On Istanbul’s Golden Horn, balık ekmek or ‘fish bread’ has been sold since the 1800s. A piece of grilled whitefish (typically mackerel) is served in white bread, with white onion, parsley, pul biber, salt and lemon juice, which, more recently, has often stood in squeezy bottles on low, plastic tables, beside grand, decorated boats.
Initially, the sandwiches were a way for fishermen to make use of an abundant catch, setting up grills on deck and selling the balık ekmek to passers-by. As the city grew in population and scale, trades were industrialised, and the demand for food increased; the fish population, and the health of the water, diminished. Over the course of the twentieth century, an excess of fish was plundered by large-scale fisheries, and the fishermen who’d been offering balık ekmek fought the pressures of poor hauls and an increase in bureaucratic regulations, which resulted in limited access and high location rents. In 2007, independent fishing boats were replaced by a trio of permanent, licensed moorings at Eminönü, an area whose waterfront mostly serves tourists as they pass over Galata Bridge towards Topkapı Palace, the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia. While balık ekmek remained popular with locals, the fresh, low-cost lunch was now harder to find outside of Eminönü; with the exception of the intrepid set-ups of Karaköy street traders. Selling mackerel in lavash, they build tables out of stacked styrofoam boxes and tape, ready to dismantle, reassemble, or start from scratch, whether their stands are removed by officials, or they find a better spot.
The ‘Ottoman-style’ fishing boats were elaborately decorated, trimmed in gold, with proud monuments in the form of exaggerated, almost demonic sandwiches at their helm – fitting more closely with the ‘Disneyland-Arabesque’ tradition than anything faintly historical. Now providing as much a performance as a service, the balık ekmek boats contained fish that was equally removed from the origins of the tradition. Having first been caught by independent fishermen, before they were overtaken by Aegean fish farms, the whitefish was now imported on ice from Scandinavia, and bought in bulk from the wholesale market. In their grand position at Eminönü, vendors were under pressure to keep up with high demand, while maintaining low prices; even as local fish stocks plummeted and wholesale prices skyrocketed.
The three boats were formalised as the Balık Ekmek Turizm Kooperatifi (Fish Bread Tourism Cooperative), but in 2019 were told that their leases would not be renewed, meaning they would have to vacate by 1 November. The Cooperative made a legal challenge, arguing that balık ekmek was not only part of the historical fabric of Istanbul (in both its traditional and neo-Ottoman form), but had provided jobs for, and fed, generations of people. As it stands, the boats remain. As do the street traders selling midye dolma (mussels stuffed with rice), lokma (deep fried dough balls soaked in honey), tursu (sour pickles) and simit (circular bread, dipped in molasses and sesame seeds) from trays, carts and the backs of mopeds; as well as the fishermen who still line the bridge.
The Karaköy Bridge (commonly known as the Galata Bridge) spans the Golden Horn, connecting Fatih (which contains the ancient city of Byzantium, or Nova Roma, Megalopolis, Constantinople, Kostantiniyye, or Istanbul) with Karaköy (formerly Galata) – a link significant both in terms of literal bridging and that which is felt. It encourages the flow of people, connecting international trade ships and industry with traditional marketplaces, solidifying ties between districts, and opening up access to the city. It’s one of two pedestrian bridges that cross the estuary, along with a metro bridge and highway bridge, and its most recent iteration was completed in 1994.
A bridge was first built over the Golden Horn during the reign of Justinian the Great in the sixth century; in 1453, when the Ottomans captured the Byzantine Empire, a mobile bridge was assembled by placing ships side by side across the water; in 1502, Sultan Bayezid II commissioned plans from Leonardo, before inviting ideas from Michelangelo, and dismissing both; in 1836, Mahmud II had one built further up the waterway; in 1845, Valide Sultan, the mother of Sultan Abdülmecid, led the construction of the first bridge at the mouth of the estuary, which was replaced in 1863, again in 1875, and moved upstream in 1912; it was then replaced by a floating bridge, which stood until 1992, when it was badly damaged in a fire.
It is as significant a place to pause as it is to cross: beside the fishermen, people have gathered on the bridge in protest, have sat discussing opposing views over glasses of raki in restaurants on the lower level, played cards and tavla, bought lottery tickets, watched the sky turn bubblegum pink and dolphins leap from the water. It has been the subject of paintings, songs and stories, claimed to bring love or luck, and according to family lore, it’s where my Dede stood as a child selling matches.
Yasef Pepo Muraben would later own a hat factory, Pepo Şapka, where he made and repaired fedoras, on Yüksek Kaldırım (steep hill), Galata, a short walk from the bridge. The hill leads up to the Galata Tower, which was built in 1348 by the Genoese, and connects the upper areas of Pera (or Beyoğlu) with Galata (or Karaköy), which faces on to the Bosphorus.
Beyoğlu, on the European side of Istanbul, was first inhabited in the seventh century BC, during the Byzantine era. Shaped by its many populations (Byzantine, Greek, Genoese, Venetian, Ottoman), by the nineteenth century, its architecture, the markets, side streets, arcades and galleria, Armenian Catholic, Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches, grand historic mosques and Sephardic synagogues, formed a spatial marker of the many histories it had already encountered. The Grande Rue de Péra, now İstiklâl Caddesi, became home to various embassies and international schools, and was one of the first parts of Constantinople to have telephone lines, electricity, trams, municipal government and the funicular railway, Tünel. The avenue was lined with theatres, cinemas, patisserie and cafés selling chocolate mousse and profiteroles, Turkish coffee and muhallebi — a pudding popular during the Ottoman Empire, which is made with shredded chicken and thickened with rice flour, sprinkled in sugar and rose water. It is the namesake for muhallebici, pudding shops that continue to serve milk puddings with burnt tops, or sprinkled with cinnamon, stirred with mastic, almonds, pistachios, walnuts, or layered with paper-thin wafer.
Muhallebi are among many multi-specific descriptors for communal eating environments, in part because there was no Turkish word for restaurant. While it is fairly common to see adopted, phonetically spelt terms like ‘büfe’ or ‘restoran’, when the first lokanta (‘guest house’, or ‘inn’) opened in the nineteenth century – serving the people working in offices and embassies around Fatih and Beyoğlu – it provided a new opportunity for workers to congregate at tables to eat together. Esnaf lokantası (‘tradesman’s restaurant’) and ocakbaşı (‘fireside’, or ‘stand by the grill’) rose out of Ottoman eating culture; meyhane (‘house of wine’), which had been introduced during the Byzantine Empire, grew in popularity during the Ottoman period. Run by the city’s non-Muslim population in Galata, who could ignore the sultan’s rules on alcohol, they served meze, fish, wine and later raki to jubilant crowds in a ‘white-tablecloth-formal’ setting.
In the nineteenth century, meyhane opened on the Asian side of the city, in Üsküdar and Kadıköy – known in classical antiquity as Chrysopolis and Chalcedon. At the mouth of the Bosphorus where it joins the Sea of Marmara, and directly across from the old city, Üsküdar and Kadıköy hold harbours that, from the Byzantine period on, made them the starting point for all trade routes to Asia. Now, people cross the Bosphorus on ferries and taxi boats, criss-crossing with the freight liners that plough through the water, wooden fishing boats narrowly dodging their hulls.
Kadıköy is home to Hacı Bekir, the oldest recorded maker of Turkish delight; Baylan, a chocolate-maker and patisserie that serves candied chestnuts and kaymak (like clotted cream, but somehow more savoury, with a heavy top) and biscuits layered with jam, among wooden-clad and pastel panelled walls; Çiya, a restaurant once known to move people to tears with Anatolian home-style food that vividly tapped collective and personal food memories; and the place that may or may not have invented İskender kebap (thinly cut grilled lamb with tomato sauce served on pita, topped with melted sheep butter stirred with chilli and yogurt).
The area surrounding the ferry terminal also plays host to some of the city’s ‘dolphones’, scale replicas of dolphins with public telephones protruding from their rounded bellies. The dolphones are a relatively new phenomenon in Istanbul, but the city’s history with animal populations is long: it has been inhabited by huge numbers of stray cats and dogs for centuries, and developed foundations and methodologies for protecting wildlife since the Ottoman period. Although there is a long and lasting legacy of feeding, sheltering and healing animals, there have (and continue to be) cases of cruelty. In the early 1900s, Ottoman sultans banished the dogs to far-flung forests, and attempted to deport them to barren islands on the Marmara. However, archives hold records of organisations established to help street cats, dogs and wolves find food, treat injured horses and storks with broken wings, and build birdhouses, which were often affixed high on the walls of mosques, palaces and fountains. Kuş Köşkü (bird pavilions), güvercinlik (dovecots), and serçe saray (sparrow palaces) provided shelter, drinking water and food for the birds, and were thought to grant luck to the people who built them. They often mimic the design of their host structure, designed according to the principles of Ottoman architecture in miniature: multi-tier, elaborate pavilions with minarets, domes, towers and grand balconies, like wedding cakes cast in stone.
Practices of care and communion with the city’s animal populations remain a common and integral feature of Istanbul. This focus on care is grounded in a belief in the importance of treating animals well, since we can’t ask them for their forgiveness. Cat houses are commonplace in parks and on side-streets, built by municipalities, charities and local citizens. Wooden structures with gables, adapted cupboards with cut-out round or domed entrances, cardboard and wooden boxes are set up in parks and scattered along streets, with people gathering to feed the cats, stroke and play music to them. Stray dogs are more likely to be found sleeping on grass or pavements, and outside restaurants, often wearing collars to signify that they belong to the area. While the cats tend not to grow beyond their kittenish form, small and fragile in appearance, wily and agile in reality, the dogs take on cartoonish shapes, with breeds crossing chaotically, as if drawn by a child. The animals are rarely adopted, neither domesticated nor entirely stray, living alongside people, intertwined but independent.
Seagull- and eagle-shaped booths accompany the dolphones dotted along the city’s European and Asian waterfronts, some of which replace the haphazard telephones that had been strung to trees, their wires dipping between the elongated trunks like garlands. These improvised design approaches, a sort-of bricolage, are commonplace in Istanbul, and can be defined as halletmek, meaning to ‘sort out’, ‘bodge’, ‘tinker’ or ‘adjust’. Rather than waiting for top-down solutions — engaging in a cycle of constant consumerism, or relying on costly fixes — street traders, shopkeepers and restaurant owners, whole communities and individuals, find ways to circumvent rules, processes and conventions with artful ingenuity.
Empty styrofoam, plaited plastic and cardboard boxes are stacked up to become serving tables; giant plastic bottles are sliced through to become tunnels to hold offerings of cat food; trays are made into bowls by setting rolls of acrylic sheeting around their edge, held within their frame using the material tension of individually packaged hand wipes stuffed between metal and plastic. Outgrown pushchairs are set up as mobile market stands by replacing the seat with a flat tray and boxes of hazelnuts, pistachios and sunflower seeds; stools are fixed with string, tape and tree branches, or their seats balanced artfully on bollards.
The will to sort out or adjust is balanced with a sense of ceremony that feels equally integral to Istanbul. It is found in the architectural grandeur that trickles down from the historic city, to the balik ekmek boats; from the grand cafés that serve people who promenade on the avenues, to the fishing boats set up to sell tea to passersby on the waterfront promenade; from the elaborate bird palaces to improvised cat houses. It is found in the ritual offering of limon kolonyası (an anti-bacterial cologne originally scented with rose water, which has been mixed with bergamot, orange, rosemary and, most often, lemon since the sixteenth century), which is poured into your cupped hands or provided via white and gold packaged wipes, in restaurants, on buses, or when you arrive at gatherings at someone’s home. These seemingly opposing forces cross over in their grounding in an awareness of collectivity, in their generosity. Sharing knowledge and space, making rituals out of practicalities, or ‘something out of nothing’, is a way of acknowledging our interconnectedness — with people, with other species, with our environments, and the things with which we interact — and engaging productively with our histories, the present moment and potential futures, understanding how one impacts the other.
Initially, the sandwiches were a way for fishermen to make use of an abundant catch, setting up grills on deck and selling the balık ekmek to passers-by. As the city grew in population and scale, trades were industrialised, and the demand for food increased; the fish population, and the health of the water, diminished. Over the course of the twentieth century, an excess of fish was plundered by large-scale fisheries, and the fishermen who’d been offering balık ekmek fought the pressures of poor hauls and an increase in bureaucratic regulations, which resulted in limited access and high location rents. In 2007, independent fishing boats were replaced by a trio of permanent, licensed moorings at Eminönü, an area whose waterfront mostly serves tourists as they pass over Galata Bridge towards Topkapı Palace, the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia. While balık ekmek remained popular with locals, the fresh, low-cost lunch was now harder to find outside of Eminönü; with the exception of the intrepid set-ups of Karaköy street traders. Selling mackerel in lavash, they build tables out of stacked styrofoam boxes and tape, ready to dismantle, reassemble, or start from scratch, whether their stands are removed by officials, or they find a better spot.
The ‘Ottoman-style’ fishing boats were elaborately decorated, trimmed in gold, with proud monuments in the form of exaggerated, almost demonic sandwiches at their helm – fitting more closely with the ‘Disneyland-Arabesque’ tradition than anything faintly historical. Now providing as much a performance as a service, the balık ekmek boats contained fish that was equally removed from the origins of the tradition. Having first been caught by independent fishermen, before they were overtaken by Aegean fish farms, the whitefish was now imported on ice from Scandinavia, and bought in bulk from the wholesale market. In their grand position at Eminönü, vendors were under pressure to keep up with high demand, while maintaining low prices; even as local fish stocks plummeted and wholesale prices skyrocketed.
The three boats were formalised as the Balık Ekmek Turizm Kooperatifi (Fish Bread Tourism Cooperative), but in 2019 were told that their leases would not be renewed, meaning they would have to vacate by 1 November. The Cooperative made a legal challenge, arguing that balık ekmek was not only part of the historical fabric of Istanbul (in both its traditional and neo-Ottoman form), but had provided jobs for, and fed, generations of people. As it stands, the boats remain. As do the street traders selling midye dolma (mussels stuffed with rice), lokma (deep fried dough balls soaked in honey), tursu (sour pickles) and simit (circular bread, dipped in molasses and sesame seeds) from trays, carts and the backs of mopeds; as well as the fishermen who still line the bridge.
The Karaköy Bridge (commonly known as the Galata Bridge) spans the Golden Horn, connecting Fatih (which contains the ancient city of Byzantium, or Nova Roma, Megalopolis, Constantinople, Kostantiniyye, or Istanbul) with Karaköy (formerly Galata) – a link significant both in terms of literal bridging and that which is felt. It encourages the flow of people, connecting international trade ships and industry with traditional marketplaces, solidifying ties between districts, and opening up access to the city. It’s one of two pedestrian bridges that cross the estuary, along with a metro bridge and highway bridge, and its most recent iteration was completed in 1994.
A bridge was first built over the Golden Horn during the reign of Justinian the Great in the sixth century; in 1453, when the Ottomans captured the Byzantine Empire, a mobile bridge was assembled by placing ships side by side across the water; in 1502, Sultan Bayezid II commissioned plans from Leonardo, before inviting ideas from Michelangelo, and dismissing both; in 1836, Mahmud II had one built further up the waterway; in 1845, Valide Sultan, the mother of Sultan Abdülmecid, led the construction of the first bridge at the mouth of the estuary, which was replaced in 1863, again in 1875, and moved upstream in 1912; it was then replaced by a floating bridge, which stood until 1992, when it was badly damaged in a fire.
It is as significant a place to pause as it is to cross: beside the fishermen, people have gathered on the bridge in protest, have sat discussing opposing views over glasses of raki in restaurants on the lower level, played cards and tavla, bought lottery tickets, watched the sky turn bubblegum pink and dolphins leap from the water. It has been the subject of paintings, songs and stories, claimed to bring love or luck, and according to family lore, it’s where my Dede stood as a child selling matches.
Yasef Pepo Muraben would later own a hat factory, Pepo Şapka, where he made and repaired fedoras, on Yüksek Kaldırım (steep hill), Galata, a short walk from the bridge. The hill leads up to the Galata Tower, which was built in 1348 by the Genoese, and connects the upper areas of Pera (or Beyoğlu) with Galata (or Karaköy), which faces on to the Bosphorus.
Beyoğlu, on the European side of Istanbul, was first inhabited in the seventh century BC, during the Byzantine era. Shaped by its many populations (Byzantine, Greek, Genoese, Venetian, Ottoman), by the nineteenth century, its architecture, the markets, side streets, arcades and galleria, Armenian Catholic, Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches, grand historic mosques and Sephardic synagogues, formed a spatial marker of the many histories it had already encountered. The Grande Rue de Péra, now İstiklâl Caddesi, became home to various embassies and international schools, and was one of the first parts of Constantinople to have telephone lines, electricity, trams, municipal government and the funicular railway, Tünel. The avenue was lined with theatres, cinemas, patisserie and cafés selling chocolate mousse and profiteroles, Turkish coffee and muhallebi — a pudding popular during the Ottoman Empire, which is made with shredded chicken and thickened with rice flour, sprinkled in sugar and rose water. It is the namesake for muhallebici, pudding shops that continue to serve milk puddings with burnt tops, or sprinkled with cinnamon, stirred with mastic, almonds, pistachios, walnuts, or layered with paper-thin wafer.
Muhallebi are among many multi-specific descriptors for communal eating environments, in part because there was no Turkish word for restaurant. While it is fairly common to see adopted, phonetically spelt terms like ‘büfe’ or ‘restoran’, when the first lokanta (‘guest house’, or ‘inn’) opened in the nineteenth century – serving the people working in offices and embassies around Fatih and Beyoğlu – it provided a new opportunity for workers to congregate at tables to eat together. Esnaf lokantası (‘tradesman’s restaurant’) and ocakbaşı (‘fireside’, or ‘stand by the grill’) rose out of Ottoman eating culture; meyhane (‘house of wine’), which had been introduced during the Byzantine Empire, grew in popularity during the Ottoman period. Run by the city’s non-Muslim population in Galata, who could ignore the sultan’s rules on alcohol, they served meze, fish, wine and later raki to jubilant crowds in a ‘white-tablecloth-formal’ setting.
In the nineteenth century, meyhane opened on the Asian side of the city, in Üsküdar and Kadıköy – known in classical antiquity as Chrysopolis and Chalcedon. At the mouth of the Bosphorus where it joins the Sea of Marmara, and directly across from the old city, Üsküdar and Kadıköy hold harbours that, from the Byzantine period on, made them the starting point for all trade routes to Asia. Now, people cross the Bosphorus on ferries and taxi boats, criss-crossing with the freight liners that plough through the water, wooden fishing boats narrowly dodging their hulls.
Kadıköy is home to Hacı Bekir, the oldest recorded maker of Turkish delight; Baylan, a chocolate-maker and patisserie that serves candied chestnuts and kaymak (like clotted cream, but somehow more savoury, with a heavy top) and biscuits layered with jam, among wooden-clad and pastel panelled walls; Çiya, a restaurant once known to move people to tears with Anatolian home-style food that vividly tapped collective and personal food memories; and the place that may or may not have invented İskender kebap (thinly cut grilled lamb with tomato sauce served on pita, topped with melted sheep butter stirred with chilli and yogurt).
The area surrounding the ferry terminal also plays host to some of the city’s ‘dolphones’, scale replicas of dolphins with public telephones protruding from their rounded bellies. The dolphones are a relatively new phenomenon in Istanbul, but the city’s history with animal populations is long: it has been inhabited by huge numbers of stray cats and dogs for centuries, and developed foundations and methodologies for protecting wildlife since the Ottoman period. Although there is a long and lasting legacy of feeding, sheltering and healing animals, there have (and continue to be) cases of cruelty. In the early 1900s, Ottoman sultans banished the dogs to far-flung forests, and attempted to deport them to barren islands on the Marmara. However, archives hold records of organisations established to help street cats, dogs and wolves find food, treat injured horses and storks with broken wings, and build birdhouses, which were often affixed high on the walls of mosques, palaces and fountains. Kuş Köşkü (bird pavilions), güvercinlik (dovecots), and serçe saray (sparrow palaces) provided shelter, drinking water and food for the birds, and were thought to grant luck to the people who built them. They often mimic the design of their host structure, designed according to the principles of Ottoman architecture in miniature: multi-tier, elaborate pavilions with minarets, domes, towers and grand balconies, like wedding cakes cast in stone.
Practices of care and communion with the city’s animal populations remain a common and integral feature of Istanbul. This focus on care is grounded in a belief in the importance of treating animals well, since we can’t ask them for their forgiveness. Cat houses are commonplace in parks and on side-streets, built by municipalities, charities and local citizens. Wooden structures with gables, adapted cupboards with cut-out round or domed entrances, cardboard and wooden boxes are set up in parks and scattered along streets, with people gathering to feed the cats, stroke and play music to them. Stray dogs are more likely to be found sleeping on grass or pavements, and outside restaurants, often wearing collars to signify that they belong to the area. While the cats tend not to grow beyond their kittenish form, small and fragile in appearance, wily and agile in reality, the dogs take on cartoonish shapes, with breeds crossing chaotically, as if drawn by a child. The animals are rarely adopted, neither domesticated nor entirely stray, living alongside people, intertwined but independent.
Seagull- and eagle-shaped booths accompany the dolphones dotted along the city’s European and Asian waterfronts, some of which replace the haphazard telephones that had been strung to trees, their wires dipping between the elongated trunks like garlands. These improvised design approaches, a sort-of bricolage, are commonplace in Istanbul, and can be defined as halletmek, meaning to ‘sort out’, ‘bodge’, ‘tinker’ or ‘adjust’. Rather than waiting for top-down solutions — engaging in a cycle of constant consumerism, or relying on costly fixes — street traders, shopkeepers and restaurant owners, whole communities and individuals, find ways to circumvent rules, processes and conventions with artful ingenuity.
Empty styrofoam, plaited plastic and cardboard boxes are stacked up to become serving tables; giant plastic bottles are sliced through to become tunnels to hold offerings of cat food; trays are made into bowls by setting rolls of acrylic sheeting around their edge, held within their frame using the material tension of individually packaged hand wipes stuffed between metal and plastic. Outgrown pushchairs are set up as mobile market stands by replacing the seat with a flat tray and boxes of hazelnuts, pistachios and sunflower seeds; stools are fixed with string, tape and tree branches, or their seats balanced artfully on bollards.
The will to sort out or adjust is balanced with a sense of ceremony that feels equally integral to Istanbul. It is found in the architectural grandeur that trickles down from the historic city, to the balik ekmek boats; from the grand cafés that serve people who promenade on the avenues, to the fishing boats set up to sell tea to passersby on the waterfront promenade; from the elaborate bird palaces to improvised cat houses. It is found in the ritual offering of limon kolonyası (an anti-bacterial cologne originally scented with rose water, which has been mixed with bergamot, orange, rosemary and, most often, lemon since the sixteenth century), which is poured into your cupped hands or provided via white and gold packaged wipes, in restaurants, on buses, or when you arrive at gatherings at someone’s home. These seemingly opposing forces cross over in their grounding in an awareness of collectivity, in their generosity. Sharing knowledge and space, making rituals out of practicalities, or ‘something out of nothing’, is a way of acknowledging our interconnectedness — with people, with other species, with our environments, and the things with which we interact — and engaging productively with our histories, the present moment and potential futures, understanding how one impacts the other.