All the Lost Istanbuls

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The winter wind is inescapable in seaside Kadıköy. Those parts of Istanbul close to the Bosporus endure four months of the year under relentless gusts from the Black Sea and the Caucasus, and this mid-November evening in 2021 was no exception  I was hurriedly running errands before returning to Vienna, buying gifts for my friends—Turkish students in my graduate program. The past decade had turned a generation of Turkish citizens into exiles, with my friends fleeing to Austria to escape economic dysfunction, right-wing populism, and political violence. Many of those here in Kadıköy, on Istanbul’s Asian side, had recently fled the decline of Beyoğlu, the city’s historic cultural center dating back to the Ottoman period. 

On the wall of a building on Moda Avenue was an advertisement for the Turkish Netflix series Kulüp [The Club]. One of the protagonists, the innovative singer-showman Selim Songür, looked out over the street, his ostentatious makeup, outfit and demeanor serving as the only permissible hints at the character’s queerness. The show, set in 1950s Beyoğlu, portrayed the lives of the city’s remaining minorities, a Ladino-speaking Jewish mother and daughter, a Crypto-Greek businessman, and the singer staring back at me. It seemed appropriate, I realized, that this poster loomed over Kadıköy. The melancholic longing for a lost time in Istanbul’s history, a time of cultural dynamism and tolerance in the old European center of the city, was pervasive here.  

Men and women of my generation here in Kadıköy were already nostalgic for the İstanbul of 2004––of the club Babylon, the films of Fatih Akin, of time at Boğaziçi. We were nostalgic for this Istanbul even before it ended with the Gezi Park protests, and in the most Istanbul of solutions, we dealt with our nostalgia for the recent past by indulging in nostalgia for more distant periods, with shows like Kulüp and bands like the 1970s retro funk band Altın Gün.  Millennials everywhere were reluctant to abandon the skinny jeans of our youth even as they began to chafe and buckle under the gut of oncoming middle age, but here, on Moda Avenue, the reluctance to let go was all there was. Between the middling rock bars and the frozen cafes, there was a poster of the fictional Songür—singing to no one, alone, on a windy street.

I noted the irony, and headed to Meyhane-i Ara.

The History of Turkey as a Meyhane

The most beloved article in recent Soviet historiography is Yuri Slezkine’s “The USSR as a Communal Apartment,” which explains the history of ethnic difference in the Soviet Union through the lens of socialist communal housing. Turkey’s last two centuries of elite and minority relations could similarly be told through the meyhane. Derived from Persian meaning “wine house,” these are Turkey’s counterparts to the Balkan kafana and the Greek taverna—a shared Ottoman tradition that developed around drinking coffee or alcohol, and eating small plates called meze, similar to Spanish tapas. Through the years, all manner of patrons have come to these establishments.

Turkish states have followed a recurring pattern: they lift up certain communities to prominence in the nation’s commercial and political life, only to later tear them down in the pursuit of a new power base that is “yerli ve milli” [national and local]. This pattern, as scholars Ali Yaycıoğlu and Richard Antaramian discuss in their respective works “Partners of Empire” and “Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire,” dates to Sultan Mahmud II’s reign, in the early 19th century.

Before 1821, many of the clients and owners of Istanbul’s meyhanes were members of the Greek mercantile elite. The Greek War of Independence, organized by the secret nationalist organization Filiki Eteria, or the Society of Friends, saw Greek merchant families—long dominant across much of the Empire—pushed from the center of Ottoman life. Yet, the songs, drinks, meze and conversation would have stayed largely unchanged.

The Ottoman state sought to cultivate new elites, including Western-trained Muslim officers, Sephardic Jews, and Armenians, many of whom filled roles left by the decline of the Greeks. The Armenian urban elite proved crucial throughout the modernizing and liberalizing efforts of the mid-late 19th century. However, the deranged violence during Pan-Islamist Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s dictatorial reign initiated the final decline of the Armenian presence in what is now Turkey. The Sultan’s brutality and incompetence sparked the formation of several political parties and underground political movements––including the Dashnaktsutyun and Hunchakians (the first socialist parties in the Ottoman Empire), Bulgarian and Macedonian organizations such as IMRO and the Boatmen of Thessaloniki, and the Young Turks, initially a nationalist opposition that aspired to restore a liberal constitutional order. 

At the meyhane, conversation would have grown heated with the decline of the Empire, marked by ethnic conflict and Western scheming, weighing heavily on everyone’s mind. While increasingly secular, Western-oriented nationalist Ottomans now felt more comfortable drinking openly with non-Muslims at the meyhane, they were simultaneously developing a distinctly Turkish consciousness and regarded the economic power of non-Muslim minorities with suspicion. The Young Turks took power, but were radicalized by the further loss of territory in the Empire’s Balkan heartland, leading to a coup by a faction of the Young Turks, headed by the Three Pashas, which committed genocide against several Christian ethnicities, including the Armenians.

The wars and the genocides changed things. The Three Pashas had brought devastation and defeat, but a coalition of Turkish nationalists managed to reverse many of the territorial losses of World War One and, under Mustafa Kemal, established a new government based in Ankara. The revolutionary, nationalist government enacted laws on what languages could be spoken where, while most Christians who had managed or patronized these establishments were either dead or in exile. The new Kemalist Turkey was governed by an elite largely composed of Balkan and Caucasian refugees—often called “White Turks”—along with rural landowners and Muslim economic elites, many of whom had profited from the seizure of Christian property. Though Armenians and Greeks held on for a while in parts of Istanbul, with older meyhanes still under non-Muslim ownership and operation, the institution declined as the last generation with memories of the Empire died. Two factors hastened this change: the rise of thoroughly European restaurants and bars, favored by a new generation of secular Turkish citizens, many of them liberals or leftists, and the emergence in the late 20th century of a new counter-elite of pious Muslims who, having no interest in alcohol, had little reason to frequent establishments such as Meyhane-i Ara.           

The Meyhane and the Neighborhood

Ara remembers me and my interest in the city’s Armenian heritage, but often overestimates my knowledge of Armenian. He was in a wheelchair this time, and was guided around his small restaurant by an Uzbek employee. Ara, a short, olive-skinned man with white hair and thick glasses, greeted me with excited Armenian words I struggled to make sense of. I looked at him, confused, and told the Uzbek man behind the wheelchair “Ara zabyl, chto ya ne govoryu po-armyanskii.” A few patrons laughed, recognizing that he was speaking Armenian and that I was not, and I told him “Ermenice bilmiyorum, efendim,” Turkish for “I don’t speak Armenian, sir.”  

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been here. It started around four years ago, when I was shuttling between Vienna and Istanbul several times a year, trying to reconnect with an Istanbul I hadn’t known for a decade. As a 22-year-old exchange student, my experience of the city was circumscribed by the interests of my fellow twentysomethings—bars, clubs, the occasional museum. Now, a decade later, I sought out places related to my interests, which led to me to spend much of my time at Circassian cultural organizations or Meyhane-i Ara.

This is a small, informal place. The walls are brick, the tables casual and unadorned for a meyhane, the space tight enough to inspire claustrophobia. The art on the walls is eclectic to the point of self-parody: two portraits of Atatürk stand flanked by an oversized print of Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club. The main offerings are meze—small plates of fish and light spreads—and rakı, a grape liquor flavored with anise similar to Greek ouzo or French pastis (which we once likened to licorice in college). The grill occupies the back of the restaurant, while a glass display case of various mezes sits to the left. The front door opens onto the neighborhoods of Pangaltı and Kurtuluş. 

This area of Istanbul is a brief walk north from central Taksim Square, up Halâskârgazi Avenue, past the monument to the assassinated left-wing journalist Uğur Mumcu, and towards the old offices of the bilingual Armenian-Turkish paper Agos––the site where left-wing Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was assassinated. The broader Nişantaşı district has been home to elites since the Ottoman period. To the right of this street is the core of the neighborhood, historically associated with high-ranking Ottoman army officers and bureaucrats, primarily Muslim but also including Jews and Dönmeh (descendants of Jewish converts to Islam who maintained certain syncretic and esoteric practices). To the left of the avenue are two former minority neighborhoods: Pangaltı, once Armenian, and Kurtuluş, once Greek. While the boundary between these two neighborhoods seems blurred, Ergenekon Avenue, which branches west from Halâskârgazi, serves as the main dividing line.  

When talking with local residents, they will always comment on which apartments were built by Greeks or Armenians versus those built by Turks. Generally, this indicates a distinction between the Art Nouveau-inflected four- to five-story apartment buildings of the late Ottoman Empire and the modernist structures of the Kemalist Republic. These buildings, common to Nişantaşı and Kadıköy, represent Turkey’s answer to the Athenian polykatoikía, though darker and sleeker than anything across the Aegean. This architectural contrast—Modernism beside crumbling Art Nouveau—resembles patterns seen in European cities damaged during the Second World War. Yet here, the ripping of the area’s fabric happened during peacetime.

Kurtuluş means “liberation” or “salvation” in Turkish, and the people it was liberated from were Greeks. Istanbul’s Greek population largely avoided the depredations of the 1923 Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, but a fire several years later severely damaged the neighborhood. During reconstruction, the area was renamed from the Greek “Tatavla” to Kurtuluş. This renaming frenzy extended to the streets: Ergenekon Avenue references a myth about the Turkic peoples’ emergence, while Bozkurt (Grey Wolf) Avenue reflects similar nationalist themes. It’s common, here, for Armenian establishments to be found on streets with the most flamboyantly Turkish nationalist names imaginable.  

The city’s Greek, Jewish and Armenian populations declined precipitously over the course of the 20th century, most notably during the WW2-era Wealth Tax and the 1955 Istanbul Pogrom—both of which feature prominently in Kulüp. The White Turks were the cultural and political vanguard of Kemalism for much of the century. However, the state-controlled Republican economy began to falter amid the turmoil of the 1970s, and a decade later, faced targeting by neoliberal economic reforms under Turgut Özal’s conservative government. Now, after two decades of attacks from the ruling AKP, the White Turks have their own reasons for nostalgia.

Hüzün

When foreign-born Turkey experts meet, certain topics invariably arise. There’s the late Ottoman Period—the Genocides, the foundation of the Republic. Then comes the political and cultural turmoil of the 1970s, the stagnation following the right-wing 1980 coup, the good days of the 2000s, and various niche cultural topics, most notably hüzün. Derived from the Arabic word huzn, this term describes a specific and intense melancholy or nostalgia—a mood that permeates the work of major Turkish artists, including director Nuri Bilge Ceylan and writer Orhan Pamuk, who himself defined the term in his work “Istanbul: Memories and the City.” 

“We might call this confused, hazy state melancholy, or perhaps we should call it by its Turkish name, hüzün, which denotes a melancholy that is communal rather than private. Offering no clarity, veiling reality instead, hüzün brings us comfort, softening the view like the condensation on a window when a teakettle has been spouting steam on a winter’s day.”

Pamuk, of mixed North Caucasian-Balkan ancestry, was raised in nearby Nişantaşı. The Pamuk Apartments, which feature so prominently in his memoir, are only 15 minutes from Meyhane-i Ara. Walking around the neighborhood this winter, I find myself thinking of Pamuk once every few minutes. Small cafes and modest bakeries line the streets, alongside winding streets of dozens of eccentric dress shops whose wares seem untouched by shifts in the sartorial winds over the last 40 years—loud silks, polyester, and self-orientalizing prints. In this eccentricity they are not alone, as the area’s remaining left-wing journalists and intellectuals, a community that once included the slain Uğur Mumcu and Hrant Dink. They seem similarly frozen in time, at the exact moment when the country’s political and cultural horizons shifted and their lives changed forever. At gatherings of these leftist intellectuals, such as memorials for Mumcu and Dink, the scene often resembles photographs from the 1970s, made all the more absurd as even the young attendees adopt the exaggerated facial hair and oversized metallic eyewear characteristic of a 1979 socialist.

Here in the city, it was not merely the old frozen in nostalgia, in melancholy, in hüzün—these were cults into which the young were inculcated. Even people a decade younger than me yearned for times that were long past when I was born. The old—grandfathers, fathers, (disproportionately) uncles, grandmothers, mothers, aunts, mentors—would take the young to the cafes, bars and meyhanes of the good times. Over time, the young would retell these stories with the same reverence.

“İstanbul Ermenileri, Ermenistan Ermenilerini Sevmez”

When I arrive at Meyhane-i Ara for the interview, the place is nearly empty apart from Ara and his coworker, Mehmet. I had never seen the place this way, and it was odd to see Ara “off”–– some part of me had always thought of him as a golem with no existence independent from meze and rakı. I came with my Circassian friend, Perit, who speaks both Turkish and Russian far better than I ever will.  He’s handsome, tall, polite, and somewhat bookish, but in a way that impresses people older than him. I tend to bring him along when I’m working, partly for his linguistic abilities, but also because he is, frankly, uncle-bait: he has a preternatural ability to inspire fatherly feelings among older men in this country.

Ara seemed confused when I mentioned I was writing an article about the place. He asks if I had already written something about the place, which made me wonder if I had drunkenly mentioned writing an article years ago. Whatever the case, it wasn’t important, and Ara moved on to talk about his past.

Ara Haceroğlu was born in 1938 in Kumkapı, an old Armenian neighborhood across the Galata bridge, some distance from here. Back then, the area had several Greek and Armenian meyhane, and young Ara would run from tavern to tavern to fetch his father home. He fondly remembers these places, naming them—Aleko, Kör Agop. When we ask about his family’s arrival in the city and their origins in the homeland, he says simply that they’ve been in Istanbul for as long as anyone can remember, perhaps 300 years. 

Over the past four years, I had attempted speaking English with Ara on multiple occasions with only marginal success, so I was surprised to learn he had lived for five years in the heavily Turkish borough of Cliffside Park, New Jersey. Looking at the Fight Club wall art, I had guessed the place was not as old as one might suspect—and I was right. It’s only 17 or 16 years old, and he’d set it up when he returned from the U.S.

His commitment to the meyhane has always impressed me. It’s clear that, upon his return from the United States, this tavern became the center of his life in a way I find difficult to fathom. While people in Turkey constantly bemoan the country’s food quality—from the freshness of the produce to the ever-suspect soslu döner with its thick layer of sauce masking the quality of the meat—this meyhane was different. Even a single tomato reflected the daily dedication to getting the absolute best. This was the pinnacle of a real culinary tradition native to Istanbul, distinct from those of the east or the Caucasus.    

What’s always struck me is how local this meyhane is. I had always thought of Istanbul Armenians, the Bolsahayer, as standing apart from Turkey while being native to Istanbul, but the notions of identity I had prior to my arrival here are not fit to explain the place. We asked Ara what he thought of Armenia, if he had been to Yerevan, and his feelings about it. His answer was simple: “İstanbul Ermenileri, Ermenistan Ermenilerini sevmez. Ermenistan Ermenileri de, İstanbul Ermenilerini sevmez.” [Istanbul Armenians don’t love Armenian Armenians, and Armenia Armenians don’t love Istanbul Armenians either]. My Turkish was good enough to understand this when he said it, and the quote stayed with me for several days, partly because I realized how thoroughly I had misunderstood the place when I first came here years ago. The portraits of Atatürk are neither forced nor ironic; this is a place for the beneficiaries of the Kemalist dispensation, or those who have at least made peace with it. Mehmet and Ara’s entire frame of reference reflects growing up in Turkey, such that when they name famous clients, they mention figures I consider parochial, like the eccentric media personality Celâl Şengör. 

Discussions of local culinary traditions in Istanbul slip into amateur ethnography, but the question of “who does what better” becomes especially heated in an Armenian meyhane. A full table at this place could have a dozen small plates, each with different regional and ethnic origins. Both Ara and Mehmet insist that Greeks and Armenians, as “the artisans of Turkey,” are better at meze and fish, while Turks focus on yogurt and meat.     

The conversation turned to the future of the meyhane tradition. Ara described several famous establishments, foremost among them Imroz and a meyhane in Yeşilköy run by his friend Ogün. Both failed quickly after their owners’ deaths, as the next generation proved unable to maintain the tradition. Now Ara himself is in poor health and was recently hospitalized, making questions of mortality and the meyhane’s future unavoidable. When he recently discussed this with his son, a jeweller, Ara asked what would become of the meyhane after his death. His son, sensibly, responded, “Dad, I’m a jeweler, what use do I have for a meyhane?”  

Ara’s story in the interview is one of decline. The meyhanes are disappearing, and this might be the last Armenian tavern. Despite his professional obligation to taste, he shows little sentimentality—even admitting that Armenians in the United States sometimes produce better specialties than those in Turkey. He singles out a specific family, the Ohanyans in Los Angeles, saying “sucuk pastırmasını ye helva gibi”, [their sucuk and pastirma is like halva]. 

The Taste of Armenia

Several hours after the interview, Perit and I settled at our small table at Meyhane-i Ara. We made sure to come on a Wednesday night to hear Antonio, a musician of mixed Levantine-Armenian heritage, play the accordion. We arrived early, and splurged on a small bottle of Beylerbeyi, one of the finer standard rakıs. We ordered a few of our favorites, including the Turkish meze atom—a dish of strained yogurt topped with dried peppers and typically the only truly spicy item at a meyhane—along with the Armenian specialties, topik and salmon pastırma, a pressed, spiced and air-dried fish presented much like beef basturma in Armenia.

Topik, which I later learned is a staple of Armenian cuisine eaten during the Lenten fast, was completely unknown to me. The dish, a yellow puree often served in the form of a vegetarian kufta, bears a superficial similarity to hummus. Like hummus, it is also a chickpea puree, though here in combination with potato. The salmon pastırma, the notion of which raised initial skepticism, was served thinly sliced, resembling a Bolsahay sashimi, with spice stuffed between the individual layers inside the meat. It was at this moment that my mind came back to a moment long before I’d ever visited the meyhane or Armenia. 

In August 2016, before coming to the Caucasus for the first time, I attended the annual “Taste of Armenia” festival outside the St. James of Nisibis Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Church in Evanston, Illinois. Though I was excited to learn more about Armenian cuisine before visiting Yerevan, I quickly realized that the festival experience in Evanston would bear little resemblance to what I would find in Yerevan.  

Before I tasted anything, the smells—sumac, peppers—brought me back to my time in Diyarbakır, but I was most surprised by the kufta, the meatballs. By shape and smell alone, I realized this was a form of İnegöl köfte, a meatball dish that Balkan Muslim refugees had brought to the southern Marmara region, south of Istanbul, during the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. Somehow, here in Evanston, an Armenian family had preserved the dish of Muslim refugees who had arrived in Anatolia just decades before the Armenian family’s departure––a century after Genocide and dislocation.  

My reaction to the topik and salmon bastirma sparked a pseudo-Proustian revelation: there was something inherently Eastern about the food before me, distinct from the Marmara meatballs in Evanston. The cinnamon and combination of sweet and savory, could be found in a more exaggerated form in the upscale Istanbul Armenian restaurant Jash, and in the excellent Çiya Sofrası in Kadıköy, euphemistically termed a “Southeast Anatolian” restaurant.  

Yet here in this tavern, these mezes were not the result of historical reconstruction, nor were they modified for minority-enthusiast palates among the liberal and left Turkish upper middle class. This was a deeply rooted tradition, native to Istanbul, going so far back into the city’s history tracing the origins of these dishes seemed impossible. The spread before us differed from the khorovats and oghee of Wine Garden in mountainous Goris, or what one might find in an old Armenian-owned panduki in Tbilisi. Yet in that moment, all these traditions felt interconnected.                     

In the Realm of the Uncles

Antonio arrived. A broad, short, stout, bald Mediterranean man in his sixties, he carried an aging accordion and set up a speaker system for background tracks. Perit and I had already eaten and were steadily working our way through the Beylerbeyi. Things had been difficult in Istanbul—the inflationary crisis had impacted locals, tourists, and expats alike—and I was happy for an excuse to spend time at a restaurant now normally out of my price range. To quote Ara, “the clientele here is upper class, there’s no riffraff”; the latter category must surely include struggling writers.

One of my favorite Turkish words is “dayı”, maternal uncle, which more broadly describes an excitable middle-aged man who frequents meyhanes and talks playful, self-aggrandizing nonsense. The table next to us has a group of older businessmen––recognizable dayıs––together with their younger colleagues. Perit recognizes one man in his sixties––similarly stout, bald, and Mediterranean––as a local Greek. The music begins, and I realize that Antonio is playing “Efige Efige”, a pop-folk song by Stelios Kazantzidis. The Greek, who introduces himself, Dimitri, passes us a plate of octopus, while his friend closest to us, a Turkish man named Yunus, insists we try some chocolate-covered raisins they bought from a sweets vendor who makes the rounds at the local meyhanes.  

“These sweets? Only in Istanbul!” our neighbor Yunus insists, though they are indistinguishable from the American candy Raisinets.

As the night goes on, I realize that Dimitri brought more than octopus, as one of the waitstaff prepares a large stack of plates. Antonio has begun switching between wistful, melancholic Greek and Turkish music—I recognize Timur Selçuk’s İspanyol Meyhanesi, or Spanish Tavern—and livelier tunes more appropriate for dancing. A striking, tall man in his fifties, wearing the quintessential early-80s fashion of an Istanbul intellectual, stands up and begins to dance. He knows the dances well and is either talented or sober enough to navigate the cramped tavern space. Yunus tells us that the dancer is Armenian as the whole meyhane begins to clap in tune with the song and dance, and he is a great favorite. Yunus turns to Perit and says, “If that man was younger, I’d let him marry my daughter.” 

As a foreigner in Istanbul, a white American no less, it has been difficult to navigate the complicated relationship between Turks and the historic Christian minorities. When I first came to Meyhane-i Ara, I encountered educated Turks eager to experience the city’s Armenian and Greek culture, which reminded me of 20th century American intellectuals and artists in New York who fetishized the city’s minority cultures. It also evoked memories of Viennese German-speakers at the end of Austro-Hungary, who seemed unable to regard the city’s Jewish population without intense feelings, whether positive or negative. While comparisons between antisemitism and Armenophobia are common—I have made them myself—there is a key distinction: European antisemites viewed Jews as an Oriental “other”, whereas Christians in the Muslim world, particularly Greeks and Armenians, are seen as an internal, Occidental “other”.  

It was no coincidence that the Ottoman government that destroyed the Christians of the country was fanatically Westernizing––the Christians’ easy access to European civilization exacerbated deep-seated anxieties about the position of Muslims in the region. Even after the end of the Ottoman Empire, the elite of the early Turkish Republic found themselves eating meze and drinking rakı, served by either the remaining Christians and Jews or a new class of secular Muslims. This intense regard for the “Occidental other” persists today among post-Kemalist liberals and leftists who seek to right past wrongs, often make a point of using the Armenian language or related symbols in a political context. My Armenian friends have complicated feelings about this, and I can’t blame them. I have seen Americans treat minority cultures with similar suspect intensity, and in this dynamic I find myself relating more to the leftist Turks.

This night at Meyhane-i Ara, however, was different. It was not a lecture at Boğaziçi or a book by İletisim––a publishing house focusing on minority issues. Here in this meyhane, the conflicts that had consumed the post-Kemalists belonged to the past. The Greek merchants’ rise and fall, the Armenians’ upward trajectory and destruction, the Kemalist White Turks’ ascension to power and subsequent downfall—all were history now. The post-Kemalists, leftists and liberals who critiqued the Turkish government and the Ottoman past, had seen their institutions, including Boğaziçi, humiliated and their dreams of a better Turkey frustrated. Even the Islamists and their ultranationalist allies found their aspirations unfulfilled, the country was clearly aimless and in agony.  

All the Lost Istanbuls

After talking to the table next to us, I learned that most of the men here met as students at the prestigious French-language Galatasaray Lisesi. They have known each other for decades, and danced at the weddings of each other’s children. Ara has joined the table, and a conversation about meze has begun, with the typical combination of playful ribbing and amateur ethnography. They argue with the theatrical mock-intensity of Mediterranean men when they are surrounded by people they love. Dmitiri insists that a good meyhane can only have one meze with yogurt, that one with two meze with yogurt is questionable, and one that offers three is unacceptable and is essentially an ocakbaşı, a tavern focusing on meat that is more closely associated with ethnic Turks and Muslims. 

Eventually, the dancing Armenian man takes one of the plates, and crashes one on the ground, an old Greek tradition. Dimitri, Yunus, Perit and I are talking about my work, and my childhood interest in the Byzantine Empire. Dmitri looks at me, excited, points at himself and says, in English, “I’m Byzantine.” He stands up, points me towards the center of the tavern, inviting me to dance. I cannot dance, for reasons both ethno-cultural and neurological, but I gladly accept, and simply try to imitate Dimitri’s movements, or attempt to copy what I can remember of Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek. “Is this Zeybekiko?” I ask, only for the tall Armenian who danced earlier to correct me in perfect English: “It’s Zeybek, Zeybekiko is Greek.”    

We sit down, and Dmitri tells me in Turkish that I danced well—a pleasantry, though I enjoyed myself far more than expected. The conversation returns to the eternal topics of the meyhane: the best meze and alcohol, this establishment’s future, the survival of the meyhane as an institution, and of course, that most Istanbul of topics, the past. How much better things were in the old days.  

All was lost: the better Istanbul dreamt of in the last years of the Ottoman Empire; the better Istanbul socialists fought for in the 20th century; the better Istanbul we dreamed of as students at Boğaziçi. No one saved the city or the country. We all end up one day telling people much younger than ourselves—initiates into cults of new nostalgias—how much better the city used to be, preferably over tables of rakı and meze.

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