IT GOES FORWARD 400 YEARS FROM 1913
The calendars showed 1913. The Ottoman Empire was experiencing the heavy political and social shock of the Balkan Wars. Molla Davutzade Mustafa Nazım Erzurumi, on the other hand, turned his face to the future instead of looking at the darkness of the period he was in. In his work titled “Rüyada Terakki ve Medeniyet-i İslamiyeyi Rüyet”, he took his narrator to Istanbul approximately 400 years later through a dream. The resulting city was completely different from the Istanbul of the period: A giant metropolis where millions of people lived, wide boulevards opened, factories rose, and was built with transportation networks. Today, the work is considered among the earliest examples of utopia in Turkish literature.
GIANT THREE-STOREY BRIDGE ON THE BOSPHORUS
One of the most surprising parts of the book is the Bosphorus crossing. Erzurumi describes in detail a giant three-storey bridge that appears when viewed from the Salacak vicinity. While people walk on the upper part of the bridge, trains, automobiles and other transportation vehicles move on the lower levels. At the time the author wrote this, there was no bridge connecting the two sides of the Bosphorus by road in Istanbul. The first Bosphorus Bridge would be opened only in 1973. For this reason, the depiction of the three-storey bridge dated 1913 is one of the parts of the work that attracts the most attention today.
TRAINS UNDERGROUND AND ABOVE THE SEA
There are not only bridges in Erzurumi’s Istanbul of the future. The city is connected by different transportation systems. Underground trains, sea rail systems, wide roads and new means of transportation have become part of the daily life of the metropolis. This depiction of Istanbul with a large transportation network inevitably brings to mind the image of the city that today lives with metro, Marmaray and rail systems. However, rather than a “prophecy”, the work should be read as an ambitious future utopia based on the technological developments of the early 20th century.
SKYSCRAPERS, FACTORIES AND A MEGACITY OF 10 MILLION
In the Istanbul of the future, the traditional city skyline is completely changing. Erzurumi talks about very tall buildings, wide balcony-like roads passing in front of the floors, giant factories, docks and wide boulevards. In the introduction of the modern editions of the book, it is stated that the population of Istanbul reached 10 million. The city in the author’s mind is no longer just an imperial capital; A giant metropolis that has become the center of production, technology and trade. Considering the population of Istanbul exceeding 15 million today, one of the most striking details of the book is this population scale.
