Inside one of Istanbul's most ancient quarters
Photographer Charlotte Schmitz captured intimate portraits of life and love in the city's diverse Balat neighborhood.
Every Romani person wears the trace of Istanbul.
Our ancestors’ sojourn in the city—then Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine empire—is evident every time we converse in our language. The Medieval Roma became so enmeshed in Byzantine culture that it is impossible to speak Romani without using Greek vocabulary. In almost every dialect, the definite article and several cardinal numbers are of Greek origin, as are the words for ‘road’, ‘bone’, ‘town’, ’flower’, ‘soup’, ‘chair’, and ‘sun’.
This is true of the tongues of those who continued west, but many Roma also stayed behind. There are Romani families living in modern Istanbul whose forebears witnessed the conquest of the city by the army of Mehmed the Second, ‘the Sultan of Two Lands, the Khan of two Seas’. The stereotype of the nomadic or ‘wandering Gypsy’ falters in the presence of these families, some of whom have been living in the same place for approaching a thousand years. The quarter of Sulukule in the west of the city might well be the oldest Romani settlement in the world.
A whisper from Istanbul also remains in many of the names with which Europe has saddled the Roma. Whereas words like ‘Gypsy’, ‘Gitane’ and ‘Gitano’ derive from a confused belief that our ancestors were Egyptians, there is another collection of labels with roots in an uglier thought. The German Zigeuner, the French Tsigane, the Romanian Cigany and several others are all derived from the Byzantine Greek word atsinganoi. Its original meaning: ‘the untouchables’.
From the Pyrenees to the Balkans, the ‘Gypsy’ ghetto remains an often bleak social conundrum. Yet there have long been ‘Gypsy’ artists, dramaturges, politicians and generals, as now there are Romani property barons who survey their domains from cockpits in the skies. What is all this if not a reflection of wider human ironies and iniquities? Yet the belief that there is something inherently strange about the Roma, a taint that confirms them as vagabonds in some ancient, indelible way, has not disappeared. We Romani people learn early on that prejudices are stubborn as the seasons.
Yet even as I write this, I have struggled with the choice between ‘we’ and ‘they’. Is it fanciful to identify with people of a distant age or place: to bind oneself with them, in the simplifying embrace of a word like ‘us’? As with any umbrella identity, to be Roma is just as much to be aware of one’s difference from other Roma people as it is to feel a sense of kinship. ‘Romani’, like other vast adjectives—‘Muslim’, ’European’, ‘African’, ‘Jewish’—sometimes feels like it means too much to be nailed down to any simple meanings at all.
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Charlotte Schmitz’s photographs of her friends and acquaintances in the Istanbul neighborhood of Balat derive from her many visits to this beloved ancient quarter. Situated just to the east of Sulukule, upon the western bank of the Golden Horn, and appreciated by aesthetes and tourists for its trademark narrow cobbled streets of rainbow-fronted houses, Balat is home to a diverse populace, including many Roma people. Some of Schmitz’s photographs capture a tincture of the decorative tastes found behind their rainbow doors. This includes a predilection for gilded furniture and tableware combined with heavy, brightly patterned quilts and rugs: evidence of a taste for domestic flamboyance that is oddly consistent across the global Romani diaspora.
This is less important than the way these photographs honor human closeness—bodily closeness to each other, to the fabric of the world, and to a bright, unifying light. These images make an emotional reaching across time or continents for words like ‘us’ and ‘we’ seem not fanciful, but essential. Schmitz does not foreground ethnic distinctness in the manner of many photographers who set out to take pictures of Roma. Most prominent here is not social isolation, but the love between female friends and relatives. We are made privy to a seeming idyll of modern girlhood: a realm of hugs and pajamas and tactile trust, with nail salons and fluffy slippers available if desired.
In this world, Schmitz has been participant as well as observer. “I never came to Balat with an idea of, ‘Oh I am doing a photo project,’” she says. Instead, these are pictures depicting her friends: ones she initially made because she was overheard speaking German in a cafe. The German language is understood by many there, including Roma, due to international family connections. Among those who welcomed Schmitz into their homes was her friend Büşra, whom she met whilst visiting Balat as a photojournalism student in 2012, and with whom she would lay “for hours under thick blankets in our pink pajamas, talking.” That intimacy translates in an almost familial feel to the images. It is as though the viewer has stumbled upon the family albums of someone who happens to be a gifted photographer.
Schmitz initially shot neighborhood weddings, some of them “a week long,” returning with prints for those whom she had photographed. “I don’t naturally take many photos,” she says. “I took about six thousand in twelve years, and maybe eighty percent of them were of weddings and ceremonies.” This was a rate of just a few frames per day, “or sometimes none,” as she adds. “I also kept text-only descriptions. Or only memories.” She distances herself, in word and deed, from what her friend and curator Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu calls “a European colonial approach: anthropological, taxonomic, far away. It’s all about what there is, the natural look of it, through gestures, through warmth, through a twelve-year relationship. Through a changing world.”
Schmitz displays a gift for translating hidden radiance into pictures, and she deftly wields artificial light to focus our minds on the sources of this inner luminosity. In Istanbul, the flash provided “a way to be able to show what I wanted to show,” she says, particularly when working indoors. In some hands, a strong flash can have an isolating, even frightening effect, but it works very differently in these images. It affirms the subjects, charging their presence, bringing them near to us, at times almost transfiguring them, rendering them at once earthly and holy. Schmitz’s Balat is a place of living icons. At times the brightness gives the people in these photographs a look of marble sculptures, but unlike the classical figures of stone we are so accustomed to seeing, here it is not the artist’s gaze but a moment of touch that provides the meaning: a hand resting on a pregnant belly, a forearm cradling a neck, fingers stroking a child’s hair.
The phone line crackles over Schmitz saying the word ‘sculptures’ and I think I hear the word ‘vultures’: a mishearing that carries a truth in its claws. We live in an epoch of camera drones, of the predator’s eye view. This has long been common in photographs of the Roma: in the anthropological shot which has the subject frozen, staring worriedly ahead, as though into the eyes of a lion. Given the history of the Roma, there is of course a profundity to this. But as a much-needed counterpoint, Schmitz offers us human culture as cuddle, as bodily overlap, and also, vitally, as friendship.
