I began spending time in Karagumruk because I wanted to understand how ordinary Turks were dealing with a refugee crisis far greater, in terms of numbers, than what was roiling politics throughout the rest of Europe. Whether the Syrians wanted to stay or not, it seemed the Turks were preparing to let them: Not long before the failed coup, Erdogan said he was considering a plan to offer citizenship to at least some refugees. Somehow the Syrians fit into Erdogan’s vision of Turkey, and his people seemed willing to consider it. The influx of refugees, I found, was making the Turks of Karagumruk rethink how they viewed their country, their history and even themselves.

I first visited Karagumruk last October, often going to a small white shed not much larger than a child’s playhouse, which sits behind a fence and a rare patch of green grass. This is the office of Karagumruk’s muhtar, a man with a wide fleshy face and a boxer’s body named Ismail Altintoprak. A muhtar is a kind of village chief, politically neutral and always in demand: registering birth certificates, listening to neighbors whine, answering a mother who asks about the suspicious origins of the boy who wants to marry her daughter. In the summers, Altintoprak raises four chickens and a rooster, which strut and squawk in the yard and even inside the office. At 68, he has been the elected muhtar of Karagumruk for 30 years, and his family, he says, has been in Istanbul since the 1700s, so he’s prone to the long memory and oppressive nostalgia particular to all things Constantinople — especially when I ask him what has happened to Karagumruk and to Turkey.

To the muhtar, the Karagumruk of old was a bucolic place: Ottoman houses made of wood, green-grass yards with “pools of golden fishes,” mosques from which every call to prayer was beautiful (not some scratchy recording) and Turks who loved their neighbors, especially if they were Greek or Armenian. The muhtar describes his own lineage as Tatar, and he is Muslim, but he says the Christians and Muslims once all got along because they were real city people, real Istanbullu, which, in his usage, appears to be code for “sophisticated,” or anyone who already inhabited Istanbul before the strangers arrived.

“This was a Greek neighborhood, ya!” Altintoprak said. “People say Christians were the Muslims’ enemies? What are you talking about? There are good guys and bad guys. I am coming from the Ottoman era! If someone is human, they are human, what can you do? In my time, the Greeks gave a Turkish guy in the neighborhood the nickname of Aleko, a Greek name, and he didn’t care! Today, if you said, ‘Hey, Petro!’ someone would shoot you.”

In the 1950s, riots, attacks and prejudice drove away nearly all of the remaining Greeks and Armenians, just as millions of Turkish migrants were arriving in Istanbul from the eastern part of the country. External migrants came too: Bulgarians, Bosnians, Macedonians. At least all these newcomers could, according to the rules of the imagined community of the time, be considered “Turks.” But it has been a different story when it comes to the new Arab arrivals, the latest of the former Ottoman subjects to seek shelter in the old imperial home.

Syrians who made their way to Karagumruk told me it reminded them of Damascus. Many of them settled nearby in an area that had once been the site of one of the oldest Roma settlements in the world, Sulukule, before it was torn down amid controversy in the 2000s and replaced with state-subsidized townhouses. These looked fancy but were deficient — windows that didn’t open, finicky plumbing, oddly dangerous patios — and failed to attract Turkish renters. When the Syrians came, the landlords increased the rents unfairly, but some tenants crammed a dozen beds into single apartments and made Sulukule home.