Istanbul

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Istanbul: The Blue Mosque

Wednesday, June 6, 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey

Photo by David Lansing.

It is still early in Istanbul. So early that Sidar and I, with nothing else to do, decide to take a walk around the Blue Mosque, just a few blocks away. There is no one there except a solitary man washing his feet at one of the outside taps on the side of the courtyard. There is something vulnerable and personal about this man washing his feet. To me it feels like watching someone unbutton a shirt and remove it. The light, the solitude, the vulnerability—I want to take a photo of the scene, even though it feels so voyeuristic.

I ask Sidar if I should go up to the man and ask if it’s okay to take his photo.

“No,” says Sidar. “Just take the photo from a distance so you don’t disturb him.”

And this is what I do.

The Blue Mosque isn’t officially open yet, but Sidar leads me to a door marked “Exit Only” and, after slipping off our shoes, we slip past the curtains into the interior of the prayer hall. The only other person inside is an old man pushing an ancient standup vacuum cleaner slowly over the dusty red carpet. The old man either doesn’t notice us or chooses to ignore us, it’s hard to say which.

“This is very rare,” Sidar whispers. “Just wait. We will come back here this afternoon and you will see. There will be thousands of people in here. So many that we will have to wait half an hour or longer just to get inside.”

But for now, the Blue Mosque is all but empty. Just us and the old man with his vacuum.

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The Turkish baths, pt. 2

Monday, June 4, 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey

This is a photo from the Cemberlitas Hamami website. But I never saw any gorgeous women there. In fact, I didn't see any women there at all. Pity.

So back to the Turkish baths in Istanbul, Çemberlìtas Hamami: A rather unpleasant hairy attendant took me up the stairs to a little changing room, about the size of a large telephone booth, and handed me a key and a pestemal to wrap around my waist. Then he grunted and pointed downstairs and said something in Turkish that I assume meant something like “After you change, get your ass downstairs” (this guy reminded me of my very disagreeable apish high school football coach).

I go downstairs, holding tight to my cloth wrap, and open the wooden door into the hararet, or hot room, the main room of the Turkish bath. The place is, well, hot. Really hot. The first thing I noticed was this massive circular marble slab. Honestly, it looked like a place you’d sacrifice goats or lambs or something. I sat on the edge of it, trying not to fry my eggs, wondering what I was supposed to do. A few minutes later Sidar came in and told me that I should lie on my back on the marble slab.

“But it’s hot,” I complained.

“Yes, but you’ll get used to it.”

So I lay on the slab and looked up at the dome with its star-like windows and tried to pretend I was enjoying this. According to Sidar, the point of lying on the hot slab was to get all sweaty. Well, I was certainly doing that.

After 15 or 20 minutes, when I thought I could no longer stand to be in this sweaty, steamy room, the old hairy attendant came in, also wearing a cloth towel around his middle, and motioned for me to turn over and lie on my stomach. At this point it became readily apparent that they were definitely trying to cook me.

I turned over and the guy started briskly soaping me up with a very coarse mitt. After he’d taken the skin off my back, he grunted that I was to turn over and then he began to tenderize my chest and legs. This went on for awhile. At this point I’d rather given up hope and felt rather like a young gazelle held firmly in the jaws of a lion. Easier to submit than to struggle.

Flayed and lightly roasted, my unsmiling attendant got a bucket of cold water from one of the many washing stalls rimming the domed room and threw it on me, rather in the manner of those old silent movies where someone tries to revive a hysteric who has fainted. The cold water certainly brought me back to life. Just to make sure, the attendant assaulted me with several more buckets. Then he grunted and left.

“Is that it?” I asked Sidar, who’d just gone through the same thing.

“Almost,” he said. “We should stay here and relax a bit.”

“But what about the pummeling? What about getting the crap beat out of us? I was preparing myself for that.”

Sidar looked sheepish. “I asked them not to do that,” he said.

“What? Why?”

“I thought it would be too much.”

“For me or for you?”

“For both of us.” Then he quietly asked me if he should go back out and ask my attendant to pummel me. “Mind you,” he said, “I’m not going to do it.”

I said no, that was fine.

“There is a very nice hamam in Bodrum,” he said, which is where we’re going next. “I will arrange to have you pummeled there.”

That’s great, I said. Pummeled in Bodrum. And so after awhile, we went back to our cubicles to dress, saving the pummeling at the Turkish baths for another day.

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A real Turkish bath

Sunday, June 3, 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey

They wouldn't let me take any photos inside the Cemberlitas Hamami, but this is what it looked like--minus the attractive women.

On Friday, I told Sidar I wanted to go to a Turkish bath. “Yes, this is no problem,” he said. “There is one in your hotel.”

No, I said. I didn’t want to go to a hotel Turkish bath. I wanted to go to a real one. “A hamam. An old one. Someplace the Sultan may have gone.”

“You want the real thing?”

“Yes.”

“Where they pound you and beat you and make you scream?”

“Yes.”

“Listen, my friend,” Sidar said, putting an arm around my shoulder. “Even I do not go to a traditional hamam.”

“Why not?”

“Because they scare me.”

I had heard this before. Last year a friend of mine from San Francisco went to a traditional hamam in Istanbul and said the old man working on him beat him so hard he started to cry. “And I haven’t cried since Patrick O’Rooney stole my bike in fifth grade.”

But here is my philosophy about travel: Wherever you go, you have to eat the dog. And in Istanbul, eating the dog means going to a traditional Turkish bath and getting the shit pounded out of you.

“I want to go to a real hamam,” I repeated. Sidar sighed and said he would make the arrangements.

And so, Saturday morning, shortly after 6, Sidar showed up at my hotel, looking like he’d just rolled out of bed, to take us to one of the oldest Turkish baths in Istanbul, the Çemberlìtas Hamami, an ancient bath establish by Nurbanu Sultan, wife of Selim II and mother of Murat III, in 1584. Now that’s what I call a real Turkish bath.

When we walked in to the hamam, the only person there was an old man sweeping the floor. “What kind of treatment do you want?” Sidar asked me.

“What are you getting?”

“I’m going to go get a coffee,” he said. “I’ll come back for you when you’re finished.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “I’m not doing it unless you are.”

Fine, Sidar said. “Although I’m really not looking forward to this.”

We looked at a chart on the wall listing the various treatments and decided we’d either go for the traditional bath or the luxury bath, the difference being a “special” 30 minute oil massage at the end of the luxury treatment. “I think we should do the traditional,” Sidar said. “Less time for them to hurt us.”

So that’s what we went for.

Now, before I take you into the domed hararet, or hot room, where, clothed only in a simple cloth wrap, called a pestemal, I would lie on a steaming hot round marble slab feeling like a piece of meat being slowly braised, waiting for the old men to come in and pummel us, I want to say something about the photo above which is of the Çemberlìtas Hamami. You’ll notice there are women in the hamam. You’ll also notice that they are very attractive. This is not my photo. And the only women we saw at the hamam were the two 20something American tourists who walked in shortly after we did and were told that while, in fact, women were allowed in to the hamam (for which there were separate facilities), there were no women staff members there at the moment and wouldn’t be until late in the day. “You must give notice first,” the women were told. So although I wish the Çemberlìtas Hamami looked just like the photo above, it didn’t. And I doubt if it ever does (if the age and looks of the two guys who worked on Sidar and me is any indication). But the cloth wrap and the marble slab are accurate.

To be continued tomorrow…

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Turkish citrus sharbat

Saturday, June 2, 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey

A stand selling fresh fruit juice in Istanbul. Photo by David Lansing.

You can’t walk 10 feet in Istanbul without coming across a stand or a cart selling meyva suyu (fruit juice), usually citrus but also, this time of year, apricot, grape, cherry and even pomegranate (or a mix of two or more). Yesterday morning as I was walking around the city I stopped for fresh squeezed meyva suyu three separate times. It gets to be a bit addicting.

It’s hard to beat fresh-squeezed citrus, straight up, but there’s also the Turkish sharbats (or sherbets) that are made from concentrated fruits or flower petals (like rose water) and served sweet and chilled.

Here’s a recipe for a citrus sharbat (you can make it with any combination of citrus fruit you happen to have, or any one its own) that’s great in the summer (I also use this sharbat recipe for making margaritas):

Citrus Sharbat

2 cups water

7 ozs. superfine sugar

7 ozs. orange juice

3 ozs. lemon juice

finely grated zest of 1 orange

finely grated zest of 1 lemon

crushed ice

mint leaves

Put all the ingredients into a large heavy-based saucepan and heat slowly until the sugar has dissolved, stirring, then bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes. Leave to cool, then strain into sterilized bottles.

Store in a cool place for up to 12 months. After opening, use within two months. To serve, dilute the sharbat with still or sparkling water (about a 4-to-1 ratio) and serve with crushed ice and mint leaves. Makes 1 quart.

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The Turkish origin of the meze

Thursday, May 31, 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey | 1 comment

We have Suleyman the Magnificent's paranoia to thank for the invention of the meze.

Jim and Perihan Masters live on the Aegean Coast of Turkey about 50 miles south of Izmir where, as they say, they live “an idyllic life by the sea—writing, drawing and painting, and teaching English.” They also sponsor the Turkophile website Learning Practical Turkish. Ask these linguists about the origin of meze and here’s what they’ll tell you:

“Apparently, times were tough in ancient Persia, because a successful ruler had to employ personal food tasters if he wanted to stay alive past the midnight snack. When Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent’s Ottoman forces conquered the Persian Safavids in 1538, the Sultan took the idea of tasters home with him. Thereafter, Süleyman’s staff of çesnici (taste) slaves were given small plates of food samples, known by the Persian word, meze, meaning pleasant, enjoyable taste.

“As news of the Sultan’s safety practice reached public ears, it became the fashion of the rich and famous to exercise a variation of it. Before long, replicas of the revered meze plates of Süleyman’s chief food taster were seen at posh dinner parties throughout Istanbul. The meze craze caught on in upper-class haunts as gedikli meyhaneler (all night bars) and, not to be outdone, the working men’s clubs also adopted the idea. And so it was that meze passed into Turkish culinary culture, dutifully accompanied by glasses of Turkish raki.”

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