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Beyoglu's
ornate Çiçek
Pasaji (Flower Passage)
on Istiklal
Caddesi at Galatasaray Square is
filled with restaurants.
Each evening the tables are filled
with Turks and foreigners who come
to talk, eat, laugh and linger over
dozens of plates of meze, succulent kebaps,
seafood, sweet desserts, and glass
after glass of milky Turkish raki, beer or wine.
The Pasaj is a shrine to Turks' love
of long, congenial group dinners,
but...the Pasaj has no flowers.
So why the name?
The Çiçek Pasaji is
the L-shaped courtyard of a building
named Cité de Péra, one
of the first European-style buildings
constructed during the Ottoman
Empire's late-19th-century effort
to modernize.
In its 19th- and early 20th-century
heyday the Cité de
Péra building
housed posh shops on its ground floor
in the Pasaj, and offices on the floors
above.
By the time I arrived in 1968, the
Pasaj had become a bunch of workmen's meyhanes (tavernas)
serving cheap but good food and strong
drinks.
The shops were now all simple restaurants.
Beer barrels were rolled out into the
Pasaj, square slabs of marble placed
atop them, low three-legged stools
set around, and Istanbul's taxi drivers,
craftsmen and minor merchants came
to eat, talk, shout, sing, and sometimes
drink a bit too much.
It was a jolly place,
with itinerant musicians, vendors,
pimps and catamites circulating freely—and
getting lots of business.
Then, in the late 1980s, about a century
after it was built, part of the Cité de
Péra collapsed.
The building was closed.
But Turkey's tourism boom had
arrived, so the building was restored,
renovated and re-opened as a more upscale
eating-and-drinking locale for a somewhat
richer class of patrons. The patchwork
of tarps sheltering it from the elements
was replaced with a modern canopy.
A dinner at one of the restaurants
in the Çiçek
Pasaji is now noticeably more sedate
and refined than when I first
dined there almost four decades ago.
Where did all the rowdies
go?
Around the corner andup the street (Sahne
Sokak) past the Armenian Church
of the Three Altars (Üç Horan
Kilisesi) to Nevizade
Sokak, a narrow street lined
with little restaurants.
In good weather Nevizade
Sokak is filled with tables,
chairs, waiters and diners. The jolly
atmosphere of the old Çiçek
Pasaji reigns, with several
updates: women are most definitely
welcome and included, and there are
fewer pimps and catamites.
But wait a minute—what about
the flowers?
When I first saw it, the Pasaj had
no flower shops, but neighboring Sahne
Sokak had several. But according
to a TTP user who served as a Marine
guard at the American Consulate-General
in the Palazzo Corpi nearby on Mesrutiyet
Caddesi, in the late 1950s most of
the shops in the Pasaj sold flowers,
and only a few were restaurants.
"It's good to know you were able
to dine off a slab of marble," he
wrote. "All we were offered
was a square of plywood."
Even more surprising is this: "I
visited it last year [2002] and even
met a waiter who befriended us Yanks
way back then and actually
remembered me from 1958."
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