News: Armenian charity invests to help orphans, poor in Istanbul

Armenian charity invests to help orphans, poor in Istanbul

Thursday, September 16, 2010

VERCİHAN ZİFLİOĞLU

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

The Karagözyan Orphanage Foundation, an Armenian community organization, is nearing the completion of a new skyscraper in Istanbul’s Şişli municipality that will house a shopping center, residences and a hotel.

“Just 10 years ago, we had to get permission from the General Directorate of Foundations even to drive a nail in [one of our community’s buildings],” Dikran Gülmezgil, head of the Orphanage told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review, adding that the current government was warmer toward solving the problems of minority foundations than previous administrations were.

All the flats in the Şişli complex, which is being built on 0.6 hectares and will be completed by early 2011, will be rented. The revenue from the complex will be used to help poor families and orphans that live under the care of the foundation.

At the same time, the opening of the building will provide the first step toward pooling the revenues of all 43 Armenian foundations currently registered in Istanbul. “This building, in a sense, will be the future bank of the community,” Gülmezgil said.

The foundation presented the project to the government for approval five years ago and received clearance, Gülmezgül said.

“We told Prime Minister [Recep Tayyip Erdoğan] that we are an orphanage that provides education for over 30 kids,” he said. “When we said we needed revenue, he gave the green light to our project.”

The skyscraper will rise besides the private Karagözyan Armenian School, which was founded in 1913 in accordance with the will of Dikran Karagözyan.

There were plans to initially use the building as a hospital, but it later became a shelter for children who were orphaned in Anatolia and brought to Istanbul.

The land the skyscraper is being built on was rented as a car park two decades ago.

Gülmezgil, who himself was a poor Anatolian Armenian child educated at the Karagözyan School, told the Daily News that the foundation had had difficulty collecting rents through the years.

“If we weren’t building this complex, we wouldn’t be able to educate our needy children,” he said.