Page 186 - Çevre Şehir İklim İngilizce - Sayı 3

Exemplary Civilization in Sustainable Water Management from
The Perspective of Environmental History: The Ottoman State
Firemen

The issue of fire has been one of the problems that are difficult to control and
have been an important task for the states from the past to the present. In this
regard, in the Ottoman state, which took the responsibility of managing large
geographical regions, even sultans were closely and personally interested in
this issue. Especially in the early days of the state, fire incidents were more
frequent due to the lack of extinguishing water. In order to solve this problem,
fire valves were added to the fountains over time, and fire-fighting services
were established as a result of the experience gained and inspections carried
out. Along with the administrative regulations, new organizational structures
were established to extinguish the increasing number of fires (Özgür and
Azaklı, 2001). As can be seen in Figure 2, the people who took an active role in
these established organizational structures were the firefighters (tulumbacılar).

Figure 2. Firemen (Öztürk, 2007)
In the early days of the state, the firemen used to wait at the covered bazaar
with the tools they used to extinguish fires, and they would intervene in the
fire together by gathering people who would voluntarily participate from the
public. However, due to the confusion caused by this method, the fire-fighting
work was transferred to the Janissary Guild (Yeniçeri Ocağı) during the reign
of Yavuz Sultan Selim Han. The tools used by the janissaries, who played an
important role in fighting fires in the wooden houses of İstanbul, were given
by the mayor to the head of the janissaries and distributed to those who were
involved in extinguishing the fires (Öztürk, 2007). The water used during the fires

Year 2 / Issue 3 / January 2023 171