oh taste and see

via Baraka, this stunning set of Ramadan photos from the Arab world and South and Southeast Asia is well worth your time, especially after the grievous news of recent days. The images from Palestine and Pakistan are particularly striking. As I scrolled down, I was hoping for an İstanbul shot or two, but there were none to be found (and I was amused, when looking at the comments, to find several Turks complaining about just that).

So, in keeping with the sweet-toothed tendency of that collection, here's some Osmanlı macunu (a sugary taffy swirled around a stick in multicolored strands) from one Ramadan night:


I left İstanbul around the end of Ramadan in 2005, and find myself missing the city most sharply at this time of the year, remembering how the drummers kept me up at night (is that post the first appearance of a Hikmet poem here?) and how the local ekmekçis would sell out of their great rounds of ramazan pidesi half an hour before sunset. Here's something I wrote, a year after leaving, about the Ramadan fairs in Sultanahmet--with a few images taken with that awful cheap camera that all my Istanbul photos are from. If I stay late enough next summer, I'll go back to the fair and take some better ones.