Rebels, gamblers, thieves, outcasts.

In 2019, the Internet Archive gave me and other Istanbul enthusiasts a great gift: one of its users downloaded all eleven volumes of Jamia Ansiklopedia, one of the most eccentric encyclopedias created in the last century.

The first article I read was about Ağe Hamam, a Turkish bath, a throwback from my writing studio in Beyoğlu. I learned that it was built in the 16th century in the classical Ottoman architectural style, that at one point it was owned by an Armenian and sold to a Muslim in 1953, and that "some unmarried men belonging to the rough guys used it as a hotel." The tape described how Beyoğlu's handsome, drunk and gay men would spend the night in the bathhouse and emerge cleansed in the morning. The recording had the exciting blend of the factual voice of an encyclopedia and the informality of a rumor column.

The budding historian Reshad Ekrem Kochu and his team of authors and artists have spent twenty-two years trying to put together this compendium about the ancient city of his birth. The first phase of the project, from 1944 to 1951, ended in bankruptcy; the second, from 1958 to 1973, ended shortly before Kochu's death, leaving the encyclopedia unfinished on the letter G. (The last entry tells the story of "Gokcinar, Mehmed," a drug-addicted poet from Istanbul who spent eighteen months in prison for illegal possession of a substance and earned the nickname "Hippie Mehmed" after locals spotted him wandering the streets of Istanbul barefoot.) The Istanbul Ansiklopedia has remained unpublished in Turkey ever since.

Kocu, a journalist who relishes the most scandalous details of Ottoman history, first thought of writing an urban encyclopedia in the 1940s.

His aim, as he said in the introduction to the first volume in 1946, was to create a "great register" of Istanbul. The Istanbul Encyclopedia is the second known urban encyclopedia in history, after William Kent's Encyclopedia of London (1937). Unlike Kent's work, a compendium of pre-World War II landmarks in London that reached a satisfactory conclusion, Kochu's encyclopedia was meant to remain a work in progress: it was an ever-growing palimpsest of murders, love stories, real estate debates, pandemics, and more. The monument of an ordinary citizen could receive an article of detail equal to a monumental mosque; a thief from a poor neighborhood could be profiled with as much attention as an Ottoman sultan. Bitlisli Ali Chamich Agha, who has been serving coffee in his café for seventy-three years, gets the article, as do the attractive young men working in the city's famous barbershops.