Üsküdar (Scutari)

Üsküdar, known in Western Europe as Scutari, is described by the Encyclopaedia of Islam as the most important of the suburbs of Istanbul on the Asian shore, lying at the southern end of the Bosphorus. ¹ The article says that both the origin of the name and the exact date of the Turkish conquest are unknown. ¹

From antiquity the place was called Chrysopolis, and it seems to have been a suburb of the Greek colony of Chalcedon. ¹ The first writer to give it something like its present name, in the form Escutaire, is Villehardouin in 1203, and Niketas Choniates mentions a palace of the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus called Scoutarion, to the west of Üsküdar. ¹ The author weighs a possible link with the Greek word for a shield-bearing soldier, but notes that the Byzantines used that word for the squires of the Franks, and suggests, only provisionally, that a term imported from the West in the mid-twelfth century named a palace and then the suburb around it. ^{1 2} The Byzantine writer Phrantzes states in the fifteenth century that the place then called Scutari had formerly been Chrysopolis. ²

There were several Ottoman incursions after the battle of Pelekanon in 1329, but the article finds no source confirming the date of 1352 given by one modern historian, and it concludes that any Ottoman control of the Asian shore before the fall of Constantinople was not accompanied by permanent settlement. ² The traveller Bertrandon de la Broquière, crossing the Bosphorus there in late 1432 or early 1433, found Turks guarding the passage and collecting the toll for crossing. ²

With the arrival of the Ottomans, Üsküdar replaced Chalcedon (Kadiköy) as the bridgehead towards Asia. ² A tax register of 1498 lists the garrison of the fortress of Üsküdar, all with Slavic names, and vineyards worked by Christians. Because the share-croppers on the royal lands named there were deportees from various parts of the Balkans, the article concludes that Üsküdar, like other places around Istanbul, was at least partly resettled after the conquest. ²

The first post-conquest building the article mentions is the mosque of Rum Mehmed Pasha, grand vizier from 1466 to 1469, completed in 876/1471-2. ² In 955/1548 Sultan Süleyman I built, in the name of his daughter Mihrimah, a complex on the sea front with a mosque, school, soup kitchen and caravanserai; the article says this strengthened Üsküdar's role as the bridgehead on the Asian shore and gave the signal for its development. ² See the Mihrimah Sultan Mosque.

The architect Sinan built a small complex for Shemsi Pasha in 988/1580, which the article calls a jewel of Ottoman architecture, and in 991/1583 an imposing ensemble on a height east of the town for the queen mother Nur Banu. ² The museum's record of the Atik Valide Mosque describes this ensemble. In 1050/1640 the queen mother Kösem Sultan built the Çinili mosque on the eastern heights, and in 1708 another queen mother built the Yeni Valide mosque in the town centre. ² The Ayazma mosque was built in 1760 by Mustafa III on the site of an older palace, and Selim III built a mosque and barracks for his new army on part of the grounds of the palace of Kavak at the start of the nineteenth century. The barracks were burnt by rebellious Janissaries at his deposition and rebuilt in 1825-50 in their present form. ² See also the Selimiye Mosque and the Çinili Mosque.

During the Crimean War of 1854-6 the Haydarpaşa military hospital was built on the sea front; it tended the Allied wounded, and beside it lies a cemetery with 8,000 British dead. ² The article also records Üsküdar's many dervish lodges in Ottoman times, the Rifa'i lodge being especially well known in recent times, and its fame to this day for its immense Muslim cemetery, the Büyük Mezaristan. ²

In the mid-seventeenth century Evliya Çelebi counted seventy Muslim quarters, eleven Greek and Armenian ones and one Jewish. ² A source for the 1840s gives seventy-two quarters, three of them Armenian, plus a Greek one of four hundred families settled in the nineteenth century. The two Armenian churches still standing date from 1617 and 1687. The Jewish quarter, near the Shemsi Pasha mosque, held Jews who had come from Galata in 1618, and has disappeared. ² Another source gives 82,000 inhabitants at the end of the nineteenth century, including 6,000 Greeks, 7,500 Armenians and 1,500 Jews; the district counted 54,969 in 1940 and 395,623 in 1990. ²

The article leaves open the origin of the name Üsküdar, the date of its first Ottoman occupation, and the exact position of the pre-1453 settlement. ^{1 2}