A lot of people don’t know that, for nearly thirty years, Istanbul had its own working matzo factory, or that Istanbul still has its own non-working matzo factory. Known in Turkish as the “doughless oven,” located in Galata, on the northern bank of the Golden Horn, it has been given over to the arts. I recently went there to see “An Attempt at Exhausting a Place,” an exhibit by four young Turkish-Jewish artists.
I met the curator, Lara Fresko, at the SALT Galata art space, where she works. (Items on display at SALT, which is housed in the former headquarters of the Ottoman Bank, include several title deeds of mansions mortgaged in the eighteen-eighties by destitute pashas.) Fresko, who is twenty-six and has an absolutely perfect profile, led me down a winding side street lined by hardware-supply shops. Heaps of mismatched screws, plugs, cogs, and valves lay on tables and in bins, as if the world’s biggest machine had been dismantled for quick sale.
The factory was set off from the street in a courtyard. Kosher Turkish pastrami hung peacefully from a doorway. In a white room, the dormant twenty-one-meter-long matzo machine was silently gathering dust. I walked around its perimeter, wondering which end the matzo had come out of.
The machine had stopped running in 2007, after visiting rabbis found that some batches of matzo didn’t meet the regulations to be kosher. Maintaining the aging Turkish apparatus, with its frequent need of repairs and replacement parts, turned out to be more costly than importing matzo from Israel, where state-of-the-art factories were churning out two tons of product a day. It might seem ironic to mass-produce and export a kind of bread that derives its importance from the fact that it was made on the run. Nonetheless, Israel now supplies all of Turkey’s matzo.
From the machine room, I followed Fresko upstairs to a loft with skylights. Smokestacks rose from the floor and went out the ceiling, releasing imaginary smoke. The exhibit, organized with help from Jasmine Taranto, included works by Reysi Kamhi, Eytan Ipeker, Neşe Nogay, and Sibel Horada. I was particularly drawn to Horada’s “Untitled Machine”: a row of old tube TV sets showing the matzo machine in grinding, clanging action. Each TV displayed a different section of the machine, producing the effect of a phantasmal assembly line.
Horada had originally titled the work “One Last Time,” reflecting her intention to bake one last batch of matzo in the machine. There had been problems with the gas and the heater, and one of the belts snapped, and then it turned out that, if people were going to actually eat the matzo, the whole apparatus would have to be disassembled for cleaning. “The Jewish people made matzo while running away from the Pharaoh in the desert,” Horada told me. “But I couldn’t do it in this factory.” She had eventually decided to load the machine with sheets of paper instead of dough. The paper rectangles, which came out imprinted with tiny squares, resembled ghost matzos. Horada sees the machine itself as a ghost, hanging bulkily around the world, no longer used but not yet discarded.
The first thing one notices about Horada is her brilliant red hair, which she periodically collects and assimilates into an evolving sculpture called “Continuous Monument” (2002-present). During her childhood in Istanbul, Horada ate matzo from the factory every Passover, without knowing where it came from. It was apparently typical of Turkish Jewish institutions that one didn’t always know where they were. After the 1986 shooting at Galata’s Neve Shalom synagogue, security measures were upped to the extent that going to parties at the Jewish social club now felt like reporting to a secret bunker. Entry was via “the aquarium”: two steel doors, separated by a chamber with a bulletproof one-way mirror. If the guard behind the mirror didn’t recognize you, you had to hold up your Turkish I.D., which specifies the bearer’s religion.
Attending a secular high school while occasionally celebrating Purim in a bunker, Horada often felt that she was living a double life. That’s why the opening of this exhibit was a revelatory moment for her, bringing together those two of Istanbul’s most “isolated, exclusive, and invisibly hierarchical” groups, between which her life had long been divided: the Jews and the art scenesters.
The Jewish population of Turkey, estimated between eighteen thousand and twenty thousand, is descended largely from refugees of the Spanish Expulsion. The print edition of the Turkish-Jewish weekly, Salom, still runs one page in Ladino, making it one of the world’s last remaining Ladino periodicals. The entire community, which includes a small Ashkenazi minority, recognizes the Chief Rabbinate in Istanbul, and helps to maintain the city’s Jewish school, hospital, and retirement home. Highly assimilated with Turkish culture, Istanbul’s Jews are nonetheless bound together by powerful and often invisible ties. “The machine worked in secret for nearly thirty years,” Horada says of the matzo factory, “holding together the Jewish community.”
For the first year after the factory closed, Horada recalls, people complained about the Israeli matzo. They said it tasted different. The second year, nobody complained anymore. It was as if they had all forgotten. This was strange, since both Turkish and Jewish cultures tend to place a high value on complaining. But that’s just how quickly and insidiously history was moving. Istanbul, by its many names, has always been a city of transformation, conquest, destruction and rebirth. But the new developments, Horada says, are different—faster, and sneakier. “You can see a crusade, or a fire. Today’s changes are felt by everyone, but they can’t be seen.”
The invisible hand is shuffling things around, moving the people and mutating the places, and Horada wants to see it happen. Whether she is transferring the process of matzo manufacture onto paper, or building a monument to ten years of hair, she’s usually trying to make historical change visible.
On my way out, I stopped to talk to the building watchman, whom I found chain-smoking in a small office. From this watchman, who had once been the factory overseer, I learned that the matzo machine had run for ten weeks a year, sending matzo as far as Antakya and Azerbaijan, and that the thirty workers who operated it had all been formerly employed by a biscuit factory.
“What happened to the workers?” I asked.
“They went back to their village. Like the machine, we all got old and retired.”
When asked his opinion of the exhibit, the watchman shrugged. He thought it was O.K., but he didn’t like the title, “An Attempt at an Exhausting Place.” Having missed the allusion to an experimental text by the Oulipo writer Georges Perec, he thought it made the place sound finished, used up. “The machine is still here. It still works,” he said. “If they fixed it, it would run for another thirty years.”
Sibel Horada, Untitled Machine, mixed media installation, 2012. Detail photograph by Lara Fresko.