Bahçelievler, İstanbul

Hikayemiz

Bahçelievler is a large middle class residential suburb of Istanbul, Turkey, on the European side of the city. It is accessible from the D.100 that runs from the Istanbul airport to the Asian side of the city, covers 5% of Istanbul's land area and is home to over 570,000 people. Bahçelievler is the northern neighbour of Bakırköy, with a similar area.HistoryStone quarried in Bahçelievler was employed to build the old city of Constantinople. Prior to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the area was largely farmland occupied predominately by ethnic Greeks. After the foundation of the Turkish Republic in the 1920s, Bahçelievler emerged from settlements built alongside roads stretching out from the center of the province towards Europe -first the Londra Asfalt, and the later E5, built in the 1960s. Factories were built alongside the roads, followed by dense housing and apartment buildings. The population of Bahçelievler grew from 8,500 in 1960 to 100,000 in 1975 and today nearly half a million people are packed into 16.7 km2.In the 1970s part of the area was built to plan, and -until the 1980s- Bahçelievler was indeed full of houses with gardens, as its name suggests. During the rapid economic growth of Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s most of these houses were pulled down, sold to developers, and replaced with apartment blocks- with far less green space between them; today the name Bahçelievler only accurately describes the central Bahçelievler District.