Sevan Nisanyan, a feisty intellectual with a
talent for trouble, stopped and turned to face the bulky village woman who
had hailed him from the step of her house.
“Sevan Bey,” the woman said, using the Turkish honorific. “Thank you for
saving my house from demolition. Now maybe they will knock down only the
upper story.”
Mr. Nisanyan accepted the praise with a small shrug, then launched into an
animated discussion with the woman, Meliha Gocmez, about whether the
government would demolish much of their lovely village in the name of saving
it.
Sirince (pronounced shi-RIN-jay) looks like a sleepy place. About 100 simple
stone houses nestle in a bowl in the hills six miles from the ancient ruins
of Ephesus near the Aegean coast. Its 600 residents are outnumbered 10 to 1
by the peach and olive trees lining the steep surrounding hillsides.
But behind the dusty calm, a guerrilla war of sorts is being waged along the
rough cobblestone paths winding past the houses with their whitewashed stucco
walls and red tile roofs.
The government declared Sirince a historic site 15 years ago to protect it
from the unregulated development transforming villages throughout the Aegean
region into eyesores. Under the law, even the most minor repair must be done
according to a master plan and approved by a cultural preservation committee.
But the provincial bureaucracy never got around to adopting a master plan,
and villagers never got around to applying for permits. Life continued as it
always had, with people fixing their houses when necessary and adding rooms
as families grew.
Now the government wants to enforce the law, and officials are threatening to
bulldoze a number of houses that are not in compliance.
These are not idle threats. Much of Turkey’s housing, even in the country’s
largest city, Istanbul, was built without permits. There is a long tradition
of shantytowns rising almost overnight on vacant land, with officials turning
a blind eye.
When residents fall out of favor with politicians, or some bureaucrat decides
for mysterious reasons to enforce the law, bulldozers move in and houses and
neighborhoods are turned to rubble.
Sirince is not a shantytown. The village has stood for at least a century,
and some trace its roots to 1000 B.C., when Greek colonists arrived on the
Aegean shore a few miles away.
In 1923 residents were forced to leave in a population exchange between
Turkey and Greece that followed the establishment of the Turkish republic. In
turn, Balkan Muslims left their homes for Sirince. The village remained dirt
poor, its population dwindled to 600 from 4,000 and many houses fell to ruin.
That is where things stood when Mr. Nisanyan and his wife, Mujde, arrived in
1995, escapees from the stresses of Istanbul. Ms. Nisanyan had bought a
ruined house here in 1985, and over the years the couple restored it and
finally decided to live in it.
Mr. Nisanyan, 43, a graduate of Yale, was finishing a doctorate in political
science at Columbia University when he returned to his native Istanbul in
1985 for a vacation. He stayed to start a computer company and never left. He
dabbled in left- wing politics, spent three months in jail for
insubordination while serving his compulsory time in the army and became a
successful author of travel books.
Restoring their house led the Nisanyans to buy a second and then another.
They now operate five guest houses, each lovingly and illegally restored,
with great attention to historic details and touches of whimsy.
“A village house is always an ad hoc house,” Mr. Nisanyan said, sipping
elder-flower juice on the shady terrace of his home. “It grows according to
need and the available materials and craftsmen.”
As a symbol for the hotels, the couple chose the snail. “It’s the animal with
the organic house that grows according to need,” Ms. Nisanyan explained.
The hotels and books put Sirince on the tourist map. Other guest houses
opened, along with restaurants and tourist shops, breeding a success that the
Nisanyans regret.
“This place should have been kept a secret,” Mr. Nisanyan said.
It became so popular that a developer planned to build summer homes for rich
Istanbul residents. Mr. Nisanyan was outraged and used his political and
media contacts to bring down a publicity barrage that killed the project.
About the same time, the government prosecuted Mr. Nisanyan for illegal
construction in a historic zone and filed demolition orders against his
houses and several others in the village. Ultimately Mr. Nisanyan faced nine
charges, each carrying up to three years in prison.
Selahattin Erdemgil, director of the state museum at Ephesus, authorized the
prosecutions as the highest- ranking cultural official in the region. He said
in an interview that Mr. Nisanyan had set a bad example by ignoring the
permission process, even after multiple warnings.
“Now there are others who started construction in Sirince,” Mr. Erdemgil
said. “What if they all built houses? There would be no Sirince left after
three or four years. You can see this happening all over Turkey.”
Last month a court upheld one of Mr. Nisanyan’s convictions, and he said he
expects to go to prison in the fall. But he is unbowed, saying jail will give
him time to finish a book about the origins of Turkish.
The government started demolition of the first of his guest houses. But when
the Turkish news media publicized the case last month, the government
engineer refused to carry out the order. Other demolitions were put on hold
while the governor’s office reviews the whole matter.
Meanwhile, the Nisanyans are ready to open their biggest building yet, a
five-room hotel. They bought it and started the restoration after the
government ordered its demolition.
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