Outskirting Istanbul Part 1: Bakirkőy

Şırdan

Let's just state the obvious: I love Istanbul. This blog began as a diary while working for Time Out! travel guidebooks, which allowed us to visit Istanbul several times for longer stays. One of the perks of living in East Europe is easy access to the former Ottoman Empire. Thus I was reading my own old blog posts to remind me just how much Istanbul had changed since 2008. Istanbul has always been a center of cutting edge urban technology balanced by a sense of Rube-Goldbergesque Anatolian "Turknology." The subways are science-fiction slick and there are no longer any donkeys rambling along the streets (that I could see) but you can still get lamb head sandwiches from sidewalk carts. The problem for the budget traveler - and the average Turkish citizen - is that the lamb head sandwiches have become expensive. Turkey experienced a sharp 64% inflationary spiral in 2023 as a result of boneheaded economic policy (Islamic banking, anyone?)  and a bout of cryptocurrency fever tinged with nationalism, and things have not improved since then. A peek at my first blog post in 2008 mentions the cost of a pide at about one euro, and a plate of adana kebab for three Euros. Today that pide is about $8 and the kebab plate will be $12. And the average working Turk is making roughly the same low wage.

Here is a not so secret tip: if you travel with Turkish Airlines from countries not neighboring Turkey, Turkish Air offers stopover options including the first night in a hotel free and discount hotel rates for up to a week in an effort to promote tourism. Regardless of the bad press Turkish Air received about being infested with bedbugs - I did not notice any - Turkish Airlines remains one of my favorites. They offered the best rate from Budapest to New York, and they offer a stopover option to visit Istanbul. The airline food is excellent. The legroom makes other airlines seem laughable, and the service on the air is wonderful. It makes you nostalgic for the era of state-owned Airlines. On the other hand, the ticketing procedure - online and on the phone - is very buggy. We had booking problems, but we survived and I would still happily fly with them in the future.

Bakirkőy

The procedure for the stopover is to register by email with Turkish Airlines and they assign you to a four or five star hotel of their choosing. Most of these hotels are outside of the city center, but near public transport. We were put up at the Atakőy Ramada in Bakirkőy, a seaside suburb west of the old city walls. Bakirkőy is where the old Istanbul Airport was located before they moved to Aranvutkőy, an hour north of Istanbul proper, and so it has several high end former airport hotels. (Fun fact: it includes Yesilkőy, was where the Treaty of San Stefano was signed in 1878 ending the Russo-Turkish war.) It is also a bustling neighborhood with universities, shopping centers, market streets crammed with cafes and restaurants, and not a tourist in sight. We liked it enough to book a few extra Turkish Airline discount nights at the Ramada, because of the convenience of the Maramaray railway station a few blocks away, and the the fact that the Ramada offered an amazing Turkish breakfast. (Also: A five star hotel at motel prices!)

Breakfast is for yourself

Turks like breakfast - they tend to go a bit overboard, and we gazed into a treasury of Turkish style salads, breads, jams, and even a huge hanging honeycomb to slice into your yogurt. There is a saying in Turkish: "dinner is time for friends, but breakfast is for yourself." We found a small kebab shop on a side street near our hotel and were treated like the first tourists to have ever entered. A lot of the kebab shops specialize in specific regional styles of Anatolian cuisine. We lucked into one serving Antep food: freshly baked flat bread and lamajun came to the table with some local dry white cheese, and kőfte kebab - ground beef mini burgers from heaven.

Beefier than Shake Shack!

I make no bones about it: I go to Turkey to eat meat. The area around the Kadinlar Pazar ("Girls market", also known as the Siirt market) near the Aqueduct in the Fatih neighborhood is my personal mecca for meat. Fatih is one of the more conservative Muslim districts of Istanbul - when we first visited a lot of our progressive cool friends advised us not to go and they were absolutely wrong. Fatih is Istanbul at its untouristed best - and the food at the Kadinlar pazar is the best of the best. The restaurants that circle the square specialize in cuisine from southeastern Turkey - towns like Siirt, Gaziantep, Diyarbakir, and Mardin and the areas near the Syrian border, especially tandir: pit-roasted lamb called büryan kebab. We arbitrarily chose one place just off of the square: Şırdanci Mehmet.

The pit roasted lamb of my dreams

For ten bucks we got a portion of büryan  - a meat so aromatic and addictive that it has come to rival my allegiance to Katz's Deli pastrami - but I also had to try the Chef's special - sırdan. Şırdan, a specialty of the southeast of Turkey, is a stewed lamb's stomach stuffed with a spicy Anatolian rice pilaf. If you like barnyard aromas and chewy meat, it hits the spot. It does, however, look like a giant dick, a point not lost on the host whose Instagram features literally hundreds of bad joke setups in which women jump up in terror at the sight of one of Chef Mehmet's Juicy Johnsons. This aptly represents the present state of comedy in Fatih. 

Is that a Kurdish stuffed tripe in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? 

Bakirkőy is a convenient stop on the Marmaray metro line, which at one point runs underneath the Bosporus connecting European Istanbul to Asia. Yes, there is the active Anatolian fault which has caused catastrophic earthquakes multiple times in Istanbul's history. Yes, some of the engineers that built the Maramaray have stated that they would not ride it through the Bosporus tunnel. Did this stop me from using it? No. This made getting into central Istanbul from Bakirkőy easy - and we headed to the Kapali Carsi, the great covered bazaar to do a bit of consumption. The bazaar functions both for local folks and tourists as it has for centuries: a massive drain down which to throw all your supplementary cash.

We didn't buy a lot in the main bazaar - a few things from the Afghani antique dealers who have colonized one corner of the bazaar since our first visit in 2000. The young boy fumie photographed back then was now running his own shop, and we got a few gifts for the folks back home. We long ago learned how to avoid Carpet Buying Syndrome - we simply don't engage the friendly rug salesmen in any conversation. The one time we broke that rule back in August 2000... I wound up schlepping a full room sized Turkmen knotted kilim back to Budapest on the train. It still lives on our bedroom floor. (Can you blame me? It was $125. As they say in the rug business: those were the days!) 

I also managed to control my musical instrument acquisition syndrome (but... a tulum? You don't have a tulum!). I have a student quality baglama saz I bought twenty years ago, and thanks to YouTube tutorials I can manage a few Anatolian Alevi melodies, but I knew that if I was placed in the middle of one of those shops where a few hundred exquisite instruments hanging from the walls I would walk out a much poorer man. If I need to play something I already have a fiddle.

Need garlic?

After a day in Bakirkőy on the European side we moved ourselves to lodgings across the Bosporus to Kadikőy on the Asian side of Istanbul. Ever since our first visit we stayed in Beyoglu, usually in the area near the Galata Tower, but we wanted to explore some new neighborhoods, and for the food-obsessed, Kadikőy is the spot. Less touristed, Kadikőy is where local Turks go out for a night on the town, drawn by the bars and beer halls that are nonexistent in more conservative nabes up the road like Uskudar. More on that in the next post.