The elderly man sits at the side of the cobblestoned street, his hands folded and motion less, his gaze serene. He looks as though he has been there forever. By his small skullcap and rounded beard I know him to be a religious man. He seems wise, unshakable, a man at peace.
Behind him is a mosque, small by Istanbul standards -- the fountain where the faithful wash their feet before prayer has but ten stools. Across from him is a Levi's store, where Sony monitors flash MTV type videos and a poster of a male model unbuttoning his 501 jeans lurks just inside the door. The old man looks toward this exhibition of contemporary culture but his face gives nothing away.
He has prayer beads for sale to believers. He has a bathroom scale for the convenience of eaters. I am walking along Istiklal Street, a shopping promenade, with a friend who speaks Turkish, and through her I learn that he is Sabri Sengul, age 70. He has lived in the neighborhood for forty years, making a living as best he can since ; his small coal business failed.
I ask him the price of weighing myself. When he says 2,000 Turkish liras, about 14 cents at the time, I know that in his wisdom he has made me out to be a tourist, be cause it is twice the going rate. I say I will pay this amount only if he can predict how much I weigh.
"More than seventyfive kilos," he says.
In my wisdom, I know this to be true, for I have been in Istanbul for more than a week and this is one of the great cities in which to eat.
I have taken short trips up the Bosporus to visit seafood restaurants much like those found at American oceanside resorts, except that the variety and
[Photo Captions]
ABOVE; SABRI SENGUL Makes a living on a busy streets. OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP ROW: the Blue Mosque; baklava; a young carpet-repairer. CENTER ROW: street life; the Spice Bazaar; one of Istanbul's American taxis. BOTTOM ROW: the Grand Bazaar; dining out; a fish merchant on the Bosporus.
freshness of the fish is better here. I have stood at counters and eaten warm cheese- and meat-filled pastries called borek that are sliced and chopped by the Turkish equivalent of Ginsu-wielding Japanese steak-house chefs. I have not been able to get my fill of savory skewered meatballs roasted on indoor charcoal fires. Though mocked as a "baklava boy" by a woman who misunderstood my quest, I have walked the streets in search of the ultimate in such pastries. Only those who have been exposed to the dizzying perfection of flaky, honey-drenched Istanbul baklava can understand what sweet relief they are after a lifetime of consuming the soggy, leaden ingots that thump on the table after a meal in a Greek-American restaurant.
I have sampled cuisine prepared by those who wish to reclaim the glory of the Ottoman Empire, at least at the dinner table. Should anyone doubt that the Ottoman Turks took their food seriously, they need only look at the paintings of the gaily dressed sultans and harem women of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, inspirations for the balloons that float over Thanksgiving Day parades, or visit the football field-sized kitchen of Topkapi Palace, where the chimneys rise in silhouette like smoke stacks over a steel mill.
Yes, I would say I weigh more than seventy-five kilos by now.
I pay Sengul and step on the scale, watch as the needle passes the seventy-five-kilo mark in a blur, traveling at the speed of a scimitar slicing the air.
The religious man is silent in his awe.
I ask his opinion of this great weight I bear.
"Praise God," he says.
I do not know what he is thinking, for my ways are not his ways, but he seems eager to say more. I lean forward to catch his words. He smiles, flashing a mouthful of metal teeth.
"And your coat hides a lot."
Istanbul, once Constantinople. Muslim, once Christian. Gritty, polluted, majestic. A city despairingly overcrowded, reeking of splendid decay, teetering on hopelessness, absolutely eternal. Divided by the Bosporus, a waterway linking the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, Istanbul separates Asia from Europe, East from West. It is the essence of cities, the Godfather of cities, the city Carl Sandburg would have chosen for his home had he been a Muslim.
What is most astonishing about Istanbul, ever-embattled Istanbul, is that it's still there. (The same can be said of Turkey itself, a nation surrounded by Greece, Syria, Iran, Iraq and a few of the ex-Soviet republics, not the friendliest lot.) Founded around 660 B.C. as Byzantium by Byzas the Megarian, whose fame has not otherwise endured, the city became the capital of the Roman Empire by decree of Constantine the Great in the fourth century, grew into the most magnificent city in the world under Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, was thoroughly sacked in the thirteenth century by Crusaders (who massacred, plundered and stole the idea for marzipan) and fell to Mehmet II and his army of 150,000 Osmanli Turks in the fifteenth century.
Today, Istanbul might best be described as desperately maintained, rather than immaculately preserved. The carpets in the mosques are threadbare and the grounds of the palaces far from manicured, but the city is filled with irresistible bits of all those empires past: the jewels of Topkapi Palace; the splendor of Hagia Sophia, once a basilica, next a mosque, now a museum; the six minarets of the fabled Blue Mosque; the sarcophagus of Alexander the Great, a master piece, whether really his or not; the rectangular Hippodrome, a racetrack built in the second century, today a grassy park; and the grandmother of all malls, the Grand Bazaar, a covered market with 65 streets and nearly 4,000 shops that dates from the fifteenth century and swarms with entrepreneurs who would be more than happy to escort you to the shop of their brother who sells gold or their uncle who sells leather or their father who sells carpets. From the sales pitches, it is clear that the family unit is intact in Istanbul.
What is not so memorable about Istanbul is the inefficient postal system, the impossible public telephones, the self- righteous gatekeepers at the mosques, the 5 P.M. traffic that makes Manhattan's rush hour seem like a stockcar race. The local wines are extremely modest, but you will soon learn to bear them, since imported still wines are highly taxed and almost never seen on wine lists. Actually, I like the wines a lot more than I like Kimiz, a Central Asian Turkish alcoholic beverage made from fermented mare's milk. I don't even like the horse it rode in on.
"At the brothels, waiters bustling about.carrying tea a nd , pastries provide the only animation."
[Photo]
Turkish delight: superb bargain-priced dining.
ABOVE LEFT: the Restaurant Pandeli, with its stunning turquoise-and-cobalt tiles, where you can enjoy artichoke hearts, TOP, or a selection of puddings, ABOVE RIGHT.
A problem not the least bothersome to me, but apparently on the mind of almost every Turk, is that Istanbul has too many Turks. In 1918, at the end of the Ottoman Em pire, the population of the city was around 500,000--half of it Turkish. By the mid-Eighties, the population was 7 million. Today, it is more than 10 million, 95 percent Turkish. The city is crowded in a way only a very old city can be crowded: too many people in homes that cannot hold them and too many cars on streets not made for them.
Long-established residents lament the loss of diversity. They bemoan how jammed and unsophisticated the city has become, how the quality of life has slipped, pulled down by the weight of all the unwashed, uncultured, unemployable and unwanted people who have migrated from central and eastern Anatolia (part of Asian Turkey). They came to Istanbul so their children could be educated, but they are so poor the children must work. They came for better living conditions, but they live in miniature, ram shackle houses with no plumbing. Some of the homeless can be seen sleeping on handwoven carpets, the only asset they will ever possess.
"When God gives out clever, Fahrettin is sleeping," says his friend Hakan.
Fahrettin Isik, 26, of hollow-cheeked Kurdish descent, born in a small village in central Anatolia, speaks Turkish, English, a little Italian, a little Japanese and is no dummy, despite what his friend says. Hakan Evrin, 22, is short, swarthy, always carefully dressed, a Turkish Michael J. Fox. He speaks Basque, Spanish, English and a little Italian. Turks do not study languages, they inhale them. Both are carpet dealers. Fahrettin and his brother have a small shop, Gallery Ottoman, in a bazaar behind the Blue Mosque. Hakan has an even smaller shop, all his own, in the Grand Bazaar. Fahrettin, in the custom of carpet dealers, has invited me to dine with him. We are eating at a small Formica countertop-type restaurant, where I have ordered a spicy meatball-yogurt-and-tomato-sauce casserole, the only food in Istanbul to give me indigestion. Hakan will not let Fahrettin enjoy his dinner. He is chastising him for falling in love with his carpets instead of selling them.
A year ago, Fahrettin drove to Azerbaijan, one of the former Soviet republics. Accompanied by two bodyguards and traveling in a Russian jeep made in the 1930s, he went to a remote mountain village, where he found an antique carpet so beautiful, the owners had hung it on a wall rather than walk on it. It was a classic Turkish carpet--all-wool, double knotted, glowing with pure vegetable dyes, hand-made by a young woman preparing her dowry. Fahrettin bought it for $600 and will sell it for no less than $6,000. He has already turned down an offer of $4,000, which Hakan cannot believe.
"When the customer offers him $4,000 and he doesn't sell," says Hakan, "that means the cost of this carpet is not $600 anymore. It means it is $4,000, because that is the amount of money he does not have to use in his business." Fahrettin says beautiful carpets should not sell for less than they are worth. Hakan looks upon such sentimental attach ments as character flaws.
The carpet dealers of Istanbul, like the gondoliers of Venice and the taxi drivers of London, personify their city. They are good-natured, generous, shrewd and indomitable. If you find yourself accosted on the street and all but dragged down a dank alley to a dark and shuttered shop, chances are you're in the clutches of a carpet salesman, not a kidnapper. In seconds, the shop will be alight, the tea served, the rugs rolled out. The carpet dealers of Istanbul will amuse you, guide you and, of course, overcharge you, if they can. How can a tourist know which one to trust? "It is like somebody you marry," Fahrettin says. "You will know."
I promise Fahrettin that I will return to his shop, but before I buy I must visit Hakan in the Grand Bazaar. He is horrified. He says that if I go to see Hakan I will never return. "If I leave you with him, he will sell you three or four carpets," he says. I ask him to have faith. He shakes his head, dismayed. He offers to direct me to the shop of the most famous carpet dealer in all of Istanbul, because anything is better than Hakan. Fahrettin tells me to go to the Grand Bazaar, ask for Fat Osman.
When it comes to food, the Grand Bazaar is anything but. As far as I can tell, the tens of thousands of people who work and shop there eat gyros made from lamb carved off of huge chunks of processed meat, sustenance I always thought was indigenous to Times Square. Had I been heading for the Spice Bazaar (sometimes called the Egyptian Bazaar), I might have gone to the Restaurant Pandeli, whose stairway promises an ascent into exotica but in reality takes you to a clubby, rather pricey luncheon spot, where meats and fish are grilled, sauced and served by extremely proficient whitejacketed waiters.
My translator friend leading the way, we wander in and around the Grand Bazaar in search of a restaurant of promise. Unsuccessful, we finally ask, and a shopkeeper points to a row of windows three stories up. It is indeed a restaurant, the Kartal Yuvasi Balik Evi--"ballk evl" means "fish house" in Turkish. We start up the steps, and the pangs I feel are no longer hunger. They're dread. This is a bad stairway, narrow and none-too-spotless We enter a low- ceilinged room of large tables filled with middle-aged men eating and smoking. Everybody, without exception, is a middle-aged man, and everybody is smoking. There is a saying in Italy, "fumare come un turco," which means "to smoke like a Turk." This could be the very room where the phrase was coined.
The restaurant has no menus and no prices, but it does have canaries. I wonder if the hirds are there for the same reason they were in coal mines--because canaries die from toxic fumes more quickly than humans. Uneasily, we sit. We are ignored. I get up, determined to proceed on my own. I go to the counter, point to some fish in a display case. Then I point to some salads. There is much nodding all around.
Buoyed by my remarkable achievement in culinary communications, I feel optimistic. I smell no cigarette smoke, which means the room has incredible ventilation. I smell no fishy odors, which means everything is fresh. The first dishes to come to our table are the meze--yogurt with garlic; cold mixed vegetables; a large, uninteresting salad, more or less the same appetizers that start every meal. We then have the unnamed fish I pointed to, grilled. It's superb. After that we have a fish stew I didn't know I'd pointed to. It's a bubbling concoction of fish, tomato sauce, peppers and onions served in a Crock-Pot that could be the one antiquity the Crusaders neglected to steal. It's everything I like in food: rich, aromatic, and there's too much of it. We have two half-liter bottles of beer. The bill totals about $14.
I feel as though I have conquered the Turkish restaurant. I am now ready to take on the master Turkish rug merchant, S,is,ko ("Fat") Osman. First, of course, I have to find him.
To enter the Grand Bazaar is to become lost. No other result is possible. Fahrettin has assured me that I will have no problem finding Osman, because everybody knows him. This turns out to be true. Three times I ask for directions hecause three times I get lost. Everybody points the way. Twice more I ask even though I am not lost, just to see if there is anyone who does not know him. Everybody knows him.
Osman S,enel is his real name. He speaks seven languages, studied Arabic at Cairo University and economics at the Sorbonne and once weighed 134 kilos, which is 295 pounds, even though he is not a very tall man. Now he is down to 220. When I appear disappointed, he apologizes and explains that he had knee trouble and was forced to lose weight. He is 67 now, or at least he thinks so, because the birth certificates back then weren't all they are today, but he will not retire because that means he would be home with his wife, and his wife says she will divorce him if he is home all the time. He laughs happily. He is a happy man. Happy about his life and happy about his carpets.
I ask him how many carpets there are in all of Istanbul, and he replies "No one can say--how many paintings do they have in Paris?" He himself has three shops in the Grand Bazaar: one for tourists, one for collectors and one where he keeps his personal treasures. He shows me a 1910 Imperial carpet, gold in color, made so fine that it was used as a tablecloth. He shows me a ninety-year-old Taspinar carpet -- with blues so vibrant they shimmer, made of wool so soft the carpet folds like a silk handkerchief. The masterpiece tumble out, like Christmas decorations spilling from a overcrowded hall closet. He is a wealthy man, yet he drives a 1972 Pontiac. He says it is "brand-new like the first day it comes from the factory," and it is large enough to sleep in when he drives through Turkey, looking for carpets. The ones he seeks are made by the rare young woman who did not copy what she had seen but had something original in her mind. Such girls and such carpets are no more. I ask him when young Turkish women stopped making such pieces. I expect a vague answer, but instead he tells me 1967.
"Exactly?" I ask.
"Exactly 1967," he says. "That is when we get TV. They cannot watch TV and make a carpet."
[Photo captions] OPPOSITE PAGE: You might stay at the Hidiv Kasri, TOP, SECOND AND THIRD FROM LEFT, whose Marble Room cafe, TOP RIGHT, is a plus for guests. For shopping, try the Grand Bazaar, TOP LEFT, the Spice Bazaar, BOTTOM LEFT, or Istiklal Stteet, BOTTOM CENTER. Other sights: the sarcophagus of Alexander the Great, THIRD ROW, LEFT, and Topkapi Palace, SECOND ROW, RIGHT. Everyday life includes pre-prayer ablutions, SECOND ROW, LEFT, and relaxing at the Erenler Pipe Salon, THIRD ROW, RIGHT.
Modern times have come to Istanbul. The tips of steel tOwers, not minarets, dominate the skyline. A shopping complex has opened in the business district, just north o the Golden Horn, the body of water that divides the European side of Istanbul. It has two office towers, an apartment building and about 275 shops, everything from Ferre to Wendy's. In a city blessed with almost infinite traditiona eating places, residents are starting to embrace Baskin-Robbins, McDonald's and Pizza Hut. (Beware the thin-crust tuna- and-tiny shrimp pizza at the branch on Bagdat Street the Columbus Avenue of Asia Minor; it tastes like hot canned fish on a cracker.) Stuffed baked potatoes are everywhere, sold from little rolling carts, potatoes so unnaturally large that my friend, a resident of Istanbul for more than ten years, is certain they contain weird hormones. (Gastronomically paranoid, she also believes the fish of the Black Sea have been contaminated by fallout from Chernobyl.)
Istanbul, the most secular of all Islamic cities, seems determined to prove its worldliness. While the call to prayer still wails from the tops of minarets five times a day, rock music bays through out the night from clubs surrounding Taksim Square. The 7-Elevens peddle their own brand of wine, the top-rated hotels offer casino gambling, Playboy sells openly on newsstands, and the police regulate a red-light district that seems thrust into this century from some longlost Arabian night. And though Istanbul is the spiritual heart of a nation where females are treated sub serviently, a 48-year-old woman, Tansu Ciller of the True Path Party, was re cently installed as prime minister.
In the sumptuous and acoustically remarkable dining room of the Hidiv Kasri hotel, once a pasha's summer palace, I overhear two businessmen discussing her ascendancy. They are speaking between bites of beef fillet stuffed with button mushrooms, a cherished specialty of a restaurant that can be recom mended primarily for its appointments. Not even the exquisitely carved wood paneling and the brocade fabrics can mute the voices of the gentlemen, one of whom is British, the other Turkish.
"Surprising, a woman elected in a Muslim country," the Englishman notes.
"It is fashionable," the Turkish businessman replies. "You had one, we decided we should have one."
"So," says the Turkish woman, "you are one of those baklava boys. Well, uh, not exactly.
Her name is Ayse Yasat, and she's a divorced teacher in her forties. While talking to her about the role of women in Turkish society, I offhandedly mention my efforts in seeking out the best in baklava. (I found it, by the way, at the Baklavaci Gulluoglu, located opposite the maritime station at the mouth of the Golden Horn.) Her smirks lead me to believe that a "baklava boy" is a man whose most intimate moments are not spent with women.
I have taken her to dinner in a small, glassed-in seafood restaurant in a slightly out-of-the-way, neo-bohemian district of Istanbul called Ortakoy; it's the closest the city offers to New York's South Street Seaport or Boston's Quincy Market. Guides to the area proudly point out that the section has a mosque, a church and a synagogue, and if that's not enough, there's also a pool hall. At dinner, we order grilled palamut, a mild-flavored, firmly textured local fish that I see alternately identified in restaurants, fish stores and guide books as tuna, bonito, scad and horse mackerel. In Istanbul, the sea is eternally mysterious.
"I am not a typical Muslim," says Ayse, "and I am not a typical Turkish woman--dependent, traditional, obe dient, not adventuresome, worried about what people say. Turkish women are not very creative or imagina tive, and if they are, they don't show it. What is important to them is clothes and decoration and showing off. Most husbands have mistresses or girlfriends and come home late, but the women aren't allowed to go out. They are unhappy, but they can't bear to divorce."
She glares at me. I remind her that she cannot simultaneously brand me as a "baklava boy" and as a man who mistreats his women. She concedes the point, continues.
"The women are very fond of children, especially sons. They don't really deal with girls, but the son is the dream prince, the king. When the boys get married, they always miss their mother's food. Here is a joke we tell: A man marries and his new wife cooks every day some thing new for him to eat, always she spends a lot of time and they are nice meals. He eats them, he is polite. One day she talks too long to the neighbors, she is late with the dinner, she cooks only mincemeat and eggs, it is a little burned. She is scared of what her husband will say. He eats it, he smiles, he has never been so happy. He says, 'Oh, it is just like my mother made for me.' "
After being implicated in the evils that men do, I feel a need to validate my manliness. In Istanbul, that means a visit to the red-light district, a maze of steep, narrow, wind ing, ill-lit cobblestoned streets that wend their way past storefront brothels. It is a trip into another millennium, a journey to an old-fashioned flesh market offering something between sex at its most primitive and sex at its most comic. The district is cordoned off by police, who roughly frisk po tential customers as they enter this netherworld.
All the women look pretty much the same, as though they've heen around since the dawn of By~antium. All rhe men act ~rert~ ml~h the same, transfixed by awe, shyness or deep respect. They stand in front of the shops, staring, un smiling, saying hardly a word. I've never seen a place so quiet that is so full of half-dressed women. On the other hand, the sight of these particular half-dressed women would strike any man mute.
The only animation comes from bustling waiters walking in and out of the brothels carrying trays of tea and pastries. I must say, the slices of chocolate cake look particularly good. The women greet the arrival of their snacks with the kind of pleasure not wasted on their customers. I recognize familiar hungers churning up deep within me, so l set off to find a nice piece of cevi~li, a kind of t-aklava made with ground walnuts instead of pistachios.
In 1923, Mustafa Kemal, the man proclaimed Fa ther of the Turks, created the new Turk ish state. He secularized the country, changing the written language from the Arabic alphabet to the Latin. This had one monumental and probably un foreseen consequence All the old recipes were lost. New generations could not read the writings of centuries past. The old words were not merely discarded, they were banned.
"In those days," says Vedat Bes,aran, 32, the food- andbeverage director of the (~iragan Palace Kempinski, the grandest hotel in Istanbul, "if you even write your name in Ottoman script, you were ar rested by the police and the army."
Be,saran is a man obsessed with the cui sine of the Ottoman Empire. In his re search, far from complete, he has already found more than 1,800 of the old recipes, 120 of them for eggplant dishes alone. Slowly, he is adapting them to the mod ern kitchen, which is no simple task, for even the measurements are of another time: Forty-four okkas equals I kantar, which equals 126 pounds. ~ust how picky were those Ottomans? Because lambs rise from the ground using their right leg, the more tender left was preferred for lamb dishes.
In the Tugra Restaurant ("tugra" being the stamp of the sultan) at the (~iragan Palace, the food seems an amalgam of Turkish, Persian and Arabic with some nouvelle plate arrangements added. Be,saran says that to operate such a restau rant, a member of the staff must stand over every table, explain every dish to every person. "The attention you must pay," he says with a sigh. ''YoU go to Ducasse [chef Alain Ducasse of Monaco's three-star Le Louis XV], he doesn't have to come to the table to explain the food. Here we must train our guests."
Whereas the Ottomans cooked and served a whole stuffed chicken, the Tugra Restaurant offers a chicken breast stuffed with rice, pistachios, tomatoes and dill, roasted in the oven, then sliced and served on a bed of very creamy, slightly garlicky spinach. Be,saran says the chicken is one Ottoman dish, the spinach is an other, and the combination is his. Among the desserts at Tugra is the famous chicken- breast pudding, which is very rich and sweet, but I cannot imagine eat ing chicken-breast pudding more than once, not when you think about the ingredients.
If my single favorite dish in Istanbul was the stuffed chicken breast, my most exquisite meal was at Cengelkoy Iskele, located at a boat landing on the Asian side of the Bosporus. It is perhaps the best, although not by any means the most fa mous, of the hundreds of eating places that dot the banks of the waterway. The most acclaimed is Urcan, located in the village of Sariyer, about thirty miles north of Istanbul proper (where you can also find the most famous borek restaurant, the Sariyer Hunkar Borek,cisi). While the food at Urcan was acceptable, what I most admired about the place was the collec tion of unlikely celebrity photos on its walls. Customers have included Burt Lancaster, Kareem Abdul]abbar, Rudolf Nureyev, Anatoly Karpov and Gary Hart.
Cengelkoy Iskele, like the third-floor fish house near the Grand Bazaar, is a no menu, no-English-spoken kind of place, but it's both more refined and more ex pensive. The cooking reflects the care taken to please a demanding clientele. The food is traditional--meze, impecca ble fried calamari, squid cooked in an irre sistible green-peppergarlic-butter-soy and-tomato sauce, slightly salted sashimi grade tuna over mild purple onions, borek as light as a croissant. I'd swim the Bosporus for one of its desserts, the baked quince with ground pistachios and clotted cream.
The worst meal I had in Istanbul--I don't consider hot-fish pizza a real meal-- was at a restaurant famous in American lore, the legendary Pudding Shop. Lo cated on Divanyolu Street in the Sultan Ahmet section, close to the Blue Mosque, the Pudding Shop (real name: Lale) served as a mustering point in the Sixties and Seventies for legions of young Ameri cans setting off for points east. If you were a pioneer in the drug culture, the Pudding Shop was where you came to hitch a ride, buy a fifth-hand VW Bug or rendezvous with your old lady. Maybe she'd be there and maybe she'd have left a note tacked to the wall "Couldn't wait. Gone to Katmandu."
The "world famous pudding shop," as it now bills itself, offers disco music and plas tic tables. It is clean and sober. I know. I stood over the steam table and inhaled.
The food ?
Bummer, man.
Next door is another notable establish ment, the Sultanahmet Koftecisi, better known as the Meatball Restaurant, a local favorite deserving of its reputation. A light meal of meatballs grilled over a char coal fire, accompanied by a mixed salad of lettuce, onions and carrots, and fresh, soft Turkish bread costs less than $2
More upscale versions--actually rather expensive by Istanbul standards--are the ocakba,sl restaurants, which are sushi bars for carnivores. (An "ocak" is an open cooking place, and "ba,si" means to sit around it and eat.) Here, various meats are skewered and cooked over charcoal fires. I particularly liked the ,cop ,si,s kabobs, tiny bits of lamb and lamb fat eaten with pita bread. The word "cop" literally means 'lgarbage1~ and refers to the leftover naturc of the lamb pieces.
My only disaF)Flointment was the grilled lamb testiclcs, not nearly as firm and meaty as I remember from a visit to Is ranbul ten years ago. With special memories, isn't that always the way ?
"I am so angry." says Fahrettin. "Hakan plays like he is rich and all the girls want to go with him. I tell them they are capi talists, all they like is his money."
I am listening to the tale of the three young Englishwomen who came to Fahrcttin's shop and ended up buying from Hakan. Gentlemen that they are Fahrettin, Hakan and another friend had invitecd the three to dinner. Hakan selected the restaurant, one where they open doors to him and ,park his car and treat him like a very important client. "of course they know me," says Hakan. "I send them so many customers."
Of the three English girls, two were very pretty. The one who was not pretty, who was by all accollnts fat and ugly, was the one picked by Hakan "I see hlm kiss ing the gjrl," say a third friend. "and she is the only one who is ugly, and I say to him 'Hakan, why do you do that?' He says 'I only\~ wannt to make her happy " The next day the three girls bougllt three carrets worth $750 at Hakan's shop and one small carpet from Fahrettin.
Hakan is all businessman. His shop Imrerio Otomano, is tiny, about three by four strides, with a miniature loft. He says that on one particularly good day. he had two customers u~stairs, six downstairs and two outside. 'l show the customers the pieces they like." he says. "Fahrettin shows the customers the p ieces he likes." I tell hilll I am not read~ to buy, but I will b. hack. He sa\ i, "My gea-l grandfather says to me, 'I will come back when the customer wh~- iays he will come back collles back.' "
He is right. Hakan is always right.. I end up purchasing a carpet from Fat Osman. As I leave, Hakan stands hunched over, holding the carpet I nearly bought but did not, looking forlorn and beaten. I turn the corner, wait a few seconds, then peek. He has recovered. He is speaking Catalan, a language he forgot to tell me he knew, to three tourists. I watch as he sits cross-legged in the center of a carpet while four assistants grab the corners and toss him into air. It is flying carpet trick. The tourists are loughing.
His granlfather, a wise man, can rest easy These three wlll not get away.
July 1994