the ramadan fair of sultanahmet
a some-kind-of photo essay
[this comes belatedly, half a month after I started writing it with the intention of posting it for Eid. Here it is anyway.]
October night. You walk out into the evening with hair still damp from the hamam, curling chilled against your neck beneath your shawl. Instead of stepping up to the platform to wait for the tram, you turn left along Divan Yolu and walk along the tracks, down towards the light and noise laid out in the space bordered by the Sultanahmet mosque and what was formerly İbrahim Pasha's palace. Here, in the At Meydanı, or Horse Maidan--once upon a Byzantine time, called the Hippodrome--you find a dense warren of stalls strung into makeshift streets, tumbling out from the mosque's iron gates--this is the Ramazan fair of Sultanahmet. The fair and fairgoers spill out into the tombs and flowerbeds of the public park, the fountain next to Aya Sofya square, and the hieroglyped obelisk brought here from Egypt by Emperor Theodosios in the year 390: an even-older thing in this ancient city.
The big mosques of the old city are all lit up (and you think of Christmas trees); strands of bulbs strung between the minarets spell out messages to the faithful and the passers-by. Sultanahmet's audacious six minarets (at the time of its building, only the masjid of the Ka'aba at Mecca boasted that many, and the Sultan donated funds for a seventh to avoid the impression of oneupsmanship) proclaims "Birlik rahmettir"--unity is the compassion of God--but later in the month it will hedge its secular-nationalist bets, and celebrate "Cumhuriyet'in 82 yılı," the "eighty-second year of our Republic."
Inside the mosque compound's courtyard the stalls offer books and tracts and prayer beads, but the real action is outside, where crowds ignore the trinket sellers and throng outside the stands selling iftar treats--roasted eras of corn, candy apples, hot chestnuts, kebabs turning and hissing on the spit, fresh bread and simit, Ottoman candy, popcorn made in little wire drums hand-shaken over charcoal braziers, fresh fruit juices, and seasonal drinks like the milky sahlep, made from orchid-root powder and topped with cinnamon, or boza, a foamy drink made from fermented grain that balances carefully between halal and haram. The sweets are the most popular, from diamond-shaped marzipan, sekerpare, helva, and baklava to the ropy, translucent strands of ceviz sucuk, walnut "sausage."
But you ignore the candy in favor of fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice, three new liras for tart liquid rubies in a plastic cup (or, if you wish to be environmentally sound or are inclined to linger for conversation, a small metal beaker).
A group of teenage girls--some örtülü, headscarved, some bareheaded--crowd around the cart from which two men in red vests are selling Osmanlı macunu. This "Ottoman taffy" is a shiny rainbow of sticky candy, wound onto a stick and served with a twist of lemon, repellently sugary even by the standards of this sweet-toothed country.
The corn is more appealing, sold either boiled or roasted--take your pick--from a wheeled cart decorated with corncob sheaves knotted into tentacled halos. They hand the ears to you wrapped in the hot, wilting leaves, with plenty of salt, but no butter.
And the perennial first sign (aside from the wind) of autumn in İstanbul: kestane, the roasted chestnuts, tasted first ten minutes' walk from here at the Eminönü docks, five Septembers ago. They're more expensive now, but just as satisfying--sold by weight, in lots of 50, 100, 250 grams, measured out with a small, battered scale, then scooped into a tiny brown-paper sack that warms your hands.
While you wait for them to cool, you wander into the fringes of the crowd gathered in a sunken half-circle still ringed with the steps of the ancient amphitheater. The musicians onstage (brought to you, a sign proclaims, by the sub-municipality of this district) are arrayed in a long crescent, wearing white turbans and colorful Ottoman robes, which close-up reveal themselves to be the tawdry work of a second-rate costumer. No one minds. This is the mehteran, a band playing Ottoman military music, sending a great skirl and thump up into the air from their drums and nasal woodwinds. Here they play, to a happy audience with full bellies, the music that once startled a besieged Vienna and rang up and down the Persian frontiers. When the echo of imperial nostalgia fades away, you slink back towards the tram tracks and board the sleek metal car, listening to the automated voice mark out its stops at Sultanahmat, Gülhane, Sirkeci, Eminönü, and finally, after sliding across the Galata Bridge, alight at Karaköy. Your back is faintly sore from the hamam masseuse's hands; your heart has taken a harder pummelling, and months later, still aches. As you climb the hill home, the last call to prayer rings out from a minaret's tin-eared loudspeaker, over this immense bastard city, halfway secular and still wholly divine.
[this comes belatedly, half a month after I started writing it with the intention of posting it for Eid. Here it is anyway.]
October night. You walk out into the evening with hair still damp from the hamam, curling chilled against your neck beneath your shawl. Instead of stepping up to the platform to wait for the tram, you turn left along Divan Yolu and walk along the tracks, down towards the light and noise laid out in the space bordered by the Sultanahmet mosque and what was formerly İbrahim Pasha's palace. Here, in the At Meydanı, or Horse Maidan--once upon a Byzantine time, called the Hippodrome--you find a dense warren of stalls strung into makeshift streets, tumbling out from the mosque's iron gates--this is the Ramazan fair of Sultanahmet. The fair and fairgoers spill out into the tombs and flowerbeds of the public park, the fountain next to Aya Sofya square, and the hieroglyped obelisk brought here from Egypt by Emperor Theodosios in the year 390: an even-older thing in this ancient city.
The big mosques of the old city are all lit up (and you think of Christmas trees); strands of bulbs strung between the minarets spell out messages to the faithful and the passers-by. Sultanahmet's audacious six minarets (at the time of its building, only the masjid of the Ka'aba at Mecca boasted that many, and the Sultan donated funds for a seventh to avoid the impression of oneupsmanship) proclaims "Birlik rahmettir"--unity is the compassion of God--but later in the month it will hedge its secular-nationalist bets, and celebrate "Cumhuriyet'in 82 yılı," the "eighty-second year of our Republic."
Inside the mosque compound's courtyard the stalls offer books and tracts and prayer beads, but the real action is outside, where crowds ignore the trinket sellers and throng outside the stands selling iftar treats--roasted eras of corn, candy apples, hot chestnuts, kebabs turning and hissing on the spit, fresh bread and simit, Ottoman candy, popcorn made in little wire drums hand-shaken over charcoal braziers, fresh fruit juices, and seasonal drinks like the milky sahlep, made from orchid-root powder and topped with cinnamon, or boza, a foamy drink made from fermented grain that balances carefully between halal and haram. The sweets are the most popular, from diamond-shaped marzipan, sekerpare, helva, and baklava to the ropy, translucent strands of ceviz sucuk, walnut "sausage."
But you ignore the candy in favor of fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice, three new liras for tart liquid rubies in a plastic cup (or, if you wish to be environmentally sound or are inclined to linger for conversation, a small metal beaker).
A group of teenage girls--some örtülü, headscarved, some bareheaded--crowd around the cart from which two men in red vests are selling Osmanlı macunu. This "Ottoman taffy" is a shiny rainbow of sticky candy, wound onto a stick and served with a twist of lemon, repellently sugary even by the standards of this sweet-toothed country.
The corn is more appealing, sold either boiled or roasted--take your pick--from a wheeled cart decorated with corncob sheaves knotted into tentacled halos. They hand the ears to you wrapped in the hot, wilting leaves, with plenty of salt, but no butter.
And the perennial first sign (aside from the wind) of autumn in İstanbul: kestane, the roasted chestnuts, tasted first ten minutes' walk from here at the Eminönü docks, five Septembers ago. They're more expensive now, but just as satisfying--sold by weight, in lots of 50, 100, 250 grams, measured out with a small, battered scale, then scooped into a tiny brown-paper sack that warms your hands.
While you wait for them to cool, you wander into the fringes of the crowd gathered in a sunken half-circle still ringed with the steps of the ancient amphitheater. The musicians onstage (brought to you, a sign proclaims, by the sub-municipality of this district) are arrayed in a long crescent, wearing white turbans and colorful Ottoman robes, which close-up reveal themselves to be the tawdry work of a second-rate costumer. No one minds. This is the mehteran, a band playing Ottoman military music, sending a great skirl and thump up into the air from their drums and nasal woodwinds. Here they play, to a happy audience with full bellies, the music that once startled a besieged Vienna and rang up and down the Persian frontiers. When the echo of imperial nostalgia fades away, you slink back towards the tram tracks and board the sleek metal car, listening to the automated voice mark out its stops at Sultanahmat, Gülhane, Sirkeci, Eminönü, and finally, after sliding across the Galata Bridge, alight at Karaköy. Your back is faintly sore from the hamam masseuse's hands; your heart has taken a harder pummelling, and months later, still aches. As you climb the hill home, the last call to prayer rings out from a minaret's tin-eared loudspeaker, over this immense bastard city, halfway secular and still wholly divine.
posted by kitabet at 10:57 PM
3 Comments:
Hello, Elizabeth! In Thessaloniki in 1974 autumn, I bought a cup of sahlep from a sidewalk vendor. I have found a recipe in a cookbook online that uses milk. I don't think what I drank had milk. Do you know any recipes?
Best regards,
I had same as yours in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Just buy Sahlab Mix in any Halal type store in your area and boil water instead of milk. That should do it.
hello Ellen,
I don't think real sahlep contains milk--the white color comes from the ground root. But there are mixes that can be bought in Middle Eastern groceries, as the anon commenter says--sadly, in my experience, they're a pale imitation. Like packaged cocoa mix compared to a cup of chocolat chaud.
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