Island historian Akillas Millas: If I could, I would have that mosque rebuilt

Mostly, it is one effective way to avoid all the crowds that descend on this particularly heavenly corner of the city during the summer months. In fact, autumn months are an ideal time to tour these islands. Summer residents have by now returned to their İstanbul homes. The long-standing İstanbul tradition of heading out to the islands when warmer weather hits is now threatened by large flocks of tourists.

Waterside yalı homes that symbolize old İstanbul.

In fact, some people these days don't even bother coming out to their summer island homes; they are that bothered by the crowds. And so it is people are faced with wanting to come out and experience the old way of life the islands offer, but not wanting to brave the hordes that also arrive with summer. In the meantime, efforts to preserve the old culture of these islands can be seen in libraries and museums that have been opened, exhibitions that have been held, and books that have been written.

Akillas Millas has spent the past 26 summers living on Büyükada. His project is an effort to resist the slow disappearance of a culture that seems to be fading with time.

The second book from his series “Hala Hatırlıyorum / I Still Remember” examines the island of Heybeliada. We had the chance to chit chat with Millas recently about his work, and about life and culture on the islands.

‘In my eyes, there are two different islands'

We talked to Millas in the lobby of the famous Splendid Otel, where he is a returning customer. Millas was born in 1934, in the district of Beyoğlu, into a family that had been in İstanbul for generations. He spent his childhood and his youth in this city. He set foot in his family's summer home on Büyükada for the first time when he was 3. From his third year onwards, he and his family spent every summer at their home on Yeniyol 16. After graduating from the İstanbul School of Medicine, Millas completed a higher degree in orthopedics at Vakıf Gureba Hospital. He became, as time passed, particularly famous within the Turkish football world for his successful operations. In fact, the techniques he personally developed through the 1960s and 1970s made him very sought after by football teams, and he was a doctor for quite a few of these teams. In the meantime, Millas was himself an athlete, and wound up joining the national team for track and field because of his performance in the long jump.

 Some of the beautiful seaside homes that people associate with Heybeliada are now falling apart or are in disrepair.

Millas later was to meet Miki Hanım on the islands, which is also where they got married. When the unfortunate events of Sept. 6-7, 1955 occurred, and when the forced Greek migrations of 1964 occurred, his family suffered greatly in İstanbul. But Millas decided to stay on in the city of his birth, focusing on paintings and collecting to distract himself. And as the years passed by, he created a larger and larger archive of works, many of which were rooted in his love for İstanbul. In the end, though, the 1980 coup and the political unrest that preceded it forced him to abandon his birthplace. He left thinking that he might never return. This only lasted eight years, though; on a visit to the southern reaches of Turkey, Millas decided he could not hold himself back, and he headed off to visit Büyükada. Talking about that period, he says: “No one wanted me to go back. They all said, ‘You are going for nothing, there's no one left there who remembers you'.”

In the end though, Millas decided to ignore their warnings, and went off to visit Büyükada. Not surprisingly, what he found was an island much changed from what he had remembered. The spacious meadows where he played ball as a child, the gardens of the large homes where he played, were mostly gone. Though it was very different from the island he remembers from childhood, he loved it. As he himself says: “There are two islands now in my mind's eye. One is the one from the summers of my childhood, and the other is this new island. I love them both, though differently.”

‘The mosque on Heybeliada should be rebuilt'

The second book from the “Hala Hatırlıyorum” series contains many significant details from history, just as Millas' other works involving İstanbul do. The homes, gardens, places of worship, water wells, sea hamams, restaurants and hotels that he details in this work -- left over from Muslims, Christians and Jewish families and individuals all the way from the first inhabitants of the islands to the mid-20th century -- make up the different chapters in this book.

Millas' second book is, like the one before it, another sign of the big book yet to come. In this book, it is not the many postcards and photographs that Millas collected over his solo years but rather his own drawings that stand out. Noting that “actually, every good doctor can also draw well,” Millas has drawn, labeled and identified the beautiful old structures on Büyükada for his readers. Through this work, readers can take a tour of the architectural history of the island, which has suffered through so many fires, earthquakes and other natural disasters.

One of the more intriguing details covered by Millas is the rivalry felt between some of the old residents of Heybeliada and Büyükada. He notes, “There are some lifelong residents of both Büyükada and Heybeliada who never once crossed over to the other island.”

While Millas talks of his willingness to do anything he can to help preserve the identity of these islands, he touches on the Kadıasker Abdülkadir Efendi Mosque, located in the garden of the Bahriye Mektebi. The mosque that was built on this land was a structure from the era of Sultan Selim III. In the 1930s, however, orders from Ankara saw this old mosque razed to the ground. Millas notes that while efforts to revitalize and rebuild mosques all over Turkey can be seen, it is unfortunate that this particular structure has not been helped.

Restoration disasters we have been hearing about so much recently are not just linked with edifices from ancient times, or mosques.

In fact, one striking example of restoration plans gone wrong can be found in the Ayos Yorgios Monastery on Büyükada. Here is how things started going wrong for that monastery: In 1986, a huge fire that swept through Büyükada wound up destroying the beautiful and intricate wooden section of the monastery's seclusion chambers. Later, when the building was restored, not only did the wooden section not get fixed, but the size of the stone section was halved. In fact, Akillas Millas notes that a terrace completely not fitting with the historic look of the 19th-century doorway was built above the building. What's more, cement poured onto the floor during the restoration of the monastery's church caused great damage to the building. Millas also laments the fact that historic stone arches left over from Byzantine times were covered in cement during this restoration.