In Charismatic Istanbul, the Past Still Shapes the Present
Øivind Haug
On a damp morning in Istanbul, I pay a visit to Zeyrek Çinili Hamam, a recently unveiled museum in a 500-year-old public bathhouse that once echoed with the chatter of the Ottoman middle class. Getting there involves zigzagging through the winding cobbled streets of Zeyrek, one of four UNESCO World Heritage sites in Istanbul. It was a holy place 1,000 years ago, during the Byzantine Empire, but these days it's uncharted territory for most Istanbulites. Few people are out: only the odd chain-smoking vegetable vendor and some meandering octogenarians doing their grocery shopping. The fall air smells faintly of raw meat, thanks to the butchers who have long populated the neighborhood. Trying to make sense of Google Maps on my phone, I almost collide with several men haphazardly carrying a sheep carcass from a van. I am lost. Or at least I think I am, until I realize that I've passed the hammam four or five times without noticing its domed roof.
As happens so often in Istanbul, the past is staring right at me, even when I don't see it.
My first plane flight, when I was six months old, was to Turkey. Since then, I've visited Istanbul more times than I can count. I have hazy memories of summer trips to see relatives in the 1990s: spitting watermelon seeds into the Bosphorus with my cousins; crying on a stifling August day after being stung by a bee; getting brain freeze from a cherry dondurma; listening to “Careless Whisper” playing on a taxi radio.
My father's deep connection to the country kept us returning. He grew up in the southern city of Adana, where my grandfather Danış—a handsome man I know only through photographs—was once the mayor. Dad left for London at 19 to train as an architect, but our family home is lined with photographs and ephemera collected by the previous generations. Now 79, he says he still dreams in Turkish.
Despite all of this living in my consciousness, I've never felt a tangible connection with this half of my identity. Growing up in central London in an English-speaking household, I thought of Turkey as a distant acquaintance I couldn't quite place, regardless of the endless mispronunciations of my name that made me all the more aware of my Turkishness. Later, when I was a teenager in the wake of 9/11, it seemed easier to be British than Turkish. Only in recent years have I learned that possessing a lineage to two places, two cultures, is infinitely more interesting than to one.
So I'd come to Istanbul to get to know the country on my own terms and to ask myself: Who might I have become if my parents had chosen to settle in Turkey? In a country famous for its dichotomies—old and new, conservative and liberal, East and West—there is a generation of creative millennials who, like me, are trying to figure out their own relationship to this culture, while also making their own mark on this multifaceted city. Perhaps, I thought, the answer might lie with them.
Istanbul has had a rough go since I last visited in 2017. Besides the pandemic, the city has endured tense presidential and local elections and the ripple effect of the devastating 2023 earthquake in southern Turkey. And yet the city is full of promise: The 2018 opening of Istanbul Airport, the city's second international aviation hub and now one of the world's busiest, ushered in a new chapter for the metropolis. It was followed in 2021 by Galataport, a shiny shopping center and cruise terminal.
Walking through Galataport, I feel a long way from spitting watermelon seeds into the Bosphorus with my cousins. Seven years ago this half-mile stretch of buzzy Karaköy was populated mostly by fishermen and chestnut roasters; now hulking cruise ships abound. There's the impressive Renzo Piano–designed Istanbul Modern and a slick pedestrian shopping area that bears little relation to the stacked antique shops of nearby Beyoğlu. At one end sits the new Peninsula Istanbul, inhabiting a collection of early-20th-century buildings from which you can view centuries of Ottoman architecture across the Bosphorus.
This ostentatious $1.7 billion development might be the official face of change in Istanbul, but the city is evolving in subtler and more eccentric ways, often by reexamining its past. Zeyrek Çinili Hamam is a good example. After a 13-year restoration project, it now exhibits local and international artists alongside historical artifacts. It reopened this past May as a functioning hammam for the neighborhood—unusual in a city where so many bathhouses are aimed at tourists.
“In 16th-century Ottoman society, hammams were gathering points where social identities or social class didn't matter,” Anlam Arslanoğlu de Coster, an artistic director at Zeyrek Çinili Hamam, tells me as we stroll through the intricately tiled women's quarters. “In today's Istanbul, the city is so massive, and so dispersed, that even within our communities, we don't really have intimate spaces to gather in that way.” Mementos of that earlier time were unearthed during the restoration process: remnants of Roman candles; shards of glassware; more than 3,000 fragments of intricately decorated Iznik tiles; an underground Byzantine cistern. “We forget how layered this city is,” she says.
Later I go to lunch at the popular Karaköy Lokantası with Mina Dilber, a former journalist at CNN Turkey and the founder of the joyful clothing and lifestyle brand Anim. As we graze on mince-stuffed zucchini, artichokes soaked in olive oil, a rich lamb and tomato stew, and buttery rice, she recounts a family history in textiles that goes back to Ottoman times. Young Turks aren't entering into the textile business as often as the generations before them, but Dilber, contemplating a career change, became curious about her heritage. “I have it,” she says. “I know it. I should embrace it.”
We finish with a shallow bowl of kazandibi, a type of caramelized milk pudding, and an order of lokum—a traditional confection also referred to as Turkish delight—infused with raki. Between bites of these sweet treats, Dilber scrutinizes me for a second before asking, because of my last name, if I might be related to a friend of hers. And somehow, in a city of more than 15 million people, it turns out I am. Dilber knows my cousin Defne. We agree to start a WhatsApp thread and get drinks the next night.
I've come to Istanbul to understand my roots, but while I'm here I meet people who are planting new ones. One evening I zip past fluttering flags celebrating a century of Turkish independence to meet Anya von Bremzen, author of the recent book National Dish, which explores the relationship between nationalism and food. She's offered to take me on a tour of Little Syria, part of the historic Fatih neighborhood. Approximately 3.3 million Syrians have crossed into Turkey since 2011, and more than 532,000 live in Istanbul. Not unlike in America, anti-migrant sentiment is on the rise across Turkey, just as the new arrivals have begun impacting the culture of their adopted home.
We spend a few hours traversing stores and restaurants lined with buckets of Syrian pistachios, vats of tahini that we sample, stacks of silver tea trays, and baskets of dried roses. At the shoebox-size Buuzecedi, which was transplanted here straight from Damascus, an Arabic soap opera plays on the television as we order fatteh—a Levantine dish packed with crispy pita bread, chickpeas, tahini, and pistachios, and topped with ghee—along with a basket of falafel. You can find this dish in Syria, but also in Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon; it transcends the artificial borders that were drawn and redrawn during and after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. It reminds me of my own connections to Syria. My great-grandmother was born in Damascus; another ancestor was its governor.
Much of my family in this part of the world now lives in Arnavutköy and Bebek, two tranquil, moneyed neighborhoods that creep up from the Bosphorus into the hills. The colorful wood houses and fishing boats bobbing on the water take me straight back to the '90s—long, hot afternoons filled with walks to the ice cream parlor with my dad and great-uncle Korkut, who owned a talking parrot, and evenings spent running around with my cousins while the adults drank wine and smoked on the terrace of the family home.
I go to Arnavutköy to visit jewelry designer Rafael Indiana Cemo Çetin at his studio, a beautiful appointment-only space inside an old Ottoman building with high ceilings and kilims thrown casually over wood floorboards. Çetin, who starts his mornings by jumping into the Bosphorus for a swim (“like in the Amalfi”), recently moved back to Istanbul to start his own brand after a stint as a filmmaker in New York. He bases his designs, which have already been picked up by cult label Maryam Nassir Zadeh, on ancient coins he finds in the “underbelly” of the Grand Bazaar. He has these discoveries engraved by an artisan in Adana, where my dad played as a child, near the epicenter of the 2023 quake. “One piece of jewelry goes through a life of processes,” he says.
Later I have my drinks date with Dilber and my cousin at Bebek Hotel by the Stay, a beloved (and recently spruced-up) 1950s property on the water. The early-fall weather is pleasantly cool, a breeze carrying the call to prayer below the hum of party boats. Inevitably we drink too much, and Dilber and I end up running late for dinner with her boyfriend, Fatih Tutak, who has promised to walk us through the menu at his new restaurant, Gallada, on the roof of the Peninsula. Rush hour traffic is at a standstill, so Dilber calls a water taxi. Suddenly we're flying along the Bosphorus, icons like the Dolmabahçe Palace flashing past us. Our driver keeps one hand on the wheel and the other on his phone. This is how you get to dinner Istanbul-style.
The 39-year-old Tutak, whose Gallada is the only two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Turkey, has brought many traditional Turkish recipes into a fine-dining setting for the first time. His debut restaurant, Turk Fatih Tutak, opened in 2019 to great acclaim, so Gallada has been majorly hyped. Dinner is a glitzy Istanbul night out with a crowd to match, the food an adventurous fusion of familiar Turkish flavors with far-flung ones that Tutak discovered during restaurant stints across Asia. It's part ode to the Silk Road, part nod to the Peninsula's long history in Hong Kong. No good Turkish meal is complete without lamb, and there's plenty of it here, from the shashlık kebab sprinkled with shavings of vinegar-soaked red onion to my favorite, the Adana kebab dumpling, an unexpected play on a classic southern dish, grilled on an open mangal, which my dad grew up eating. There are other memorable bites, like tiny skinless tomatoes soaked in yuzu that we pop into our mouths like candy and a warm Medjool-date cake soaked with masala tea.
I ask Tutak about his approach to the cuisine of his homeland. After traveling around Turkey for a few months, he told me, he found himself drawn to what he describes as regional multiculturalism. “The food can change here within just two kilometers,” he explains as he refills my wine glass, a tattoo peeking from his sleeve. “The same dish can be cooked in different villages, in the same region, in completely different styles. The world still has no fucking clue about Turkish cuisine. I'm only just discovering it right now! The more I travel around Turkey, the more I learn.”
Sanayi, an industrial neighborhood filled with old car-repair shops, feels a long way from the buzz of Gallada. In recent years an artist community has taken hold there, and Enis Karavil, a well-groomed interior designer in his 30s, has offered to take me on a tour of its studio spaces. Each appears to be in as much flux as Istanbul itself, crowded with vast work-in-progress sculptures and chaotically stacked canvases as well as unexpected pockets of quietude; in a pottery studio a dog snoozes peacefully next to a wood-burning stove. Eventually we reach Sanayi313, the black-lacquered concept store and gallery that Karavil owns with his brother, Amir, where we eat lunch among thrifted antiques and the store's own furniture designs. As we part ways, Karavil splashes me with a dash of Etem Ruhi cologne, a fragrance introduced over a century ago by a local haberdasher and recently resurrected. It's a characteristically Turkish gesture, I later learn, when hosting guests at your home.
My next stop is Marsel Delights, a Bomonti shop and tasting room that specializes in lokum. Its proprietor, Selim Cenkel, is eager to convince me that there is more to lokum than kitschy storefronts slinging powdery pistachio flavors to tourists. His small team produces 100 kilos of the stuff here each day, in flavors like sour cherry, rose with blackberries, and mastic, a type of tree resin. These are “flavor profiles that come from the richness of the region's products,” says Cenkel. Like Dilber, he saw an opportunity to reinvent a Turkish product that had been virtually unchanged for centuries—no easy feat in a country that can be deeply conservative about its heritage. “You can't touch tradition,” he says. “People think that you're out of your mind to modify it.”
But Cenkel has, and the results are fantastic. In the back, he shares a wasabi concoction made for the Istanbul Nobu, followed by something a bit more classic: pomegranate with raspberry and sumac. The sweet, chewy cubes encapsulate modern Turkey. “After years of working, I wanted to do something from scratch,” he says. “But I wanted it to be linked to my culture.”
We're all searching for those links. I spent one morning wandering the Çukurcuma district of Beyoğlu, popping into tiny junk shops to sift through piles of old postcards and vintage ashtrays. I paused to pet a stray cat and realized, in a moment of kismet, that I was outside Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence. It's a companion piece to the Nobel Prize–winning author's novel of the same name, which charts its protagonist's obsession with building a repository of memories to honor his first love—and the bygone city where they met. Housed in a tiny 19th-century building, it is a fictional museum of life in Istanbul.
Inside, I couldn't believe how familiar the photographs on display felt: men and women who looked and dressed like the grandparents, great-uncles, and great-aunts in the black-and-white images that fill my parents' house. The sheer quantity of the pictures, hung alongside movie posters and trinkets and matchboxes, reminded me of my dad's collection of his own memories of Turkey: thick albums of family snapshots; the EP he played drums on with his high school band. What I'd always seen as an idiosyncrasy suddenly looked like a cultural trait. It turned out I'd had the answers about my roots all along. I'd grown up surrounded by them—just as my father had intended.
Where to stay
The Peninsula Istanbul which took over a collection of century-old buildings along the Bosphorus last year, wows with its grand Bauhaus-era lobby, rooftop restaurant by two-Michelin-starred chef Fatih Tutak, and sleek interiors by Zeynep Fadıllıoğlu, who also designed Istanbul's carbon-neutral Şakirin Mosque. True to Peninsula form, the 177 rooms and suites come with monochromatic palettes of black and cream, thick Tai Ping carpets, and next-level tech. The spa has a marble hammam. More historic is Çırağan Palace Kempinski Istanbul. First built as a gift for a 17th-century sultan's daughter, it remains an opulent oasis of plush red velvet, gilded details, and marble. And the recently renovated Bebek Hotel by the Stay, farther down the water, has suites done up in jewel tones that overlook the water.
Where to eat and drink
High up in a 1960s villa in the hills above waterside Bebek, Arkestra recently won its first Michelin star. The downstairs restaurant is pure Mad Men, with mahogany-paneled walls and brown leather banquets, while a new, second dining room is more showy, with cherry-red drapery and mirrored walls. After enjoying small plates like grilled baby squid and beef sandos, guests can visit a listening room for cocktails and local DJs. For more classic food, Karaköy Lokantası has some of the best mezze; locals go at lunchtime for a spread of dolma, lamb koftë, and stuffed artichokes in olive oil. Blue-tiled Pandeli, inside the Egyptian Bazaar, was awarded a Bib Gourmand by Michelin in 2022 for its mezze and smartly comforting dishes like spicy wood-fired chicken.
Where to shop
Istanbul shopping is all about craftsmanship and local designers. Midnight carries cutting-edge womenswear and menswear labels along with a curated jewelry collection. In bohemian Çukurcuma, A La Turca stocks handwoven kilims, each sourced and restored by owner Erkal Aksoy, in addition to ceramics and antiques. At Marsel Delights in the Bomonti district, proprietors Selim Cenkel and Tuğçe Cenkel specialize in tradition-bending, produce-driven lokum (a.k.a. Turkish delight), in flavors like sour cherry or mastic. They also sell a small range of lace placemats and ceramic evil eyes.
This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
