and recreational activities. After the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the display of healthy bodies became particularly important for making modernity visible, and for this reason parks, dance halls, sports facilities, and beaches were promoted to a wider audience for the display of bodies in motion. This article analyzes how Florya Beach in Istanbul was reconstructed as a modern urban area, through the beach’s representations in popular media and architectural projects from 1935 until 1960. The article traces the reshaping of a part of the urban waterfront of Istanbul through the everyday life of the city’s residents, representations of the beach, the myth created around Atatürk’s summer residence, and the modernist architecture that embodied the state’s aspirations to modernization and nation-state policies on the beach.

Historical Background and Objects of Study

The establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 accelerated the country’s move toward Westernization and spurred a systematic endeavor to transform many areas of the social life of its citizens. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic, directed the shift from a theocratic empire to a modern nation-state. Kemalism, or “Republicanism,” was based on the idea of rapid utopian progress that would bridge the intellectual and economic gap between the new Republic of Turkey and Western countries through a series of reforms. ¹ Kemalist reforms aimed to transform Turkey’s agrarian society into an industrial one by adopting industrialization, urbanization, and state capitalism. ² The reforms encompassed clothing, industrialization, education, the legal system, health, and women’s rights; they aimed to establish and maintain secularism from the rule of the state to the way people appeared in their social lives; and they attempted to spread secularization across the whole country through education, science, and well-being. ³ In the years following the establishment of the republic in 1923, an educated Muslim group emerged to form a new Republican elite, together with the non-Muslim business-owning community that had previously led the commercial and cultural life of Ottoman Istanbul. This new, ethnically homogeneous group consisted of civil servants engaged in implementing state policies and individuals who were able to achieve education through the opportunities offered by the city; thus, it was urban by its very nature.

As the idea of civilized culture was strongly associated with urbanity and the urban classes in the first decade of the Republic, ⁴ Republican policies centered on the industrialization of cities: to this end, they sought to achieve social change by promoting some of the existing “pleasurespaces” as well as offering new modern performative spaces for leisure and cultural activities. With the designation of Ankara as the new capital, there was continuous construction of ministry buildings and public open areas in the city throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Meanwhile, building in Istanbul was often postponed to prioritize Ankara and the industrial development of Anatolian cities. ⁵ It was not until a full decade had passed after the establishment of the Republic that the government held a competition for the urban planning of Istanbul (1933), thus marking the beginning of planning activities in the Republic of Turkey. None of the plans by the invited architects (Alfred Agache, Hemran Elgötz, and J. Lambert) were implemented, however. ⁶ In 1936, French architect Henri Prost was invited to study the planning of Istanbul, and he produced a ten-year Istanbul Master Plan in 1937 (partially implemented until 1951). His master plan, through proposing new infrastructures and highways combined with recreational spaces such as gazinos, ⁷ dance halls, promenades, and beach facilities, demonstrated the importance given to the remodeling of Istanbul into a “cultural center.” Although leisure spaces predated the Republic, their representation changed as the Republican state adopted nation-state policies and modernist architectural imagery.

Since the sixteenth century, Istanbul had offered many kinds of leisure activities: inns, taverns (meyhane), ⁸ and coffeehouses ⁹ were locales for eating and drinking, albeit mostly for men. ¹⁰ Although non-Muslim and Muslim communities were not always strictly separate, some of their leisure places and practices differed, for example, those involving alcohol consumption. Also, Muslim men and women’s participation in leisure activities and the use of leisure spaces were segregated until the twentieth century, although after the Second Constitutional Era, when the parliament of the Ottoman Empire was restored and reformed, mixed-sex use became more common, and the number of leisure spaces, cafes, taverns, and parks increased. ¹¹ Daniel J. Macarthur-Seal shows that in the initial decades of the Republic, the number of venues decreased dramatically, partially due to the abrupt ban (1920-1924) on producing, selling, and distributing alcohol, which affected the non-Muslim communities most, as the majority of alcohol-serving venues were owned or administered by Greeks, Turks, and Armenians. ¹² With nation-state policies and anti-cosmopolitan sentiments, leisure spaces would continue to change hands—from the non-Muslim to the Muslim community—in the following decades.

With the establishment of the Republic, state policies attempted to modernize the everyday practices of the city’s inhabitants through the design and visual representation of public recreational spaces and resort areas such as Florya. The specific topic of this article is Florya Beach, a waterfront area almost two kilometers long on the shore of the Marmara Sea, thirty minutes by car from the west of Istanbul. Florya is a neighborhood located in today’s Bakırköy district, which historically had consisted of Greek villages such as Aya Stefanos (today Yeşilköy) and Galitaria (today Şenlikköy).

During World War I, Florya had been an area where Russian emigres fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution had settled; according to Willy Sperco, the beach was frequently used by Russian women “during a time when it was unacceptable and inconceivable to imagine Muslim women dipping in the water.” ¹³ In addition, in his memoir, Hristo Brızitsov remarks, “In 1920, this place [Florya] was already European and attracted many vacationers. They had switched to a mixed-sex beach, while this was not even spoken of on Bulgarian shores.” ¹⁴ This shows that non-Muslims were active in both using and administrating the beach in the 1920s. Ö. Sıla Durhan remarks that the cabins on Solaryum Beach were run by a Monsieur Gruber, a Russian Jew; before this, a Greek entrepreneur named Anastas had established an open-air tavern, followed by two other Greeks, Uzun and Küçük Aleksandr, who had set up the Haylayf (Highlife) Beach. ¹⁵

In the early twentieth century, people swam in the sea mostly using sea baths, gender-separated, enclosed timber structures built on the sea, with an opening in the middle for “bathing” (Figure 1). According to Meltem Ö. Gürel’s comprehensive work on the shift in seashore practices from sea baths to beaches, the former had been used on the shores of Istanbul as early as the seventeenth century, becoming prevalent in the nineteenth century for their “health benefits”; by the 1930s, however, the beach had become a site where the sexes and different social groups could mix to enjoy recreation. ¹⁶ At the beginning of the 1930s, Istanbul City Council decided to urbanize the shores of Florya, although expropriation in the area took time, partly because the motive behind deploying new structures and operations was to establish Muslim management of the leisure spaces there. ¹⁷

Figure 1.

Woman lying on Florya Beach with a sea bath in the background, 1940s.

Florya Beach’s transformation from a mesire (an open space or promenade used for socializing and recreation, for example, picnics and strolling) to a “designed beach” started with the Turkish modernist architect Seyfi Arkan’s plan for a summer residence for Atatürk in 1935. After this was built, Atatürk used it and the beach for government meetings and leisure activities. The relationships between the representations and proposed uses of Florya underwent continuous construction, the most significant projects being the Florya Gazino designed by Rüknettin Güney in 1938, the Florya Houses built by Istanbul City Council in 1952, and the beach facilities designed by Sedad Hakkı Eldem and Orhan Çakmakçıoğlu in 1956-1959. An important factor that shaped the image of Florya as a modern recreational space was its portrayal in popular media. The following sections briefly discuss the modernization of Turkey, analyze the symbolism attributed to beach architecture, and provide an account of the resort as an urban space of modernity in the Republic of Turkey.

Theoretical Background and Terminology

An important aspect of this article that should be clearly defined is the definition of “modernization” and “Westernization,” two concepts that are often used almost interchangeably. In this paper, I use “modernism” mainly with reference to Neil Leach’s account of “the aesthetic practice of modernity” and as an ambiguous term, ¹⁸ and I accept modernization as characterized by the permeation of both modernism and modernity into social life through a series of new contradictory and fragmented experiences as described by Marshall Berman. ¹⁹ Similarly, Hilde Heynen sees modernity as a condition of living imposed by the processes of modernization. ²⁰ The way the Turkish government regarded the relationship between modernization and Westernization, in which the latter was used as a mimetic tool to achieve the former, was both ideological and technical. In Florya Beach, modernist architecture was used as a mimetic tool of Westernization with the aim of modernization.

Esra Akcan and Sibel Bozdoğan discuss the aesthetic and spatial implications of the modernization project by considering ideology, nationalism, and state initiative as active agents in the development of the built environment in Turkey. They focus on the appropriation of modernist architecture, due to its claims to rationalism and progressivism, as a spatial representation of the revolutionary aspect of the early Republic and the modern state. ²¹ The idea of “Westernizing society,” however, actually goes back to the Ottoman period, especially to the period (1839-1876) starting with the Declaration of Reforms (in Turkish, Tanzimat Fermanı), consisting of a series of measures seeking to secularize the governing system and initiating the process of systematizing the project of modernization. For Uğur Tanyeli, during the Republic, modernism was treated as an object to be delivered by rulers who believed that the people did not yet have a high enough level of consciousness to demand it. ²² Leisure spaces such as Florya Beach became symbols for this “unconscious” way of internalizing Republican modernity by engaging in physical activities such as sports, dancing, or swimming in mixed-sex groups. In that sense, the Republican aims of changing society were translated into everyday activities taking place in the space of the beach and through its users. ²³

Turkey was not the only case in which the political regime’s drive for visibility and self-assertion was manifested through the urban waterfront and leisure architecture. There is considerable scholarship on the connections between states and the organization of citizens’ lives through recreation and leisure. In their introduction to Romanian Black Sea Tourism Planning and Architecture of the 1960s and 70s, Kalliopi Dimou, Sorin Istudor, and Alina Şerban suggest that the communist state’s implementation of modernist architecture on Romanian shores shows the government’s concern to demonstrate that it provided for its people in all areas of life and to legitimize itself through public service. ²⁴ Georgia Daskalaki’s research on how modernism became the façade through which Cyprus in the 1960s could confirm its position as an independent country and as a modern Mediterranean leisure destination shows that these policies were adopted not only for propaganda purposes but also to affirm a country’s position within a Westernized world. ²⁵ What makes this possible is the liminal character of the seaside, with its ability to deliver shifts in its users’ perceptions of everyday life. ²⁶ This liminality, the transitional, “neither-land nor-sea” characteristics of the beach making it similar to a threshold, made the symbolism attributed to Florya Beach pliable: for its users, the beach was simply a space for recreation and leisure, but beyond that simple attribution, for the young Republic of Turkey, Florya Beach was also a performative space for modern urban Turkish identity. John Fiske approaches the issue with a similar view; in his analysis of the beach as part of the construction of Australian identity, he writes, “the beach can be read as a text [. . .] Like all texts, the beach has an author—not, admittedly, a named individual, but a historically determined set of community practices that have produced material objects or signs.” ²⁷ Taken together, these studies all argue that political strategies were embedded in what could be seen as ephemeral leisure or everyday spaces through large-scale urban planning, the construction of new facilities, modernist architecture, and social programming.

In that sense, Prost’s Istanbul Master Plan (1937) is pivotal, as it epitomized the rationale of early twentieth-century urbanism as a tool for internalizing modernism on an individual level through the experience of the city. In this regard, Turkish urban historian İlhan Tekeli emphasizes that twentieth-century urban design shared ideas with the Enlightenment and its underlying belief in the possibility of remaking society by organizing the city into a rationalized system. ²⁸ This discourse, equating modernism with Western thought and rationalism, forged a scientific link between architecture and society: it identified rationally calculated and designed spaces with controllable subjects, relationships, and social practices. For this reason, architecture, and especially urban space, was used to visually and materially demonstrate the move away from the Ottoman Empire during the initial years of the Republic.

The Construction of Modern Recreational Spaces

While many Ottomans had already been familiar with recreational spaces, the Republican government aimed to promote particular sites and buildings that it associated with being “Western” and modern. Mesires ²⁹ had been a part of everyday life in Istanbul—and in other parts of the Ottoman realm ³⁰ —since the sixteenth century and were followed by “people’s gardens” in the nineteenth century, which represented improvements in design quality, wider use, and a shift in production techniques and locations within the city. ³¹

Some early examples of recreational spaces included the Grand and Petit Champs des Morts (the meadows of the Great and Small Cemeteries, stretching over today’s neighborhoods of Pangaltı and Tepebaşı). These green spaces were situated on hilltops with spectacular views of the city and, being non-Muslim areas, were frequented both by men and by women. ³² Until they were expropriated, the Champs des Morts were popular sites for strolling and enjoying the views. ³³ Official municipal gardens, public spaces, and “people’s gardens” were constructed toward the end of nineteenth century: both Taksim Garden (1870) and Tepebaşı Garden (1880) opened in place of the Champs des Morts, with “designed” features such as gates, walkways, and cultivated trees, and were seen as hygienic and civilized spaces. ³⁴ These parks continued to be popular among non-Muslim communities, as Nikos Sigalas deduces from Yorgos Theotokas’s semi-autobiographical novel: “Without any doubt we can say this: Taksim Garden was a place that Muslim women [. . . ] didn’t spend much time in; it was a garden of the infidels [sic].” ³⁵ Gülhane Park, which was a part of Topkapı Palace and opened to the public in 1913, was another important example, since while there were attempts to limit women’s use of the park to specific days and hours, in practice this was not implemented and the park was a mixed-sex space. ³⁶

The Galata seafront, especially after 1895, when it was remodeled along the lines of a European city, soon became a popular site for recreational walks and enjoying sea views. ³⁷ While communal gardens (bostans), meadows, and promenades close to water had always been common leisure areas, emblems of visibility, and sociability for Ottoman citizens, Muslim women’s presence there with men had been regulated, if not entirely different from that of non-Muslim women. ³⁸

In addition to these open spaces and promenades, in the first two decades of the Republic, with the help of visual media, Istanbul’s new image stressed its historical associations with culture and leisure activities. The urban elite’s need for spaces of representation was met by the emphasis on leisure spaces, public areas, and modern housing in the city. These representational spaces, ³⁹ as the term is used by Henri Lefebvre, are not necessarily codified in the way representations of space are, but relate to the actual experience and everyday activities that take place in a space. The representational spaces associated with the early years of the Republic of Turkey often remained on the margins for the majority of the Muslim society, in the sense that until then, mostly non-Muslim communities had used these spaces. The representational spaces that were promoted in the early Republic were indirectly regulated by Kemalist reforms—such as the reinforcement of modern clothing and the increased prevalence of leisure activities in mixed-sex spaces—and reciprocally redefined the everyday practices of urban inhabitants with the “West” as the model.

The new message of these recreational spaces was the possibility of experiencing the city in a more democratic way. Nevertheless, while the government was attempting to align modernist, egalitarian imagery with the new regime, the outcome of nation-state policies was the homogenization of society. From 1914 to 1927, numbers of non-Muslims had fallen from almost 20 percent to 2.5 percent, due to mass expulsions, migrations, and killings. ⁴⁰ In fact, as Berin Gölönü writes,

The Turkish “public” that these processes, reforms, and modes of urban renewal were meant to serve, however, was a citizenry who benefited from the government’s dispossession of the communities that had been evicted from the new Turkish Republic. Much of the property of the departing Greek and Armenian minority communities was expropriated in order to turn these lands over to the state or to make this property available for use by the citizens of the new Turkish Republic. ⁴¹

Thus, the narrative of top-down modernity in Turkey is also the story of the building process of the nation-state.

Florya Beach was only one predecessor (albeit an important one, as it involved swimming) of the many recreational spaces that followed: İnönü Promenade (1940), the Taksim Gazino (1940), Lido Pool (1943), Ataköy Beach (1956-57), Büyükdere Beach, Süreyya Beach, and Salacak Beach were only a few destinations that were popularly frequented between the 1930s and 1960s. The constant signifier in the period’s visual propaganda and architectural projects was that the young nation’s healthy bodies, both men’s and women’s, were simultaneously present and in motion in dance halls, sports areas, pools, and beaches. ⁴²

Shields argues that spaces on the “social periphery,” that is, spaces that are the “other” of cultural centers, have the potential to be manipulated by national agendas through architectural symbolism: certain spaces are associated with cultural categorizations such as central, marginal, urban, or modern through their physical qualities as well as their usage. ⁴³ As one of these spaces identified by Shields, while beaches and swimming were culturally marginal for the Ottoman Empire, they slowly started to become central for the Republic of Turkey.

Especially after Prost’s Istanbul Master Plan (1937), recreational areas acquired symbolic importance in Istanbul as modern, healthy, and hygienic spaces where the sexes could mix and move around freely and the Republican elite could appear in public. ⁴⁴ His plan was implemented in fragments until after the government of the Republican People’s Party was unseated by the Democrat Party (DP) in 1950. The DP government had repositioned Istanbul as the economic and cultural center, and adopted populist cultural policies and liberal economics as a basis for modernization. After Prost’s departure, the DP government used his plan as a reference point, but with significant alterations, which allowed for the demolition of large areas of the traditional urban fabric to build new structures and wide boulevards.

The main purpose behind Prost’s initial plan was to create urban spaces for free movement and encounters for new social practices while at the same time restoring the historical pattern of the city. ⁴⁵ The plan aimed to emphasize monumentality through breadth and to reorganize the city into efficient zones and hygienic espaces libres (free spaces). ⁴⁶ These espaces libres included large public spaces, youth parks, sports facilities, scenic routes, and pedestrian promenades. For instance, as part of Prost’s master plan, Park No. 2 was a continuous green area extending from the coast of Beşiktaş toward Taksim, where the İnönü Promenade (today Gezi Park) was built after the demolition of the Taksim Military Barracks in 1940. The promenade was a mixed open space that enabled urban inhabitants to see each other walking around and functioned as an extension of Taksim Square. In 1940, the promenade was joined by the Taksim Gazino, designed by Rüknettin Güney, who also designed the Florya Gazino, at its north-eastern end. In the following years, the Taksim Gazino became an established destination for hosting formal and private balls, tea parties, and high protocol dinners and a popular symbol of the Westernized urban lifestyle in Istanbul. ⁴⁷ These, then, were some of the new public spaces of encounter and entertainment in the central part of the city.

Florya Beach, another example of these spaces of encounter, entertainment, and recreation, was located on the periphery of the city, connected to the city center by the infrastructures proposed in Prost’s master plan. The train line connecting Sirkeci and Halkalı (1871) was the main means of public transport. In addition to this, Prost’s Istanbul Master Plan in Figure 2 shows the western branch of the major highway, at that time known as the London Asphalt (Londra Asfaltı), which was intended to connect Istanbul to Europe but instead appears to end at Florya. Furthermore, in his Notes on Istanbul (1937), Prost points out the importance of the regulations regarding waste disposal, infrastructures, and the roadworks linking Florya to Edirne in the west and Istanbul in the east, and emphasizes that Florya Beach needed to have “a fully modern design in all its facilities in order to redeem the area between the railway and the sea.” ⁴⁸ The decision to make Florya a modern seaside resort is further emphasized in the 1944 city council publication Güzelleşen İstanbul (Refined Istanbul), which remarks,

In a city surrounded by seas such as Istanbul, modern and orderly beaches are necessary and beneficial facilities for public health, recreation, sports, fun and to prevent drownings. Similar to many examples found in Europe, Florya’s conversion into a sea-bathing town is included in Istanbul’s master plan, and this area will become one of the most beautiful in the world in addition to being a centre for tourism. ⁴⁹

Figure 2.

Henri Prost’s Istanbul master plan for 1943-1953, 1937.

Prost’s detailed plan (Figure 3) demonstrates that the architect also saw Florya as a potential growth area, a “garden city” awaiting continuous development with forestation, villas, a large hotel, and further beach facilities located to the north of his provisional plan. In fact, in 1939 an article in the newspaper Cumhuriyet reported on the progress of the forest. “Florya: Beach and garden city,” it read. “In this land where even thistles struggled to grow, one can now see a wide pine forest” ⁵⁰ (a photograph of saplings from the site was included). His proposal to build gymnastics areas, a running track, and a pool for “young people to train their bodies” ⁵¹ also shows that he clearly imagined Florya as a space for the youth to do sports as a prerequisite of a modern society and a representation of the Republican nation. In his “Plan for Sports and Recreational Instruments in Front of the New Florya Cabins” (1937), Rüknettin Güney, the municipal architect working jointly with Prost at the time, also set out an area for sports in front of the cabins, with ping-pong tables, swings, and gymnastics apparatuses. ⁵² The inclusion of sports by design supports the ideological emphasis placed on health and the young nation.

Figure 3.

Henri Prost’s plan, entitled “Florya Park-City,” 1937.

The Myth of Atatürk’s Summer Residence

Atatürk’s summer residence in Florya is a Streamline Moderne structure literally built on the sea, with nautical details and a long deck that emphasizes horizontality and was seen as epitomizing industrial beauty and efficiency (Figure 4). Although in reality by 1937 his health was deteriorating, Atatürk’s presence at the residence and his sorties to row and swim in the sea alongside the people created an image of his having a healthy, functioning body on equal terms with the mass of healthy bodies on the beach ⁵³ (Figure 5). Atatürk’s closeness to the people thus symbolized democracy, in contrast to the aloofness of the Ottoman ruling class.

Figure 4.

Atatürk’s summer residence, designed by Seyfi Arkan in 1935.

Figure 5.

Atatürk rowing at Florya Beach, late 1930s.

In an American documentary, The Incredible Turk (1958), sequences of Atatürk swimming at the beach with his daughter and lying on the sand in his bathing trunks are at the core of a series of close-up shots showing him as a sympathetic and approachable leader. ⁵⁴ This footage and its display of Atatürk engaged in leisure pursuits is an example of a form of political power that Foucault describes as being embodied in everyday life, through which it identifies the individual and “imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognise and which others have to recognise in him.” ⁵⁵ This form of power, Foucault argues, enables the integration of individuality only as part of a specific pattern or of an institution related to human social life. In that sense, Atatürk’s presence on the beach, him being engaged in seemingly casual activities, and the representations of his presence in the mainstream media (contemporary newspapers and propaganda films) underscore the humane, amiable, grassroots aspects of his leadership that people encountered in their everyday lives. The role of the media thus constitutes the basis of the power that Foucault describes. Thus, on June 26, 1935, one of the national newspapers, Tan, eagerly announced the construction and modernization of Florya Beach with the headline “Atatürk’s Gift to İstanbul: Florya,” showing photos of the President visiting the construction site. A few days later, on June 30, 1935, Tan announced, “Atatürk gives life to Florya,” with a photograph of the model of the summer residence in the middle of the page. The idea of activating and bringing life to an entire seashore through the inauguration of a single building demonstrates not only the importance attributed to architecture, but also its enhanced power when combined with media imagery. And indeed such imagery was also associated with other leaders: the iconic photographs showing second Turkish President İsmet İnönü jumping into the sea in the 1930s and the photograph titled “The President Among the People on the Beach,” published in Cumhuriyet on August 15, 1951, of President Celal Bayar relaxing on the sands at Florya with others are only two examples among many.

Although people could not fully gain access to Atatürk’s summer residence, ⁵⁶ the structure’s presence and image were meant to encourage users of the beach to adopt those ideals, represented by the residence, that they had visual, physical, or mental access to. ⁵⁷ Atatürk’s healthy body, bodies performing in a modern space (the beach), and the unity of these bodies in that space created—in Barthes’s sense—a myth of Florya Beach that was aligned with the norms of the Republican elite. Through this myth, the use of Republican symbolism attributed an “essence” to the beach and defined its relationship with its users through health and efficiency, appropriating its signifiers to allude to these themes. Barthes writes that myth “transforms history into nature. [. . .] What causes mythical speech to be uttered is perfectly explicit, but it is immediately frozen into something natural.” ⁵⁸ In that sense, the beach was not necessarily presented as a “new” space but as a natural condition of being modern and subscribing to Republican values. Through this “natural” signification, Florya and the activities associated with it became “Western” and, with this categorization, also “modern,” as the former was instrumentalized to achieve the latter.

The Spatialization of Recreation on the Beach Through the Florya Gazino

In 1938, architect Rüknettin Güney was commissioned to build a gazino to the west of Atatürk’s summer residence. A gazino is a structure, typical of the early Republican period, that enables people to “perform and express their modernity” in a mixed-sex crowd through activities associated with the West. ⁵⁹ This structure was very different in terms of its architecture, materials, and aesthetics from its predecessors—temporary wooden cabins or sea baths—at the early Solaryum and Haylayf Beaches in Florya in the 1920s. The gazino spatially represented the identity of the new state and its Westernizing effects in areas of everyday life, through both its events and its users. In the early years of the Republic, the events program of the gazinos was addressed to urban citizens, to familiarize people with activities such as mixed-sex dancing and concerts.

The Florya Gazino was part of a larger building comprising changing cabins, a resting area, storage space, and a long terrace that lay on top of the cabins. As was the case for the entire beach, the Municipality of Istanbul owned the Gazino and farmed out its administration for fixed periods to private companies or individuals. Perhaps it is important to note here that the Gazino was built in the political climate of the aftermath of the “Art and Services Allocated to Turkish Citizens in Turkey” legislation of June 11, 1932, which banned non-Turkish citizens from partaking in many areas of business; thus, it is most likely that the municipality preferred Muslim citizens to rent the beach and gazino from then on.

The monumental structure embodied the new norms ushered in by the Republic and highlighted the latter’s modernization project through its architectural, physical, and material qualities. It was for this reason that it was featured in Refined Istanbul, a 1944 publication promoting the projects carried out under the Republic (Figure 6). The Gazino also formed a physical divide between the beach and the transport arrival area. There was an entrance to the building on the ground floor, with the path continuing through the dancing area and exiting from the lower ground floor; thus, the Gazino served as an intermediary reception structure displaying beach activities to urban dwellers on their arrival.

Figure 6.

Pages from the Istanbul Municipality publication Güzelleşen İstanbul [Refined Istanbul] (1943), showing the Florya Gazino, designed by Rüknettin Güney, 1938.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, many cultural activities were staged in the Gazino: concerts by international bands and orchestras, tango and exotic dance nights, and so on. ⁶⁰ The relocation of such “formal” recreational events to the beach was made possible by the Gazino as a venue and positioned Florya Beach as a space specifically designated for Westernization to take place. Even physically, the building differentiated itself from the “naturalness” of its surroundings by its massive architectural language: elements such as the podium, the semi-open terrace, and the Marmara Sea vista conveyed monumentality with a modernist economy of details.

This approach correlates with the idea that while the beach is not entirely urban, it is more urban than rural. ⁶¹ The beach is neither completely “natural” nor entirely “constructed,” as it occupies a liminal position between land and sea, between city and nature. ⁶² It is usually a site briefly visited for pleasure and relaxation, containing temporary structures. Fiske identifies the beach and related activities as “a place and time that is neither home nor work, outside the profane normality.” ⁶³ Similarly, Shields defines the beach as a marginal place where “specific behaviours and patterns of interaction outside of the norms of everyday behaviour, dress and activity” occur. ⁶⁴ Consequently, the beach becomes a place that is outside the norm because it is specifically designated for leisure. ⁶⁵ Perhaps this in particular was the reason why Florya was easy to model into the materialization of the new Republican norm.

The Gazino was a new kind of mediator between groups of people and the sea. The modern form of the building did not limit swimming as had the Ottoman sea baths; rather, through its spatial qualities, the Gazino both welcomed and regulated different activities such as sports events, beauty competitions and concerts on its upper floors, where dress codes seemed to be stricter (perhaps because it had direct access to the entrance and therefore was more public and formal) than on the lower floor, where people could sunbathe, eat, chat, and relax. Throughout the 1950s, Florya became increasingly popular as a destination for weekend getaways. According to some writers and columnists of the period, rather than swimming for pleasure, the experience of visiting the site was characterized by the overcrowded train trip, the struggle to rent one of the cheaper cabins before everyone else, and the search for a place to sit on the beach. ⁶⁶ A 1937 article by Niyazi Acun illustrates this point: “Among Istanbulites who want to get away from the dreary atmosphere of the city and cool off, going to the beach is an epidemic this year . . . This summer, the most crowded beach is once again Florya.” ⁶⁷

In the 1930s and 1940s, although there were over forty beaches in Istanbul ⁶⁸ and the city was referred to as “the resort capital” by Prost, ⁶⁹ the ritual of going to the beach had not yet been defined as a vacation activity. Nevertheless, Prost foresaw the potential for a hotel at Florya for the “wealthy visitors” arriving by car, along with a campsite for “those living in Beyoğlu and Galata and needing to strengthen their lungs with fresh air.” ⁷⁰ An incomplete master plan from the municipality archive (produced at the end of the 1930s, possibly by Rüknettin Güney) shows the ambitious construction projected for Florya (Figure 7): a large-scale hotel, a pool, an area for children, a new gazino with changing cabins, a market, “cheap rooms,” more changing rooms, and a promenade ranging along the whole site, all toward the east of the beach. Progress in tourism and the prevalence of the vacation as a way of spending leisure time in the 1950s would lead to some of these structures being built at Florya.

Figure 7.

Damaged master plan of Florya, possibly by Rüknettin Güney.

The Post-War Architectural Expansion of Florya Beach

Perhaps the particularity of the beach as a modern space for the urban elite was boosted by the development projects to—ironically—“modernize” Florya Beach under the DP government from 1956 to 1959. In the 1950s, this government embraced tourism as a means of modernizing society. Their approach emphasized international relations as part of the economic growth of the country and repositioned Turkey in alignment with the United States. Although initiatives such as The Directorate of Tourism had been established in 1938, World War II prevented any rapid changes in traveling and tourism from taking place in Turkey, ⁷¹ and domestic tourism only became prevalent in the 1950s. International tourism would not reach its official peak until the 1980s, but government encouragement for travel, combined with advances in air and maritime transport, made new facilities necessary to accommodate the increasing number of tourists arriving in Turkey by the 1950s. As a result, the notion of the resort became conceptually and physically extended beyond “daytime travel to a nearby destination.”

The promotion of the vacation as a need for modern citizens ⁷² escalated the short- and long-distance leisure-time mobility of city inhabitants. By this period, the civil servants who formed part of the Republican elite had dissolved into the middle class and rural migrants had moved to the cities. With the relocation of rural groups in the city, a larger part of Turkish society gained mobility, and they brought their ways of using space with them. This changed visiting Florya from being an exclusive practice for the urban citizen to a leisure activity available to a more diverse population.

As part of this shift, sixty houses (the Florya Houses) were built by Istanbul City Council in 1952, thereby transforming the temporality of the stay and activities on the beach into a more extended mode. At the beginning of the 1950s, the majority of these houses were rented out to bureaucrats randomly selected by a lot, but by the end of the 1950s, the houses were also available for public rent. ⁷³

These summer houses in Florya existed as new spaces located outside the urban organization of time and space. The summer residence was a house but not a home; it was a form of shelter but only for the summer; it was closer to nature but located in the city; yet it was a place where everyday activities such as visits from relatives, housework, and neighborhood gossip continued. Unlike the Gazino, it did not impose the temporary use of an idealized space on its users. Thus, the everydayness of the beach was particularly emphasized when people started to spend extended periods of time there at their summer houses. This new domestic usage of Florya expanded from the 1950s into the 1960s with the development of motels, housing complexes, and campsites. In 1957, management of Florya Beach and Gazino was rented out to the Tourism Bank (an institution that provided funding for tourist enterprises) for the following thirty years. ⁷⁴

In the 1950s, Florya received an increasing number of international tourists, in addition to local visitors. As a result, in 1955, the City Council commissioned architect Sedad Hakkı Eldem to renovate the old structures and build new ones to cater for the increasing demands on the resort. Eldem was responsible for rehabilitating the existing Gazino, improving and reorganizing the site and planning series of motels, campsites, picnic areas, changing cabins, and houses to accommodate the growing number of visitors and for the use of different income groups. According to his master plan, had it been fully implemented, the beach would have been able to accommodate visitors in 1,080 units of different kinds. However, due to financial difficulties, it was only partially realized and finally only included two motels, a campsite, two restaurants, and changing cabins on the eastern part of the beach. The motel opened in 1958, and after this date there were many advertisements in the newspapers promoting the opening of “luxurious motels in Florya.” ⁷⁵ The rest of the complex was completed in 1959 with the support of the Tourism Bank and turned over to the city in 1960. ⁷⁶ This anticipated expansion of the site confirms that tourism and consumerism had become part of the modernization project in Florya.

The influence of North America as a cultural and economic model guided many architects’ investigations in modernism and functionality in the 1950s. Eldem is known for his explorations of the traditional Turkish house and geometrical form in constructing a local language of mid-century modernist architecture. ⁷⁷ Corresponding with this approach, his designs for the facilities in Florya bear morphological resemblances to 1950s American resort architecture (Figure 8), ⁷⁸ incorporating sensitive aesthetic elements through material details in the structures, similar to post-war American architects.

Figure 8.

Motel B, part of the campsite designed by Sedad Hakkı Eldem and Orhan Çakmakçıoğlu in 1956-1959.

Eldem was also influenced by American suburban developments, and some of his designs were hybrids of traditional Turkish houses with a “flavour of Americana.” ⁷⁹ This approach is visible in the Motel B Gazino, which includes a courtyard, as in the Turkish house, but also a modular grid and reinforced concrete as part of its use of new technology.

The site plan and the more economical structures of the campsite display his explorations in geometry through voluted architectural details and the plan’s layout (Figure 9). However, its aesthetic appeal and uniformity is actually an outcome of constructing the complex in the most efficient way, as it takes economy into account in materials and technology to target the new middle class emerging in the city. ⁸⁰ As the period’s commercials illustrate (Figure 10), the campsite’s residential units targeted the nuclear family through practical structures, use of construction technology, and appropriate sizing, while the new circular Gazino replicated the old one’s purpose: hosting recreational events such as dances and concerts.

Figure 9.

Site plan of the Florya campsite for local and international visitors.

Figure 10.

Advertisement reading: From the Turkey Tourism Bank, Florya facilities; Public vacation camps; 15 Liras per day—En-suite, spacious family rooms for couples with children; Economical Restaurant, Private Beach.

Conclusion

As the ambition to modernize society systematically accelerated in 1923, the built environment became an agent in implementing ideology. In parallel, a new educated class formed in the cities, and the need for new spaces of representation for these actors to perform and promote the rationalist path to “civilizing” society emerged. The Republic expressly endeavored to break all ties to former signifiers of traditional leisure activities, such as enclosed sea baths or male-exclusive coffeehouses, by encouraging the use of spaces that it saw as appropriate to a modern society. The emphasis on these “pleasurescapes,” however, cannot be properly understood without their contradictions: while the built environment was redesigned and promoted to serve the majority of the country, the government, through its nation-state politics, negated the visibility of non-Muslim communities and their use of many spaces within the city. Through taking two distinct eras after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey into consideration (1935-1950 and 1950-1960), I have attempted to trace these ideological shifts and their relationships to modernization through leisure activities and the construction of Florya.

With Atatürk’s summer residence as its initial architectural flagship, Florya was particularly convenient for this aim. It was located outside of the old city and introduced swimming at the beach as a new practice for Istanbul residents. Thus, Florya was positioned not only as a resort and a city getaway but also as a symbolic place of modernity, well-connected to the city by its transport infrastructures. Florya Beach, first as “marginal” and as an antithesis of Ottoman-period spaces, was steered toward ideological “centrality” along with other urban spaces, such as parks, gazinos, and other “pleasurescapes” in Istanbul.

The Republican government appears to have projected the beach as available to urban citizens who had instantly achieved the ideals of the Republican elite: a mixed-sex group of educated, young, healthy, nationally homogeneous individuals performing sports at the beach and listening to concerts at the Gazino. The use of the beach in the 1930s to 1940s displays the contradictions of Republican ideology in “delivering” modernity for everyone; while after 1950, with the influence of liberal policies and the increase in different types of facilities, the experience of the beach may have become more diverse, as the model for modernization was itself renewed. Unlike nineteenth-century sea baths, or promenades which enabled only a limited physical relationship between genders, bodies, and water, the beaches became sites of a more active way of engaging with the sea and with others through swimming, doing sports, and socializing.