Turkey historical ties book

historical ties

TURKEYAMSTERDAM

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Index Foreword Better Turkish than Papist Saint Nicholas Cornelis Haga Levantine trade Tulips from Amsterdam Amsterdammers in Izmir Turbans on the Dam A la turque Ambassador Calkoen Vanmour’s Turkish paintings Tourist in the Levant The Turkish Van Lenneps Turkish façades Investing in Turkey Hendrik de Booy and the Turkish Sea Rescue Institution Netherlands – Turkey Atatürk in Amsterdam-North Amsterdam and Kocaeli Colophon

Foreword In 2012 a slew of activities took place across the Netherlands to celebrate the four-hundred-year existence of diplomatic relations between Turkey and the Netherlands. Amsterdam also devoted extensive attention to relations with Turkey. An appropriate reason, therefore, to produce a booklet this year on the historical links between Turkey and Amsterdam.

The booklet offers a glimpse into the shared past of Amsterdam and the area which is now Turkey, the core of the far larger Ottoman Empire up until 1923. Turkey as we now know it came into existence in 1923. The name Istanbul – in a number of variants – was already in use before the Turks captured Constantinople in 1453 and declared it as the capital of the Ottoman Empire. However it is mainly Westerners who continue to use the old name, Con-

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stantinople. For consistency this booklet retains the name Istanbul.

Interaction between Turkey and Amsterdam have been plentiful over the course of the centuries, and the fascinating history of the country impressed its Amsterdam visitors immensely. A Dutch ambassador, Cornelis Haga, was already established and living in Istanbul in 1612. Over the course of the four hundred years numerous Amsterdam families have established themselves in Turkey. In a letter from Istanbul the eighteenth-century Amsterdammer Joan Raye from Breukelerwaard gave his nephew and friend Hendrik Backer a short history lesson on the city: ‘King Pausanias of Sparta laid the foundations under the name of the former Byzantium, which Constantine the Great later made the residence of his empire after

leaving Rome. The city was then conquered in turn by the Greeks, the French and the Venetians. Finally Mehmed II brought the city under the dominion of the Ottomans who currently call it Stambol. But more interestingly: the Dardanelles and the Black Sea appear to have been created to bring the city riches from all four quarters of the compass.’

A later ambassador, Cornelis Calkoen, didn’t actually want to leave Istanbul, but was assigned a new post after seventeen years of service in Turkey. ‘I belong completely to Constantinople: at least send my soul back and keep the rest,’ he wrote to his friends.

This booklet is part of the series, Historical Links, in which Amsterdam highlights the significance of the shared past and present

between our city and a variety of countries with which there have been relations for centuries. The past decades have also seen dynamism in relations with Turkey.

Among other things this is apparent in the enormous development of the flourishing Turkish community in Amsterdam, since the arrival of labour migrants in the 1960s.

The links between Turkey and Amsterdam go back four hundred years, and in that time interaction at the personal, business and cultural levels has only intensified. We hope this booklet will contribute to awareness of the rich, shared past, and that it will build further towards the future.

Marens Engelhard Director, Amsterdam City Archives

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BETTER TURKISH THAN PAPIST ‘Better Turkish than Papist’ was the motto of the Dutch resistance fighters, the ‘Geuzen’ in the second half of the sixteenth century. At that stage the Netherlands was still part of the territory ruled by the King of Spain. But since 1568 the many Protestant Dutch, led by William of Orange, had been in revolt against Spanish rule and the coercive hand of the Catholic church. The Turks were also at war with Spain, automatically making them allies of the Dutch.

Powerful allies, because the Ottoman Empire, with the area now known as Turkey at its core, was then one of the major world powers. The Empire stretched from Hungary to Somalia and from Algeria to Iraq, and played a vital political and economic role thanks to its strategic location between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.

Not only did the Dutch rebels enjoy moral support from the Turkish Sultan, but financial and military help as well.

William of Orange maintained contacts with the Ottoman Empire through a former college friend from Leuven, the Jewish banker Josef Nasi, who had

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fled the Spanish Inquisition and had set up home in tolerant Istanbul (Constantinople), where he had become one of the Sultan’s advisors.

The relatively wide freedom of religion prevailing in the Ottoman Empire was another reason why the Dutch rebels were ‘better Turkish than Papist’ – a corruption of ‘better Turkish than (under) the Pope’. As long as his subjects kept to the rules and paid their taxes, the Sultan did not interfere with their religions.

And this at a time when the mainlyProtestant Dutch were weighed down by the yoke of the Spanish Inquisition. As the ‘Geuzen’ sang: “Al is den Turk gheen Christen genaemt, /Hy en heeft niemant om tgeloove gebrant, /Als die papisten doen alle dage” (roughly translated: Even if the Turk is not called a Christian / He has never burned anyone for their faith / Which the Papists do every day).

So the ‘Geuzen’ wore badges on their clothes shaped like a Turkish half-moon and bearing their motto, and the ‘Water Geuzen’ flew Turkish pennants from their masts.

From 1599 Dutch troops and the Spaniards waged a battle for the Zeeland region.

When the Spaniards

had to withdraw partially, they left behind around 1,500 galley slaves, mainly ‘Turcken’. These were probably mainly seafarers from the North-African part of the Ottoman Empire who had been captured by the Spaniards in the Mediterranean. Their liberation by the Dutch occurred more or less by accident, but the Ottomans then fought on the side of the Dutch. In 1604 the Dutch and the liberated Turks were able to repel the Spaniards and to capture the most important fortress town, Sluis, in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen. In consequence, Prince Maurits named one of its redoubts ‘Turkeye’. A village in the area, which still exists today, later acquired the same name. The Ottoman seafarers were taken to Algeria aboard Dutch ships.

SAINT NICHOLAS In the fourth century Saint Nicholas, traditionally the patron saint of Amsterdam, was Bishop of Myra, at that time the capital of Lycia in the Byzantine Empire, on the southwest coast of what is now Turkey. He is believed to have died there on 6 December 342. In 550 the first church was dedicated to him in Constantinople, the current Istanbul. When the Turks revolted in 1087 and threatened to occupy Myra, Italian sailors stole the relics of Saint Nicholas to take them to Bari, where the saint was given his own basilica. Turkey has been trying to retrieve the relics from Italy since 1997. According to Turkey’s Minister of Culture, the remains of Saint Nicholas are part of Turkey’s heritage.

Among others, Saint Nicholas was the patron saint of sailors and merchants, and was thus the designated patron for the port city of Amsterdam. The saint would also offer protection to prostitutes and thieves. The ‘Oude Kerk’, the first parish church in Amsterdam, was dedicated to Saint Nicholas. And when Amsterdam became a Protestant city in 1578, the generous donor and children’s friend ‘Sinterklaas’ had become a feature of the city. The Amsterdam Saint Nicholas markets were renowned over centuries, and the ‘Sinterklaas’ festival was celebrated throughout the city, with gifts like figs, nuts, cakes, spinning tops, pens and books, according to Bredero in 1617.

When the Catholics were again allowed to build their own churches in the nineteenth century, a huge new Saint Nicholas Church was constructed in 1887 in a prominent location opposite the Central Station – one of the first buildings the train traveller sees when arriving in Amsterdam – with a statue of the saint high in its gable.

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CORNELIS HAGA In 1610 the Ottoman Minister of the Navy Halil Pasha invited the Dutch to send a diplomat to Istanbul, crowning the good relationship between the Ottoman Empire and the Netherlands.

The States General sent the Schiedamer Cornelis Haga as the first Dutch ambassador to the court of the Ottoman Sultan. Haga set off at the end of 1611, accompanied by four members of staff. After a journey of four months – by carriage over land and by ship over the Mediterranean – they arrived in Istanbul in March 1612, where Minister Halil Pasha welcomed them personally.

Haga established himself in the diplomatic area of Pera, now Beyoglu, where the Dutch consulate is still located.

The Ottoman government did everything to make the Dutch mission a success. In July 1612, after three months of negotiation, the Sultan granted the first ‘capitulation’ treaty to the Dutch. Such a capitulation was a treaty covering rights, obligations and

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conditions which applied to subjects from foreign – Christian – countries, within the Islamic Ottoman Empire. The capitulation permitted the Dutch to travel, to live and to trade under their own flag in the Ottoman Empire, all under favourable legal and fiscal terms.

Dutch merchants and diplomats thereby acquired the same rights as those from the other three states which already had ambassadors in Istanbul: France, England and Venice. The capitulation for the Dutch was renewed and expanded several times over the following centuries. Although the two countries signed a bilateral trading agreement in 1840, the capitulations continued to serve as the basis for the relationship between the Netherlands and the Ottoman Empire, until the Turkish government withdraw all the Empire’s capitulations in 1914.

The system was officially abolished in 1923 with the founding of the Republic of Turkey.

With the reception of Cornelis Haga as

Cornelis Haga remained in Istanbul.

From 1614 he was the permanent representative there for the Dutch Republic. From Istanbul he built a network of Dutch trading posts and consulates throughout the Ottoman Empire, in important cities like Smyrna (now Izmir), Gallipoli, Selanik (now Thessaloniki in Greece), Athens, Aleppo, Tunis and Algiers. Much of Haga’s time and money was also spent in freeing Dutch people captured by Ottoman sailors (the Dutch called them pirates), generally coming from the North African part of the Empire. In 1639 Cornelis Haga was recalled to the Republic, where he would later become President of the High Court of Holland, Zeeland and West-Friesland.

Since May 2012 a bust of Cornelis Haga in Turkey’s Dalaman airport commemorates the first Dutch ambassador to Turkey.

LEVANTINE TRADE The Dutch had in fact travelled to the Levant since the sixteenth century.

First they only carried grain from the

countries along the Baltic to Italy via the Straits of Gibraltar – the so-called ‘Straatvaart’. However, they soon sailed to the eastern part of the Mediterranean, to the ports of the Ottoman Empire, but under an English or French flag. With its ‘Turkish Stock’ Antwerp was a centre for trading with the Levant, and after the city was conquered by the Spaniards in 1585, trade moved largely to Amsterdam. Jewish bankers and merchants with families in the Ottoman Empire played a significant role in this.

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ambassador and the granting of the capitulation, the Ottoman Empire was also the first power to recognise the Dutch Republic – which had actually continued as a rebellious area under Spanish rule until 1648. Thus in the middle of the seventeenth century the symbols of the Ottoman Empire acquired a prominent place in the ceiling mural of the meeting hall of the States of Holland (now home to the Senate) in The Hague.

Once the Dutch had been granted a capitulation from the Sultan in 1612 thanks to the efforts of ambassador Cornelis Haga, they could sail independently in the Ottoman Empire. Just like the English, the Dutch only had to pay three per cent tax on imports and exports. This was a low tariff; the French paid five per cent until 1673. The low taxation contributed to the Dutch being able to expand their trading activities in the Levant at a rapid pace. In doing so the Dutch certainly did come up against

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the unfamiliar customs of the exotic Ottoman Empire, and time and again faced Ottoman sailors who expanded their sailing routes in the Mediterranean, to the detriment of the European powers. These vessels, mainly from the North African part of the Ottoman Empire, raided the European merchant ships with clockwork regularity. They seized the ships and the goods on board, while they captured the crew and passengers to use or sell them as slaves. Ambassador Cornelis Haga had his hands full buying the freedom of the Dutch slaves, or exchanging them for captured Ottomans – where the pirates invariably insisted on wanting at least two Turks in exchange for one Dutch slave. It cost the ambassador thousands of ducats a year.

To resolve these problems, the Directorate of Levantine Trade and Navigation in the Mediterranean was founded in Amsterdam in 1625. Cornelis Haga was one of the founders. The Directorate did not conduct any trade itself, but was intended to stimulate and coordinate trade with the Levant, while also protecting and arming the vulnerable Dutch ships. The Directorate of Levantine Trade also played a part in appointing Dutch ambassadors and consuls to the Ottoman Empire, and paid part of their salaries. In exchange for mediation and protection, traders with the Levant paid taxes on their im-

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ports and exports to the Directorate.

The first and most important office of the Directorate of Levantine Trade was

in Amsterdam. Seven merchants, all from well-to-do Amsterdam families, were the directors. Departments of the Directorate were also established later

in the port cities of Hoorn, Rotterdam and Middelburg, but the Amsterdam branch remained the most important. In 1655 the Directorate of Levantine Trade

occupied premises in the brand-new city hall on the Dam – now the Royal Palace – which was the city’s most important building at the time, and a symbol of

Amsterdam’s power and welfare. In their room on the second floor in the city hall’s north-western corner, the directors met every Wednesday and received visitors. The room was full of paintings and maps of the Ottoman Empire, often gifts from ambassadors or consuls, offering an impression of the Levant. Thus there were several paintings of Istanbul, where the Sultan was based, one painting of Ankara, from which the angora wool came, and two of Smyrna, the current Izmir, one of the most important port cities for the Amsterdammers.

Partly thanks to the Directorate of Levantine Trade, in the middle of the seventeenth century the Netherlands became one of the most important trading partners of the Ottoman Empire. The Dutch merchants bought Turkish products like silk, angora wool, mohair, cotton, dried fruits and carpets.

They also transported a variety of goods to the Levant: textiles from Leiden and Haarlem for instance, and earthenware from Delft, but also pepper and spices, silver from Spain, grain from the Baltic countries and foreign currencies. Trade declined somewhat from 1680 onwards because of a number of international conflicts, but even in the eighteenth century the Ottoman Empire remained a significant trading partner for Amsterdam.

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Ottoman vessel attacks continued to trouble the Directorate of Levantine Trade throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In February 1643 a collection was raised in the Lutheran church in Amsterdam to assemble a ransom to liberate one Dirk Joosten ‘from Turkish slavery’. A list of contributions received is preserved in the archives of the Evangelical-Lutheran congregation: 116 churchgoers together gave 485 guilders. In the archives of the Amsterdam mayoralty there are lists of the vessels raided by the Ottoman seamen – seven ships with 120 people in 1718, in 1719 nine ships with a total of 234 souls – and publications on the problem, for example detailing plans for a ‘project to ruin the Turkish pirates’. In the course of the eighteenth century Dutch and other European warships succeeded increasingly in sinking Ottoman ships. In 1816 the British Navy and six Dutch ships devastated the port of Algiers, one of the most significant ports.

The Directorate of Levantine Trade was wound up in 1826. The paintings which decorated the room of the Directorate in the city hall were moved to the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. In 2012 they were displayed first in Istanbul and then in Amsterdam, to celebrate the four-hundred-year-old relationship between the Netherlands and Turkey.

TULIPS FROM AMSTERDAM The best-known symbol of the historic links between Amsterdam and Turkey

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is the tulip. The tulip, the Dutch – and Amsterdam – flower par excellence, grew as a wild flower in Central Asia and was introduced into the gardens of the Ottoman Sultan. In 1593 the botanist Carolus Clusius, working at the University of Leiden, was given a set of Turkish tulip bulbs as a gift from his friend Ogier Gisleen van Busbeke, the Habsburg Emperor’s ambassador to the Ottoman court. Clusius then grew the first tulips in the Netherlands. The tulip achieved popularity in the Netherlands at lightning speed, so that as early as 1613 Dutch tulips could be given as gifts to the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed I. Tulips were expensive and were thus also a symbol of status and wealth. They were painted, and used as decoration on tiles and earthenware. The Netherlands was overtaken by a tulip mania in 1620 and 1630 – tulips were sold for ever-increasing prices. In 1635 forty tulip bulbs changed hands for a hundred thousand guilders.

By way of comparison, a cask of butter cost around a hundred guilders at the time, and eight fattened pigs were worth 240 guilders. The most expensive tulip bulb was the famous Semper Augustus: it was auctioned in Haarlem for 6,000 guilders. At the time that was roughly the price of a canal-side house in Amsterdam.

Massive speculation in tulip bulbs occurred – dealers sold the bulbs before they actually had possession of them. The tulip market collapsed on 5 February 1637.

During an auction in Haarlem, bidding on the bulbs suddenly stopped, creating panic. Investors suffered enormous losses.

The tulip mania was actually regarded as the first major ‘bubble’ – wave of speculation – in history. Despite it all, the tulip continued to be popular in Amsterdam.

At the start of the eighteenth century, under Sultan Ahmed III the Ottoman Empire experienced its own tulip era, where considerable sums were paid for tulips. There the tulip was in fact a symbol for Allah.

AMSTERDAMMERS IN IZMIR Far and away the most important trading city in the Levant for Amsterdam was Smyrna, now Izmir on the west coast of Turkey. Not long after the Sultan had granted the Dutch their ‘capitulation’ in 1612, they had already established a couple of Dutch trading houses in Smyrna.

This number quickly rose to fifteen, and at the beginning of the eighteenth century there were twenty, including a large number of merchants from well-known Amsterdam families. In Smyrna the Dutch traded mainly in textiles from their own country, then buying raw materials like wool for the Dutch textile industry.

They lived together in the same neighbourhood, around the so-called ‘Frankenstraat’, where all sorts of Dutch shops could also be found. They had their own administration and their own jurisdiction, and ultimately also their own church.

Smyrna had acquired its own Dutch Consulate in 1657 to promote and protect the interests of all the merchants. After some clashes with the first consul, in 1660 the States General appointed the

Amsterdammer Gerard Smits as consul in Smyrna. Soon after his appointment Smits encountered the young clergyman Thomas Coenen in Amsterdam’s Jodenbreestraat. When Coenen congratulated him on his new post, Smits asked Coenen to accompany him; the Dutch community in Smyrna could in fact use a clergyman. Smits offered Coenen the promise of a decent salary and the minister eventually agreed – after both the Amsterdam church council and his mother had both given their blessing.

After considerable postponement and a journey replete with danger and discomfort, Thomas Coenen preached to the Dutch community in Smyrna from 1662. This didn’t happen without some resistance, according to his letters to the governing body of elders, the classis, in Amsterdam, responsible for Coenen and thus for the Protestant congregation in Smyrna. The clergyman was in constant conflict with consul Smits. The fixed salary the consul had offered him had not materialised, and Smits quite happily asked others to preach in his house, without notifying Coenen. The minister also believed that the consul was not setting a good example for the other Dutch, and often liked to stage sumptuous dinners on a Sunday afternoon which kept people away from the sermons. Coenen sent letter after letter to the Amsterdam classis, with copies of his protest letters to the consul, often co-signed by witnesses. Smits in turn accused Coenen once again that he was not fulfilling his contract. Thomas

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Coenen remained in Smyrna until 1672 and ultimately gained fame through his eye-witness report concerning Sabbatai Sevi, born in Smyrna and claiming himself at the time to be the Jewish messiah, managing with his followers to cause turmoil throughout the whole of Jewish Europe.

Dutch state, but is now rented to the Greek Orthodox church. The churchyard houses the remains of members of wellknown Dutch diplomatic and merchant families, such as De Hochepied and Van Lennep, but also those of sailors or passengers who died at sea en route to Smyrna.

Consul Gerard Smits left Smyrna in 1668. He was succeeded by Jacob van Dam. On his arrival in Smyrna Van Dam discovered that his predecessor had left Dutch affairs ‘extremely divided and confused’, and set himself to restoring order. In 1688, soon after Smyrna had been struck by a major earthquake, his successor Daniël Jean de Hochepied arrived, the son of a successful Amsterdam merchant who had fled to the Levant ten years earlier from unrequited love.

He too complained initially about the ‘turbulent spirits’ among the Dutch in Smyrna, who were ‘infected with a passion,’ but he was eventually able to calm their troubled minds. The Amsterdam De Hochepied family continued to be the driving force behind the consulate for around a century and a half. They were thus so completely comfortable in Smyrna and with the Turkish culture that not only did they represent the Dutch community there, but regularly also represented the interests of other Europeans in the city.

TURBANS ON THE DAM

In Izmir today the Dutch Protestant church is still a reminder of the presence of the Dutch. It’s the property of the

In the middle of the seventeenth century Amsterdam had become the centre of world trade. From 1611 the pivot of international trade was the commodities exchange which had been built on the Rokin by city architect Hendrick de Keijser. Here merchants from around the globe all had permanent stands, trading more than four hundred different articles from all corners of the world, from tobacco and spices to textiles and shares.

It was unsurprising that seventeenthcentury poet Jeremias de Decker called the exchange ‘a promenade park where the Moor trades with the Norman, a church where Jews, Turks and Christians congregate.’ Apart from a few Turks, it was mainly many Armenian and Greek merchants from the Levant who could be found there. And Jews: Sephardic bankers and traders from the Ottoman Empire who also had family or even an office in Amsterdam. All these eastern merchants were dubbed ‘Turks’.

Artists were happy to accord merchants from the Levant a place in Amsterdam cityscapes. With their large and exotic turbans the eastern traders added

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international allure to images of the city: Amsterdam as a world city. For Amsterdam they also emphasised the significance of the trading links with the Ottoman Empire. In 1656 Amsterdam artist Johannes Lingelbach painted the Dam, the bustling heart of the city. The new city hall, which would become the ultimate symbol of Amsterdam’s power and wealth, was still under construction.

Around the weighing house, where goods were weighed before being taken by barrow or sledge to warehouses and shops, porters and traders are milling, along with well-to-do citizens and their servants, while on the right a small group of merchants from the Levant and a Spanish gentleman give the image an international tint. Thus invariably ‘Turks’ could be found in pictures, drawings and paintings of the seventeenth-century Dam.

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A LA TURQUE A cultural exchange between the Ottoman Empire and the Netherlands followed in the merchants’ footsteps. Right back at the start of the seventeenth century the Dutch had become fascinated by the Turkish language and culture.

Scholars avidly studied and described everything which came from the Ottoman Empire. This was the start of Turkology, a significant academic tradition in the Netherlands which continues to this day, particularly at the University of Leiden. Along with bringing knowledge to the Netherlands, diplomats, traders, artists, scholars and travellers also brought customs from the Ottoman Empire – the drinking of coffee, for instance. And they introduced Turkish art and implements which would leave their traces in Dutch culture.

In the seventeenth century it was particularly the carpets from the Ottoman Empire, with their striking designs, which became highly popular among well-todo merchants in Amsterdam and the rest of the Netherlands. These carpets were expensive, immediately making them something of a status symbol. They were also included as such in paintings. The Dutch did not generally lay the carpets on the floor, as was customary in the Levant itself. They were too valuable for that. Instead the Turkish carpets covered the tables in the home of moneyed Amsterdam merchants. Very soon cheaper copies of the rugs were produced in the Netherlands under the name Smyrna carpets, after the city from which most Turkish carpets were imported. The tradition of Turkish rugs on tables still persists in Amsterdam’s ‘brown cafés’, although they have since shed their roles

as status symbols.

Particularly in the rococo period, in the eighteenth century, everything Turkish was fashionable in the Netherlands: Turkish clothing and fabrics, Turkish architecture and decorations. It certainly didn’t have to be terribly authentic, as long as it looked Turkish: the ‘turquoiserie’. Turkish garments had already reached the Netherlands as a curiosity in the seventeenth century, and painters like Rembrandt depicted eastern clothing and turbans, particularly in biblical scenes. But in the eighteenth century well-to-do Amsterdammers themselves wore this ‘mode à la turque’.

‘Turkish’ pavilions also became extremely fashionable at this time. Every rich merchant wanted to have a ‘Turkish tent’ in his garden or at his country house.

The buildings generally looked nothing

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like a real Turkish tent, but rather like a Chinese pagoda – or they were simply Dutch buildings decorated with ‘Turkish’ details, like crescent moons.

The Ottoman and Dutch culture came together in ceramics. Both countries had ceramic traditions which influenced each other over the course of the centuries.

Although the seventeenth-century Dutch liked to decorate their tiles with motifs derived from the Levant – sultans with large turbans and eastern horsemen, for instance – from the second half of the seventeenth century it was mainly Dutch tiles which inspired the tile makers in cities such as Kütahya and Istanbul in the Ottoman Empire. In the eighteenth century Turkish sultans even imported huge quantities of Dutch tiles with baroque decorations for their palaces. Thus tiles from the Netherlands adorn the famous Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. This changed in the late nineteenth century. Then it was ceramics from the Ottoman Empire, and particularly from Iznik, the leading ceramics city, which became exceptionally popular in the Netherlands. Tiles

from Iznik, which had been used for centuries in mosques right across Turkey, became desirable collectables, for private collectors and museums. Various well-known Dutch factories, such as De Porceleyne Fles and Rozenburg, also began to produce ceramics with shapes and decorations based on the Turkish pottery. One of the most interesting ceramic products is certainly the tulip vase, which is part of the cultural heritage of both countries.

AMBASSADOR CALKOEN The Amsterdammer Cornelis Calkoen was only thirty when he was appointed Dutch ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. He had no diplomatic experience, but came from a well-to-do merchant family which had traded with the Levant for decades, and which had also participated in governing Amsterdam.

After a seven-month-long ‘difficult and distressing journey’ as he described it himself, during which he was afflicted by illness, bad weather and problems with his travel documents, on 30 May 1727 Cornelis Calkoen arrived in the diplomatic area of Pera, now the Beyoglu district in Istanbul, on the northern shore of the Golden Horn, where he occupied the palace of the Dutch embassy.

Cornelis Calkoen still had to wait until September for an audience with the Sultan. Such an audience tradition-

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ally coincided with the payment of the Janissaries, the Sultan’s elite military corps, and this only happened every few months. On Friday 12 September 1727 Cornelis Calkoen was permitted to visit the Grand Vizier, the Sultan’s prime minister. The following day Calkoen sent the gifts he had brought for the Sultan by boat to the opposite shore of the Golden Horn, where they were stored in a house specially hired for the purpose.

The next morning they were delivered to the Sultan’s palace when the gates opened. On Sunday 14 September Cornelis Calkoen was finally received by Sultan Ahmed III. A report of his audience has been preserved.

The ambassador was accompanied by his secretary, a diplomat who interpreted, a group of fellow countrymen and wards of the embassy, and the painter Jean-Baptiste Vanmour, who would depict the audience. In the Topkapi Palace the company first witnessed the noisy mealtime enjoyed by a thousand or so Janissaries. After this military show Cornelis Calkoen attended a sitting of the imperial council in the special meeting hall, the divan. The Sultan was able to observe the meeting unobserved from a closed gallery above the hall. The ambassador and his retinue were then offered a meal by the Grand Vizier. After coffee the guests were given kaftans as presents, to wear during the audience.

That of ambassador Calkoen was trimmed with sable.

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Finally Cornelis Calkoen was led to Great Hall in the inner palace to meet the Sultan and four princes.

There he presented the gifts he had brought: for the sultan, among other things some 40 waistcoats made of cloth, satin and fine velvet, two silver flowerpots made of filigree with cloth flowers, ‘a beautiful telescope 10 feet long’ and a ‘splendid case with four very fine reading glasses’.

Calkoen had also brought waistcoats for the Grand Vizier, along with two trumpets and a double, beautifully painted fire engine, the invention of the Amsterdammer Jan van der

Heijden. The new ambassador was not permitted to address the Sultan directly and thus delivered a speech to the Grand Vizier, then bowed deeply before the Sultan and presented his credentials.

The Grand Vizier then spoke on behalf of the Sultan, expressing the wish that the timehonoured

friendship between the two countries would continue to grow. After a final bow by Calkoen the audience was over.

A long celebration then ensued in the Dutch embassy,

with musicians provided by the Grand Vizier and wrestlers the Sultan had sent to entertain them.

Under Sultan Ahmed III the Ottoman Empire experienced an exceptional era in which expressive art and literature were given full scope and the empire also opened up to the rest of Europe to an unprecedented degree. This was also the era of magnificent celebrations, of luxury and spectacle. Because the tulip had become immensely popular among the Turkish elite in this period, it was known as the Tulip Era. Cornelis Calkoen enjoyed everything the Ottoman Empire had to offer at the time, and led a life of luxury in Istanbul, to the extent that the States General and the Directorate of Levantine Trade, who were after all paying for everything, occasionally raised their eyebrows. Calkoen also plunged fully into Ottoman politics.

He built up a major network, assisted by his dragoman, the interpreter who also had to fulfil important diplomatic duties.

Thus Calkoen was always fully informed as to what was happening in the empire and beyond it. Through the openness of the court under Ahmed III, Cornelis Calkoen had considerable personal contact with the Sultan’s courtiers. He regularly spoke with the Grand Vizier, who liked to receive information from Calkoen.

In September 1730 a rebellion put an end to the extravagant Tulip Era. The Grand Vizier was beheaded, and Sultan Ahmed III was deposed to be replaced

by Sultan Mahmud I. Cornelis Calkoen

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sent a report on the events to the States General. However the door to the West stayed open and afterwards Calkoen was often summoned by the new Grand Vizier to share his insights on European politics. In 1737 Cornelis Calkoen, along with the British ambassador, was engaged to mediate between the Sultan and the Russian Tsar.

In 1744 Calkoen’s stay in the Ottoman Empire came to an end after seventeen years. He took his departure from the Grand Vizier on 4 April. As a farewell

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present he was given a kaftan trimmed with ermine. At the end of the month Calkoen left Istanbul, ultimately to become ambassador in Dresden. He departed the city with pain in his heart, according to the travel diary he kept during the journey and which is now in the Amsterdam City Archives. En route, by his own description he was silent and generally poor company. In his thoughts he was still in Istanbul. ‘I belong entirely to Constantinople; at least return my soul to me, and keep the rest,’ he wrote to his friends.

Calkoen had remained unwed, but he did leave a mistress behind in Istanbul, a freed slave known by the name Beyaz Gül (White Rose). The story goes that after Calkoen’s departure, she died of a broken heart. Her spirit continues to haunt the Dutch embassy, the Palais de Hollande. The former embassy, which consisted of a wooden building above a stone gallery, burned down in 1767, and again in 1831, but the current Palais de Hollande was rebuilt on the foundations and houses the Dutch consulate to this day.

VANMOUR’S TURKISH PAINTINGS When ambassador Cornelis Calkoen entered the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul on 14 September 1727 for his audience with Sultan Ahmed III, he was accompanied by the Flemish artist Jean-Baptiste Vanmour. Vanmour would record the most significant moments of the day on three canvases. He painted how Cornelis Calkoen and his retinue entered the second inner courtyard of the palace, where at precisely that time the thousand gathered Janissaries had just begin their meal, and how Calkoen sat opposite the Grand

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Vizier during the meal he had offered the Dutch ambassador. The third painting shows the actual audience with the Sultan.

Calkoen’s western garments were hidden by the fur-trimmed kaftan he had received as a gift.

Jean-Baptiste Vanmour had arrived in Istanbul some thirty years earlier in the retinue of the French ambassador, and had remained. He had painted for a number of other ambassadors, but Cornelis Calkoen would become his greatest patron. Calkoen would eventually commission dozens of works from Vanmour: topographical paintings of Istanbul and other places in the Ottoman Empire, and so-called costume paintings: images of representatives of the many peoples of the wide-ranging Ottoman Empire in traditional costume, and of the officials of various ranks at the Sultan’s court. Vanmour painted the courtiers in their posts: they can be seen in the palace or in offices, where their garments and in particular their turbans, indicate their position. But because Cornelis Calkoen had excellent connections with the members of the Sultan’s court, Vanmour could observe them at close quarters and make much more of his paintings than the usual stereotypes: these are genuine portraits, of real people – often their names and backgrounds are known – with real faces. And that was unusual in the Ottoman Empire, where realistic portrait painting barely existed. Vanmour died in Istanbul in 1737 and was buried in the Jesuit cemetery there.

Cornelis Calkoen presented a series of 32 costume paintings from Vanmour’s studio as a gift to the Directorate of Levantine Trade in Amsterdam. The paintings were hung in the Directorate’s room in the city hall on the Dam. The paintings were numbered in Amsterdam; they also acquired a key explaining what they depicted.

Thus merchants and other visitors to the Directorate’s offices could gain an impression of the Ottoman Empire and its varied inhabitants: Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Albanians, Bulgarians…

Cornelis Calkoen took his own collection of Turkish paintings with him when he left Istanbul. In his new post, as ambassador in Dresden, they would remind him of his time in the Ottoman Empire. Thanks to the conditions of Calkoen’s will, his collection of paintings has always remained intact.

Since 1902 the collection has been accommodated in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. This has given the museum the largest collection of Vanmour paintings in the world.

TOURIST IN THE LEVANT Joan Raye, a gentleman from Breukelerwaard, recorded a very personal view of eighteenth-century Turkey in a series of elaborate letters. The Raye family from Amsterdam had become wealthy from sugar plantations in the West, and Joan was born in 1737 in Surinam, where his father was the governor. However, his father in fact died before Joan was born.

As a youth of ten Joan came to Amsterdam, where one of his guardians was his

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uncle Jacob Bicker Raye, the well-known diarist.

In 1765 Joan Raye was allowed to undertake a journey to the Levant with Willem Gerrit Dedel, who had just been appointed as the new ambassador in Istanbul.

The journey was intended as a sort of study trip for the young Joan. They travelled via Germany, Austria, Hungary and the Balkans to Istanbul, where they arrived on 12 July. Later, when Joan had been back again for some time in Amsterdam, he wrote a report of his trip, illustrated with drawings, which is now in the Royal Library in The Hague.

But during the trip itself he corresponded with his nephew and good friend Hendrik Backer, who lived at the Keizersgracht. In the letters, which are still preserved in the Backer family archive in Amsterdam’s City Archives, he offers his blunt opinions on what he experienced in the Levant.

In the autumn of 1765 Joan Raye described his arrival in Istanbul. This was precisely the time that a plague epidemic had surfaced in the city, and the disease was claiming many victims daily. Immediately after his arrival the ambassador therefore sealed off the Dutch embassy, in the hope of keeping the plague at bay. With considerable shock Joan noticed however that the local populace, toughened and used to the plague, simply walked in to deliver the travellers’ baggage. To his relief no-one became infected. Eventually the group quickly

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sought out the healthy air of the countryside. Here Raye was highly impressed by the typical long and low Turkish couches, covered in beautiful fabrics and topped with cushions. He wanted them back at home. ‘If you saw me lying here you would agree,’ he wrote to his friend; the couches were ideal for anyone wanting to make themselves comfortable, and were also extremely suitable for ladies, who could display their charms and graces to best advantage.

In his next letter, on 20 April 1766, Joan Raye describes how he was permitted to join the ambassador in an audience with Sultan Mustafa III. No doubt his friend had read of it in the newspaper, but Joan wanted to put a few things right.

Such an audience was not in fact much fun. For example, it was really not nice to have to wait so long outside under a tree until the Grand Vizier and his entire retinue would pass, before being allowed to enter the palace. And don’t imagine the Sultan’s accommodation as a pleasant fairy-tale palace. It’s a rambling building surrounded by high walls just like a monastery, where absolutely no order can be discerned. It contains a jumble of rooms and gardens built on uneven ground, with some cypresses and other trees. The audience hall is fairly small and somewhat sombre. The Sultan himself, on his throne, is indeed impressive, as is the situation of the palace, offering a splendid view over the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara, and over Istanbul, with the domes of many

mosques. But from close by, the city is really not that beautiful. The streets are very narrow and because the city is built on seven hills, you always have to climb or descend. The houses are also low and mainly built of wood. And you rarely see women in the streets, because they’re generally not allowed outside, and if you do see them, they are so covered and veiled that only their eyes are visible.

This is because the men want to keep the women for themselves; they believe that women are there purely for their enjoyment. But perhaps in that respect the Levant doesn’t actually differ that much from the West, muses Joan Raye.

After a journey via Greece and Naples, in December 1769, after five years Joan Raye of Breukelerwaard was back in Amsterdam, where he would live in the ‘Gouden Bocht’ of the Herengracht. He died there in 1823 at the age of 85.

THE TURKISH VAN LENNEPS In 1731 the Amsterdammer David George van Lennep, a descendant of the well-known trading family, decided to try his luck in Turkey. He was not yet twenty when he arrived in Smyrna, today’s Izmir and at that time an important trading city with a considerable Dutch community. David van Lennep first joined an acquaintance’s firm, but ultimately operated as an independent merchant from 1737. He exported goods like silk and mohair from the Turkish interior, and figs and citrus fruits from islands in the Aegean, and among other things impor-

ted textiles, sugar, spices and glasswork.

David van Lennep’s firm also grew to become the most important bank in Smyrna.

In 1758 – he was then 45 – Van Lennep married the twenty-year-old Anna Maria Leidstar, a Dutchwoman born and raised in Istanbul, where her family ran a trading house. Anna Maria was renowned far and wide in the Levant for her beauty and intelligence. The couple had thirteen children – seven daughters and six sons – who would all in turn enter into good marriages with rich merchants and important diplomats. One traveller described David van Lennep as the uncrowned king of the Dutch community in Smyrna; his house – with spacious galleries offering splendid views across the bay – was the heart of high society there.

The family also had a country house in the village of Seydiköy, three hours’ journey from Smyrna, where many Dutch had a country home. They went there on Sundays, to play tennis and drink tea, and lived there in the summer months when the hot city was afflicted by epidemics. The Van Lennep’s country house had 27 rooms, ‘each one as big as three ordinary ones,’ according to a visitor.

The family also had an estate in Malcajik, around thirteen kilometres further, which included a tobacco plantation.

Around 1770 David van Lennep had his family painted by the Swiss artist Antoine de Favray. The painting now hangs in the Rijksmuseum. The eight oldest children

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can be seen in it, with their teacher in the right-hand corner, and on the left Grandpa Leidstar, in Turkish costume.

Anna Maria Leidstar and her oldest daughter are also dressed in Turkish style, and on the floor is a Turkish carpet.

The infant on the arm of his mother is Jacob van Lennep, who would later continue his father’s trading house, first with his brothers and later alone. In fact David van Lennep was active in the firm right up to his death in 1797. In 1825 Jacob van Lennep became consul in Smyrna of what had in the interim become the Kingdom of the Netherlands. A year later the centuries-old Directorate of Levantine Trade was closed down. Jacob then became the agent for the new ‘Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij’ or Netherlands Trading Society in Smyrna.

Life in the Ottoman Empire was also not without its dangers for the Van Lenneps.

In 1868 the then seventeen-year-old Alfred Oscar van Lennep was kidnapped while working on the farm in Malcajik, by ten Greek bandits armed to the teeth.

They took the boy into the mountains on a gruelling journey. They wanted a ransom of 10,000 Turkish lire, but Alfred was able to convince them that 1,500 lire would be a more realistic amount.

The kidnappers then forced him to write a letter to his father, in which he stated their demands. In it Alfred indicated that it was particularly cold and wet at night, and thus asked his father to also send twelve ‘zaroukas’ (a type of legging), along with a Bible and a prayer-book.

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Alfred’s letter eventually ended up in the Van Lennep’s family archive, in Amsterdam’s City Archives. The ransom was delivered on time, and Alfred returned home safely. A week later he was able to identify the severed heads of the bandits at Smyrna’s police station. Alfred Oscar van Lennep later became vice-consul in Smyrna. He didn’t forget the family ties with Amsterdam: at the beginning of the twentieth century he sent his son to a boarding school in Amsterdam’s Hemonystraat.

In 1922 Turkish soldiers occupied the countryside around Smyrna, including the Van Lennep family’s farm in Malcajik.

The Greek farm workers were deported to Greece. In that same year a massive fire devastated a major part of Smyrna, including the European neighbourhood.

The Turkish Van Lenneps, who had lived in Smyrna for almost two centuries, lost almost everything that year.

TURKISH FAÇADES References to the Turkish Empire were found in Amsterdam’s streets – and still can be, in the façades of buildings and the names of buildings and places. Many of the so-called ‘gapers’ (literally, yawners) often bore the face of a Turk, for instance. ‘Gapers’ were the signboards of chemists and pharmacies, in the form of a head with a wide-open mouth, often with a protruding tongue. Amsterdam chemists and pharmacists affixed such heads to their shop-fronts from the

seventeenth century. Often it was the head of a Turk or a ‘Mussulman’, sometimes with a turban, probably because Arab medicine was highly regarded in Europe and many ingredients for medicine came from the East. The ‘yawner’ held his mouth open to take medicine.

These days most of the ‘gapers’ have disappeared or have been moved to museums, but a few can still be seen in the streets.

Other places in the city hark back to foodstuffs which came to Amsterdam from the Ottoman Empire and were all called ‘Turkish’. In the Tweede Goudsbloemdwarsstraat, at number 7, for instance, there was a grocery with the signboard, ‘De Turckse Boer’ or the Turkish greengrocer. That’s why this entire Jordaan street was in fact called the ‘Turckseboer steeg’ in the seventeenth century – Turkish Greengrocer Lane. The signboard has now gone.

Further to the south in the Jordaan, at Hazenstraat 12-14, is still a building bearing the name ‘De Turksche

Keizerspoort’, or Turkish Emperor’s Gate.

It dates from 1893, but in the eighteenth century this was apparently the site of a warehouse for Turkish foodstuffs. The building now has two stepped gables, with a gate structure in the middle leading to a passage flanked by a couple of small houses. Above the gate the Turkish coat of arms can be seen, with a crescent and star.

INVESTING IN TURKEY Around the middle of the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire had launched a process of reform and modernisation, where among other things Islamic law was replaced by secular legislation, the army was reformed, banks and postal services were set up along Western lines, and modern factories were established. For the first time the Ottoman government sent an envoy to the Netherlands, in 1855.

The Ottoman Empire turned more towards Europe, and Europe began to invest in the Ottoman Empire.

The modernisation also encompassed the laying of railways, by the Ottoman state or private companies. *23 The capital for

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this was often obtained through issuing bonds. Several Amsterdam bankers acted as intermediaries in this. The wellknown banking firm of Wertheim and Gompertsz traded bonds in the Société du Chemin de Fer Ottoman d’Anatolie, for example, a company set up in October 1888 as a subsidiary of the Deutsche Bank and which owned the busiest railway line of the Ottoman Empire, which would ultimately interconnect important cities like Istanbul, Izmit, Ankara, Kütahya and Konya. Wertheim and Gompertsz also had bonds in a railway in the west of Turkey, from Izmir to Cassaba and further. And between 1908 and 1910 the Amsterdam office of Loon & Co. issued bonds for a loan of almost 52 million guilders to the imperial Ottoman Empire for construction of the railway from Konya to Baghdad and the Persian

Gulf. Large bonds in such projects were subdivided by the Amsterdam bankers into smaller certificates and then sold on.

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Thus all manner of Amsterdammers were able to invest in Turkey.

In the interim the Ottoman government had run up a significant national debt. From 1854 the Ottoman Empire regularly borrowed from European banks, mainly French and British, partly to finance the building of railways and partly to cover the enormous expenditures of the Ottoman court, in the main.

The Ottoman Public Debt Administration was set up in 1881 to be able to settle the debt – an organisation in which the European creditors of the Ottoman state became bondholders and which collected funds through taxation among other things, to pay off the debt, which was reduced from 191 million pounds to 106 million. In the meantime the government continued to enter into new loans.

Several Amsterdam firms issued bonds for Ottoman state loans. Wertheim and Gompertsz joined other bankers in 1885 in a syndicate which bought 400,000 pounds of Ottoman debt bonds to redeem them on the Amsterdam exchange, after which new bonds were then acquired. This syndicate included the Twentsche Bankvereeniging (175,000 pounds), the Amsterdamsche Bank and Wertheim and Gompertsz (both for 100,000 pounds), and the Amsterdam banker H.J. van Ogtrop & Zn (25,000 pounds). Other Amsterdam banking houses, such as the renowned Hope & Co., the firm of Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co. and the Gebroeders Teixeira de

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‘Noord- en Zuid-Hollandsche ReddingMaatschappij’ (the North and South Holland Sea Rescue Institution), and had travelled aboard the Orient Express to the young Turkish Republic at the Turkish Rescue Institution’s invitation, to offer advice to the organisation. After years of internal and foreign wars, since 1923 the Turkish part of the Ottoman Empire had officially become the Republic of Turkey, led by the former freedom fighter Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Queen Wilhelmina had recognised the Republic immediately and had even sent Atatürk her congratulations, and on 16 August 1924 the Netherlands and Turkey signed a friendship treaty.

HENDRIK DE BOOY AND THE TURKISH SEA RESCUE INSTITUTION ‘Constantinople with its cobbled streets is reminiscent of Amsterdam inner-city areas,’ wrote the retired naval officer Hendrik de Booy in November 1927. After retiring the sixty-year-old Amsterdammer was Secretary of the

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©Stadsarchief Amsterdam A00562000011

Mattos, all issued bonds for state loans to the Ottoman government. In this way Amsterdam bankers continued to be involved in loans to the Ottoman Empire until 1920.

Hendrik de Booy came face to face with the new Turkey immediately, as is apparent from the report of his trip which he wrote and which is now preserved in the Amsterdam City Archives. DirectorGeneral Nedjmeddin of the Sea Rescue Institution, who accompanied De Booy during his visit, ‘is zealous for the new direction’. He also wanted to do away

with the use of the difficult-to-read Arabic script as quickly as possible. A colleague explained that they felt like freed prisoners, ‘freed from the meddling of the great nations, freed from the fez; we are allowed to wear hats.’ The previously mandatory fez, which had in fact replaced the turban in the nineteenth century to create a more modern and equal society, had become a symbol of everything that was traditional and old-fashioned, and was thus abolished

by Atatürk. Turkey also became a secular state, and during a walk Hendrik de Booy noticed that the mosques were almost empty. Two Turkish reporters who came to interview him said that the changes had long been nurtured in the souls of the young, but that it was difficult for older people to accept all these

new things.

The Turkish Sea Rescue Institution guards the coast to the east and west of the Bosphorus. The rescue service was previously the responsibility of the countries sailing on the Black Sea, but a Turkish organisation ultimately assumed the duties. Together with director Nedjmeddin and a few other companions De Booy undertook trips in the coastal area – by boat, by car and if all else failed, by horse – to inspect the various rescue posts. En route they were offered a variety of meals, some more successful than others according to De Booy, and often coffee or tea, always from very attractive glasses. One of the most important issues concerning De Booy was whether the lifeboats should be equipped with

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motors. Another issue was whether the light-ship anchored in the Black Sea at the entrance of the Bosphorus could be improved. Just as De Booy went to view the light-ship a storm blew up, so that he was prevented from going aboard.

Hendrik de Booy was generally impressed with the rescue stations he encountered. The look-out posts were tidy and well-organised and equipped, with sufficient rescue facilities, even if somewhat old. The lifeboats were wellmaintained. The energetic attitude of the rescuers made a particular impression on De Booy, and drilling with rescue equipment always ran virtually flawlessly. On his departure Hendrik de Booy promised to do everything to ensure that the most up-to-date equipment which the Netherlands uses, could also be imported into Turkey. And while the newspapers in the Netherlands proudly headlined that a Dutchman was leading the reorganisation of the Turkish rescue body, the Turkish newspapers were content to report the good impression which the rescue service had made on the Amsterdammer.

NETHERLANDS – TURKEY The Dutch national football team took on Turkey for the very first time on Sunday 4 May 1958. Some 65,000 spectators had come to the Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam for the event, including a small group of Turkish supporters with huge flags. The KNVB had only agreed

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at the last moment that morning that the match could be shown on television.

This meant ticket prices suddenly plummeted: in the cafés on Rembrandtplein, where tickets normally changed hands for huge amounts, a seat suddenly cost just half its usual price. At the Stadionplein venue, too, tickets were being offered at knockdown prices and ‘Just before the start of the match, it even occurred that holders of extra tickets which would normally grant the coveted right to a seat, were being given away to youngsters… for nothing!’ reported the Nieuwsblad van het Noorden.

The Netherlands had won the previous international match, and began this one full of self-confidence with experienced leading players like Faas Wilkes and Abe Lenstra, and the young Coen Moulijn. In the first half Faas Wilkes scored 1-0 from a penalty kick. But the Turks played fast and driven, and after a few high-speed actions the legendary Turkish centre forward Metin Oktay had put his team ahead with two resounding goals. The spectators – including the Dutch – were now in complete admiration of the Turks, who continued to play at full throttle from beginning to

end. And that could certainly not be said of the Dutch team, according to the paper; the Dutch players were apparently so convinced of their own superiority that they thought they could sleepwalk their way to a win, and ‘There was clearly no-one among the spectators who begrudged the visitors this triumph over our eleven apathetic individualists.’ Just before the end the spectators encouraged Abe Lenstra to score an equaliser, but in vain. The Netherlands lost 2-1 to Turkey, in the newspaper’s view a disgraceful defeat.

What did certainly appeal that day was the camera-work of the TV broadcast, although the Dagblad voor Amersfoort newspaper noted of the commentary of Leo Pagano: ‘This radio reporter still doesn’t seem to realise that television viewers at home see just as much as he does in the stadium.’ In the evening the committee of Dutch football’s administrative body the KNVB received a telegram from the Turkish Minister of Education and Sport. In it the Minister thanked the Dutch team for a fair match and also expressed his admiration for the very sporting attitude of the spectators, who had cheered the Turkish team just as enthusiastically as the home one.

Amsterdam’s own legendary footballer, Johan Cruijff, would also play

his very first match in a European tournament in that same Olympic Stadium eight years later, against the Turkish Besiktas. On 28 September 1966 Ajax appeared there in the first round of the Europa Cup 1 against the club from Istanbul. The Amsterdam team won 2-0.

ATATÜRK IN AMSTERDAM-NORTH Many Turks came to the Netherlands to work in the 1960s. There was widespread unemployment in Turkey at the time, while the Netherlands was short of workers, particularly in the automotive industry, shipbuilding, the metal industry, construction and the cleaning sector. The Netherlands signed a treaty on worker recruitment in 1964. Dutch selection teams then went to Turkey to find Turks

prepared to come to the Netherlands to

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work. Once the Turkish workers had been selected and approved, a Dutch agency in Ankara, Hollanda Irtibat Bürosu, arranged the entire procedure of placement and accommodation in the Netherlands.

In Amsterdam it was largely in the North part of the city that many Turkish guestworkers came to work, in the yards of the Netherlands Dock and Shipbuilding Company, or NDSM, and in the Ford factory.

They put in long hours and often worked night shifts. The NDSM arranged accommodation for its Turkish employees. In Amsterdam-North, north of Klaprozenweg, there was a large residential complex with white-painted wooden barracks where 270 Turks could sleep in 34 dormitories. The complex was called Atatürk, after the founder and first president of the modern Republic of Turkey, Mustafa

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Kemal Atatürk. The street is still called Atatürk. In commemoration, since 1978 there has been an austere monument to Kemal Atatürk: an abstract shape in white concrete, with a copper plaque bearing the inscription ‘Peace at home, peace in the world’ in both Turkish and Dutch.

Turkish workers who arrived in the Netherlands on their own initiative went to live in special pensions, or they went to places where family members or others from their village or region already lived, people they could join. This meant they initially formed a host of small Turkish communities which had little contact with the Dutch around them. Both the Turkish workers and the Dutch government assumed that their stay would be temporary, as the name ‘guest workers’ already

inferred.

Up until 1972 increasing numbers of Turks moved to the Netherlands each year. The stream of Turks then began to reduce, particularly because the Dutch government became stricter in admitting foreign workers. From 1975 no Turks at all were permitted to come to the Netherlands to work.

This also meant that Turks who went home temporarily, were no longer readmitted to the Netherlands. Some of the Turkish guest workers then decided to return to Turkey permanently. But the majority remained in the Netherlands. If they already had families in Turkey, they brought their wives and children to the Netherlands. Or they later married a Turkish woman, who then also came to the Netherlands. Many of the Turks who remained in Amsterdam opted to set up their own businesses. Now there

is no sector without its own Turkish entrepreneurs. Increasingly, Turkish entrepreneurs form a bridge between the Netherlands and Turkey. This is apparent for example in tourism, healthcare and international trade.

Amsterdam also acquired Turkish cultural associations and political organisations, and sports associations, like the Turkish football club AGB (Amsterdam Genรงler Birligi), or Amsterdam Youth Union. Various associations use more than 10 buildings as mosques, and during Ramadan further temporary houses of prayer are added in the neighbourhoods. Some 40,000 Dutch Turks now live in Amsterdam.

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AMSTERDAM AND KOCAELI Turkey’s Kocaeli, the metropolitan municipality surrounding the city of Izmit in the north-west of Turkey, was hit by a major and destructive earthquake on 17 August 1999. The next year a joint venture was launched between Amsterdam and Kocaeli, within the LOGO East framework, a funding programme of the Association of Dutch Municipalities for international collaboration with local authorities in Eastern Europe. Kocaeli is a rapidly growing urban area in one of Turkey’s most important industrial centres. It is populated by around a million and a half people.

The Amsterdam fire brigade is working on a variety of projects with its counterpart in Kocaeli, such as training for extinguishing fires with hazardous materials, and providing information on fire prevention. Amsterdam has also assisted in setting up a central incident room for the fire brigade and ambulance services in Kocaeli. And in collaboration with the municipality of Kocaeli and a variety of organisations and municipalities in the Netherlands, Turkey’s first sheltered workshop has been set up, where the large numbers of residents with a physical disability – often a consequence of the earthquake – can find work.

Amsterdam also offered its cooperation in setting up a historic buildings association in Kocaeli. Kocaeli is an old city.

Back in ancient times it was the site of the city of Nicomedia, and much of the old city can still be found in the centre of today’s Kocaeli: old, often wooden houses, and archaeological traces. However the old city suffered enormous damage during the earthquake. Amsterdam’s Monuments & Archaeology Department exchanges knowledge and experience with its new counterpart in Kocaeli, on subjects such as the preservation of monuments and advising the owners of historic premises.

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TURKEY IN THE PORT OF AMSTERDAM After four centuries, the trading links between Amsterdam and Turkey are still very strong; in fact, the Netherlands is one of the largest investors in Turkey. The Turkish economy is expanding rapidly and as a consequence, that country’s importance for the Netherlands as a trading partner is steadily growing. The Netherlands exports some three billion Euros worth of goods to Turkey annually, while, in turn, the value of imports from Turkey total about one and a half billion Euros.

Nowadays you will not just see ships from Amsterdam heading for Turkey, but also more and more ships from Turkey moored in the Port of Amsterdam. After all, the Port of Amsterdam is the fourth largest port in Western Europe and a major gateway to the European hinterland, and as such, it is important to Turkish companies too.

International logistics company CWT Sitos has branches in both Amsterdam and Turkey, importing legumes, cereals and cereal products such as bulgur from the latter country to Amsterdam, and exporting Dutch products from Amsterdam to Turkey. For instance, tonnes of traditional Dutch treacle waffles are shipped to Turkey every year, especially in the period at the end of Ramadan, which concludes with the festival of Eid-ul-Fitr.

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Furthermore, Dutch steel is exported to Turkey and Turkish steel is imported to Amsterdam; Amsterdam port authorities Waterland Terminal, Thor Shipping and United Stevedores Amsterdam transfer the steel for Turkish clients and organise its European distribution.

Shipping company Zealand Shipping, headed by Yusuf Efe, who was born in Istanbul, has been using the Amsterdam metropolitan area as its operational base since 2008. Although the company has Turkish origins, its headquarters are in Almere and the ships sail under a Dutch flag. Zealand Shipping is growing fast and in fact has just bought a new fleet of modern ships, specifically for carrying bulk transports to all corners of the world.

The company commissioned its first ship, the MS Zealand Beatrix, in 2011. However, Zealand Shipping has currently four ships in service including one that bears the name “Amsterdam”. New ships are built for the company at the Turkish shipyard Sefine Shipyard in Altinova in the northwestern province of Yalova. Situated on the east coast of the Sea of Marmara, this yard is rapidly becoming one of the most important shipyards in the country. Zealand Shipping also sends it ships to the Turkish shipyard for maintenance, and the ships that are currently being built there are also to be named after members of the Dutch royal family.

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