Karaköy Waterfront

In the summer of eighteen ninety-four, several hundred boatmen and port stevedores prevented a French steamship from berthing at this shore. They gathered at the Wine Quay—the name of a section of Galata Harbour on what is now Karaköy Waterfront. Police officers tried to clear the pier, a fight broke out, and soldiers had to fend off the attackers to protect Mustafa Pasha, who was commanding the guard. The ringleaders were arrested and the crowd was dispersed. The steamship remained on the water all the same.

Before the waterfront was built, large ships could not come up to land here at all. They anchored at the entrance to the Golden Horn, and their cargo was transferred onto mavnas—small vessels running between the steamship, customs house, and warehouses. Boatmen were paid for each such trip. Porters then took charge of the bales and crates. Work was allocated through guild associations: outsiders could be denied access to unloading. The livelihoods of thousands of port workers depended on this short crossing by water.

For merchants, this system meant delays; for Ottoman officials, it meant difficult accounting of goods and duties. In eighteen ninety, Sultan Abdul Hamid II granted the French entrepreneur Marius Michel a concession to reconstruct the harbour. Michel headed the Ottoman Lighthouse Administration and sought the right to build quays, warehouses, and customs buildings, then collect port fees for eighty-five years. He brought in French banks and established the Istanbul Quay Company.

Engineers filled in a new strip of land along Galata and built a quay wall from concrete blocks. A large steamship could now come directly up to the shore. For the boatmen, this meant the disappearance of the very trip for which they were paid: cargo passed from the ship's derrick straight onto the pier.

After the clash at the Wine Quay, the company entered negotiations. A clause was added to the agreement concerning goods unloaded from a ship standing by the waterfront. The boatmen read it as confirmation of their right to carry cargo between ship and land. The management believed their work began only after unloading—when goods were moved to another ship or to the opposite shore of the Golden Horn.

For several months, one ambiguous clause delayed the operation of the new port. When the company installed floating platforms for direct unloading, the boatmen untied them and set them adrift. They submitted petitions to the sultan and demanded that the platforms be removed. A special commission compared the Turkish and French copies of the agreement. The Turkish wording allowed for dispute, but the French term placed the transfer of goods at the point beneath the ship's derrick. The commission adopted the French interpretation and recognized the company's right to unload ships without mavnas. In the autumn of eighteen ninety-five, another steamship was brought up to the quay under guard, and the commission's decision was put into effect.

The boatmen retained transport between ships and the two shores of the Golden Horn, but lost their former exclusive right to the route from ship to land. By the end of that same year, the company had completed seven hundred fifty-eight meters of Galata Quay from Karaköy toward Tophane.

Beneath the present-day surface lies the strip of land created then, about twenty meters wide. The former shore ran closer to the facades. The mavnas in front of it are gone; what remains is the straight quay wall that workers once prevented the first steamship from approaching.