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From Europe to Asia in just three and a half minutes!
Avupra-Asya sadece 3,5 dakika!
More than one million passengers daily!
Günde 1 milyondan fazla yolcu!
»Metro Istanbul« is the first intercontinental underground system in the world that brings formerly very distant zones close together in time. On the lines Eurasia 1 and 2 the distance between the two continents is reduced to a mere three and a half minutes.
A transport structure operating independently from the surface life of Istanbul,
»Metro Istanbul« radically changes our way of thinking about the city.
»Metro Istanbul« carries over a million passengers a day in high-tech, driverless, computer-operated coaches.
The passengers are taken down to the stations and back up to the city in special, fast elevators.
Orientation is made easy by a newly developed, user-friendly underground map.
»Metro Istanbul« is a fully-operational system even in earthquakes and in time of war.
Kizil Elma, Turkish-Hungarian Underground Engineering and Construction Company,
wishes all passengers a pleasant journey!
Since 1997, Lakner’s artistic method has been dominated by principles of engineering, constructing and design, as well as focusing his attention on global questions. His Metro Istanbul project made for the Istanbul Biennial 1997 was located at the arrival point of European trains, and Lakner mounted the planned site for the yet unrealized central subway station on a glowing billboard. Inhabitants and tourists were equally fascinated and deceived by the carefully designed map, which was the continuation of Lakner’s earlier interest in cultural bridges (Direction Signs, Persönliche Kulturbrücke). With the impressive precision of a professional engineer, Lakner also designed Euro-Asian Underground, the first intercontinental subway system that - within this context, of course, especially in the cultural sense - formed a link between Europe and Asia. The project also had historical connotation regarding the shared past of the Turkish and Hungarian people, inasmuch as it was built by a Turkish-Hungarian joint enterprise named Kizil Elma; the strict meaning of this is »red apple«, but in the historical sense the name meant the towns that the Osman-Turkish Empire planned to conquer. This subtle reference invokes the rather different interpretations of a relationship made by the two cultures: Hungarians called the period that of the Turkish Occupation, while the Turkish think of it as an era of fruitful and prosperous friendship.
KIZIL-ELMA (or KIZIL-ALMA), »Red Apple« is an expression which occurs in written sources from the 16th century onwards; it also occurs in Turkish oral traditions from Anatolia and Adharbaydjan as well as in modern Greek, Bulgarian and Rumanian folklore, current to this day. It refers to a legendary city which was to be the ultimate goal of Turko-Muslim conquests, and some versions explain the term from the resemblance between a red apple and the golden dome of a building - in this latter case it refers to a large church situated in the area. In the Ottoman period Kizil-Elma tended to be identified with the large cities associated with Christianity-Constantinople, Budapest, Vienna and Rome - which the armies of the Padishah were hoping to conquer.
(see J.Deny, »Les pseudo-prophéties concernant les Turcs au XVI. Siécle«, in: REI, X/2 (1936), 201-20; E. Rossi, »La legenda turco-bizantina del Pomo Rosso«, in: Actes du V. Congres international des études byzantines, Rome 1936, 542-53).
Text by: Erzsébet Tatai, 2001
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