Article by Prof. Ozayr Saloojee: Little Big Worlds
September 23, 2024
Professor Ozayr Saloojee has written a meditation on Istanbul, Turkey, in which he compares Miniatürk, a miniature theme park of significant Turkish buildings and places, with the noisy, crowded city itself.
Published in Places Journal in September, the 6,800-word article, titled Little Big Worlds, is written as a first-person travel piece.
“There is something useful, and profoundly disconcerting, about seeing the buildings of Miniatürk without the urban chaos, density, and intensity of their real-life contexts,” writes Dr. Saloojee.
“No traffic, no shoe-shine hustler, no rabbit fortune teller, no cajoling restauranteur,” he observes. “The sites are clean, quiet, perfectly photographable, Instagrammable. I walk into the Hagia Sophia, and I am alone.”
Saloojee, who has taken architecture students to Istanbul, calls it “the most beautiful and exhilarating and lovely city on this tiny blue dot of a planet.”
Miniatürk, considered the largest miniature theme park in the world, features 15,000 square metres of pathway, 135 architectural models, and other attractions, including a play structure in the form of a Trojan Horse. The buildings, infrastructure, and monuments appear at 1/25th scale and span Istanbul, Türkiye, and the Ottoman world.
Saloojee uses the experiences of the same places — real and represented — and the different thoughts that arise to illustrate the contemporary city and its history and politics.
“Miniatürk meanders, in effect, through many cities — many geographies, many time periods, many histories, politics, and myths too — and all the while, you never leave Istanbul,” he notes.
It is, he says, “an attempt to miniaturize what is otherwise too gigantic to comprehend, to scale down the political implications of historical, social, national, and citizenship, and, as historian İpek Türeli notes, to craft instead a substitute citizenship narrative via architectural whimsy, and the most pleasant kind of absurdity.”
Places Journal is an online journal about architecture, landscape, and urbanism, founded at MIT and Berkeley in 1983.