The Big Dig: Istanbul’s city planners have a problem: too much history (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The Big Dig: Istanbul’s city planners have a problem: too much history (2015)

newyorker.com

105 pointsbenbreen21 comments

Elif Batuman is a fabulous writer; I suggest anyone who likes this article to check out her stories on Gobekli Tepe and Turkish soccer hooligans as well.

She also just published a novel, The Idiot, and is promoting it. I haven't read the book, but I plan on seeing her give a reading this Tuesday in D.C.

The Bells - How Harvard helped preserve a Russian legacy. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/04/27/the-bells-6

http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/elif-batuman

She also just published a novel, The Idiot, and is promoting it

I loved The Possessed, her essay collection, but that love does not extend to The Idiot: https://jakeseliger.com/2017/03/23/briefly-noted-the-idiot-e...

Istanbul's city planners also have a (likely) greater problem with unplanned rapid expansion. A lot of haphazardly constructed buildings pop up fortnight, squatting empty lots.

This form of expansion is not just at the urban borders, but also within the city. The government has some plans to prevent this and revert the damage, but it's not particularly well-executed.

Fortnight?

A Fortnight is a period of fourteen days, or two weeks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortnight

Fortnightly then.

I was in Thessaloniki, Greece 2 years ago visiting friends. The city is unbelievably congested and similarly to Istanbul a lot of city expansion plans are stopped because sooner or later the construction crews start unearthing ancient ruins. Probably an issue with a lot of European cities.

My brother's an archeologist, and spent a lot of time in Cyprus. (Fabulous place. Go visit. Some of the best food in the world. Also, did you know there used to be tiny elephants and hippos living there?)

There's a lot of history there. I heard him on several occasions complaining about all that nasty modern Roman trash cluttering up his dig sites.

I don't understand the article's comment about the "big difference" between Roman artifacts vs Byzantine artifacts. Did she mean Roman artifacts are well-studied enough that archaeologists find them uninteresting? Or was the reason political?

Actually, the takeaway I had was that the Roman artifacts were precious and would be taken seriously, whereas the Byzantine artifacts were considered disposable.

I suspect this happens for two reasons. One is that the Byzantine era, being later and more prosperous, simply has more artifacts and is more well-understood, so new finds are less interesting. But I suspect the bigger reason is that the Roman Empire has a better reputation in history as the glorious pinnacle of Western Antiquity whereas the Byzantine Empire is denigrated as 1000 years of stagnant decline (although neither of these characterizations are very accurate).

I did not know about tiny elephants and hippos! Wow :)

This is a regular issue in Italy, also in smaller towns. Any kind of construction job involving excavation may end up unearthing something deemed interesting by the relevant authorities.Thanks to our traditionally slow bureaucracy, this means that construction works can be stuck for very long times (even years).

Also in Jerusalem. The (relatively) recent rail and light-rail infrastructure projects bumped into similar obstacles.

Greece is such a fascinating country. A few years ago I visited The Acropolis, and relative to the US, it really is mind-blowing to see a structure that's several thousand years old.

The really remarkable part about the Parthenon is that it likely would have been almost completely intact, if it hadn't been used as a powder magazine and blown up in the 1800s. It wasn't gradually ruined, it just blew up relatively recently (historically speaking).

All correct, except for the date, which was 1687 [1]. It happened during a war between the Venetians and the Ottoman Turks (the Turks stored gunpowder in the building; the Venetians fired a mortar at it). The Venetians compounded the damage by their incompetent attempt to loot some sculptures from the west pediment; these fell to the ground and smashed to pieces.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenon#Destruction

Worth a spielberg movie

No other race has brought such devastations and massacres, such lasting derangements, into the life of other nations, ...

True, but the same can be said of any empire, including ours

What a nice problem to have!

it sounds like it from the outside but it really isn't. having bad infrastructure is something that really affects your day to day life vs historical artefacts that are mostly interesting to tourists (not saying they should destroy them, just that it's not really a nice problem for the locals).

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