şeker bayramınız kutlu olsun

In Turkey, Eid al Fitr is called Şeker Bayramı (literally, Sweet/Sugar Holiday), and lives up to its name--religious significance aside, as an excuse for eating mountains of sweets, including lokum, the confection known abroad as "Turkish delight."

My favorite kind of lokum, without question, is pistachio (I don't like the rose, mint, and fruit flavors much) and specifically, the duble fıstık, or double pistachio, from the sweet shop of Ali Muhiddin Hacı Bekir. Hacı Bekir's little white-and-green boxes with the red logo proclaiming 1777'den beri şekerci, "confectioner since 1777," are a potent evocation of İstanbul--I've lost track of the number of those little parcels, leaking confectioner's sugar, that I've ferried back across the Atlantic, or that others have brought as gifts for me.

Back in 1777, as the history related on the website goes, one Bekir Effendi (he hadn't gone on hajj yet) moved from a town on the Black Sea coast to İstanbul, where he opened up a sweet shop in Bahçekapı, near the Eminönü docks and the Mısır Çarşısı. The shop, considerably expanded, still stands there today, cornerstone of a sugary little empire run by Hacı Bekir's descendants.

Yesterday, my friend Kerem (whose MERO analyses you should be reading if you have any interest in Turkish politics whatsoever) sent round an Happy Şeker Bayramı/Eid email with images showing the evolution of the Hacı Bekir logo over the years. Here are the original (Ottoman-era) and current versions:



So, Şeker Bayramınız Kutlu Olsun, and Eid Mubarak! I don't have any Hacı Bekir on hand, but I did eat pistachio lokum (Hazer Baba brand) for breakfast this morning, before taking myself and my laundry up to Atlantic Avenue, where the Eid sales were spilling out of the storefronts, and little kids were prancing around showing off their fine new clothes.