PERA

the most europeanized district of istanbul during the last century of ottoman rule.

Pera (Beyoğlu) comprised the long ridge stretching north above Galata, and its slopes to east and west. Galata, the Genoese and Venetian port concession on the northern shore of the Golden Horn in Byzantine Constantinople, remained such in the Ottoman city but was subject to greater government control. Especially after the arrival of large numbers of western and northern European traders in the seventeenth century, Pera became the site of embassies and merchants' mansions. Its great age of prosperity, power, and prestige came in the second half of the nineteenth century, after trade liberalization and social Europeanization. With tremendous expansion of European trade, the Grande Rue de Pera flourished with shops, restaurants, hotels, banks, and office buildings in the latest European styles; it was populated by foreigners, local non-Muslims, and Muslims in the vanguard of Europeanization. In republican times, though Turkified and much less cosmopolitan, the area managed to maintain, somewhat diminished, its social, cultural, and commercial importance.

Bibliography

Çelik, Zeynep. The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

i. metin kunt

PERA Production Engineering Research Association of Great Britain