Heybeliada Sanatorium
Heybeliada, Istanbul City
Heybeliada, Istanbul City
November 2021
A sanatorium is a boarding institution where patients with tuberculosis are treated with hygienic outdoor cures, appropriate bed rest, and a generous diet, and then vocational rehabilitation is implemented when the effects of the disease begin to subside. The etymological origin of the word "sanatorium" comes from the Latin "sanare" meaning "to heal."
There are four important sanatoria in Turkey: Heybeliada and Süreyyapaşa in Istanbul, Atatürk in Ankara, and Ballıdağ Sanatorium in Kastamonu. Heybeliada Sanatorium was established on November 15, 1924, on the order of Atatürk, in the south of Heybeliada, a part of Istanbul, in the Çam Liman area, which is an area that's not affected by the wind, surrounded by pine trees, and receives sun all day long. Heybeliada Sanatorium, the first sanatorium of the Republic, was partially damaged in the 1999 Gölcük earthquake and was closed in 2005. On October 18, 2009, after a fire of unknown origin, it became completely unusable.
Heybeliada Sanatorium has witnessed the joy, sadness, hope, and fear of tens of thousands of patients for 81 years, from the day it was founded until the day it was closed. The walls, stairs, corridors, and medical remnants of the treatment processes, in which feelings, thoughts, and experiences similar to the endless silence brought by life, new beginnings, and endings are absorbed, continue to be effective as traces of social memory. In the sanatorium where pulmonary diseases such as tuberculosis (tuberculosis) and pneumonia (pneumonia) are treated, politicians, writers and poets such as İsmet İnönü, Rıfat Ilgaz, Ece Ayhan, Rüştü Onur and Muzaffer Tayyip Uslu are known to have stayed.
Within the framework of the documentary photography project called Heybeliada Sanatorium, the latest situation of the sanatorium was photographed in November. From the moment they entered the sanatorium door; an attempt was made to record, through photographs, the resurrection of lived stories and history beyond the present time, behind every detail seen.
