---
title: "The Last Stablemen of the Island — Tarık Kaan Muslu"
url: https://tarikkaanmuslu.com/the-last-stablemen/
lang: en
---

# The Last Stablemen of the Island — Tarık Kaan Muslu

Buyukada, Istanbul, 2014. A century of horse-drawn carriages ended in 2020; this series is the only record of the stablemen who lived behind the hills.

# The Last Stablemen of the Island

Büyükada, Istanbul — 2014

Behind the Victorian mansions and the pine-scented promenades of Büyükada — Istanbul's largest Prince's Island — there was a hidden city. A settlement of canvas, scrap wood, and horsehair where the island's stablemen lived alongside their animals in makeshift shelters they called home.

For over a century, horse-drawn carriages were the only means of transport on the Princes' Islands. No engines were permitted. The horses carried the tourists, the residents, the cargo — and the stablemen carried the horses. Most came as seasonal workers from eastern Turkey: young men who arrived with nothing and slept on mattresses laid over the stable floors, separated from the animals by a plank of wood.

They were not supposed to let anyone in.

I was given access to the stables behind Büyükada's hills in 2014 — a world invisible to the day-trippers below. What I found was not cruelty or spectacle, but something quieter: a community of men who had built an entire life in a space society preferred not to see.

In January 2020, Istanbul's Metropolitan Assembly voted unanimously to ban all horse-drawn carriages from the islands. The horses were removed. The stables were dismantled. The stablemen disappeared.

Every doorway is a threshold between two worlds. His is between daylight and the dark interior where he sleeps above the horses.

Rest comes in stolen hours. The mattress is shared with the scent of hay and the sound of hooves shifting on packed earth. Jury Special Award — Adalar Municipality Photography Competition

Two men, one entrance. The structure behind them is a home built from whatever the island discarded.

The shoes tell you everything. Shoes lined up on bare ground next to a water jug and a television balanced on cinder blocks. This is a living room.

Youth finds a way. Behind the grin: a bunk bed, hanging clothes, peeling wood. The quarters of a seasonal worker who will be gone by winter.

The craft requires no diploma. A bucket, a brush, bare hands, and the patience to hold a leg that could kick you into next week.

The next generation learns by doing. Between the greenhouses and the makeshift paddocks, the island's back roads belong to the horses and the boys who tend them.

The day continues. A cigarette, a loaded cart, a laugh shared between men who have done this work longer than most of us have been alive.

This series is their only record.