Carrying home: A linden tree’s journey from village to Gecekondu to abroad
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Melisa Elçin Özçelikel
In a corridor of the Turkish consulate in Geneva, a fellow election observer told me, almost proudly, that he had just flown back from Istanbul with a piece of home in his suitcase: kokoreç, the spiced street food made from lamb intestines, not permitted by Swiss customs and smuggled through anyway.
His story made me think about what I had carried as an international student. Not meat, but something drier and easier to miss: a small bag of linden blossoms, picked from a tree in my grandmother’s garden in Istanbul. I had packed them without thinking, the way you pack things whose importance you can’t yet explain. That first winter, when I finally brewed them, the flat filled with a honey-sweet scent and I was suddenly home. After that, whenever a friend came over, I would make linden tea and find myself talking about the garden, my family, my childhood. The leaves became part of the conversation, and part of what made the conversation happen.
The tree came to Istanbul in the 1970s, roughly when my grandparents did. When they left their village in Sivas province for the city, my great-uncle Cemal, a man who understood plants as relatives rather than decoration, sent a young linden after them, dug from the forested hills of Koyulhisar. He gave departing relatives saplings and seeds, so they carried something of the land with them, not only its memory.
They planted it in Gülensu, a neighbourhood on Istanbul’s Asian shore built the way much of the city’s edge was built: room by room, on hillside land the family didn’t formally own. These self-built settlements are called gecekondu, “landed overnight”, a kind of homegrown city where villagers became urban without quite leaving the countryside behind, half-rural and half-urban, full of gardens. The state tolerated them because it needed cheap labour but wouldn't pay to house it. The house was not quite legal. The land was not quite theirs. But the linden took root, and it has grown there for fifty years, thickening while the neighbourhood rose around it, flowering every June.
My grandmother knew that tree the way she knew her own hands. She could tell when the flowers were ready without quite looking; something in the morning light, or the warmth gathering in the garden, or simply fifty years of paying attention. You can’t learn it from a book, it accumulates through seasons of getting it slightly wrong and adjusting.
The harvest pulled the whole family into the garden early, before the heat. We ate breakfast while stripping the branches and sorting blossoms into cloth bags; the children learned, without being told, that this was something worth knowing. Afterwards she spread the flowers on newspaper to dry, and for days the house smelled of honey. In winter she brewed them into tea that eased colds, sleeplessness, and, more quietly, homesickness. She believed the tree could heal in ways its chemistry alone couldn’t explain, and as a child I believed it too. I would press my palms to its bark and talk to it, the way children talk to things they sense are listening.
She used the tree, but use and care are not opposites: pruned, it grew back fuller; harvested with attention, it kept producing. That is what I have come to think of as a living archive: one that exists only in the doing, in the relationship itself, and so cannot be packed into a bag and carried.
Gülensu has been marked for "urban transformation" since 2004. Under the government’s construction-driven growth, neighbourhoods once quietly tolerated as workers' housing have been recast as illegal and unsafe; even, officials said, as havens for crime and terror. The 2023 earthquakes that killed more than fifty thousand people only sharpened a case for clearance already long in the making, letting demolition be framed as rescue. The safety argument is real, but clearance also turns land the poor built on into valuable real estate, and residents have lived under the threat for twenty years, afraid to repair homes that might be bulldozed - yet far from passive: they gathered thousands of signatures against it within days and have resisted since.
Whatever happens to the people, the tree cannot leave. Its roots have grown through fifty years of that particular soil, tangled with pipes and foundations. Moving a tree that old rarely works; for the linden it would almost certainly mean death. In my Geneva kitchen, the blossoms sit in a cloth bag above the stove. I use them sparingly, because I can’t easily replace them. When I brew them, for a moment I am back in the garden with my grandmother. Then the moment passes. I could leave Istanbul. My education and passport made an exit possible, and I left as many educated women have in recent years. The tree cannot leave, for the same reason the neighbourhood’s least mobile residents cannot: it is rooted in place, without the means to go. My bag of blossoms is a privilege, evidence of an asymmetry between who gets to move and who is left behind. The leaves hold the tree’s chemistry, the oils that calm and heal. What they cannot hold is the practice: the knowing when to pick, the morning ritual, the attention built over decades. They are a fragment. They are proof the archive existed. They are not the archive.
The linden in Gülensu is one of many trees on contested ground in Istanbul. A linden became an emblem of the 2013 protests to save Gezi Park: the same pale flowers, the same honey scent, the same insistence that a tree could remain a tree. One of the planners jailed for defending it later wrote from his cell of a day the city would gather again ‘under a linden tree in Gezi Park’. Mine still stands. It flowered this June again. Some archives are living ones, and the work is to notice them before they’re gone.
Melisa Elçin Özçelikel
Melisa is a sociologist/anthropologist based in Istanbul. She holds a BA in Sociology from Boğaziçi University and an MA in Sociology and Anthropology from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Her research focuses on urban transformation, migration, and ecological displacement. She has also worked as a journalist, including an internship at bianet in 2021. Still publishes as a freelancer.
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