Educated Turks, instead of staying in New York or Boston, returned home. They wanted better restaurants, bars, artistic and social freedom
Above all, the pro-capitalist policies of the Erdogan era made Turkey rich, and the country began to feel freer. Wealth was a more liberating force than religion was a repressive one. The devout crowds parading down Main Street made many secular Turks fear for their freedoms, but economic success entitled Erdogan’s followers to feel like viziers. Newly-rich, hijab-wearing women started covering themselves in Burberry. At the same time, upper-class and educated Turks, instead of staying in New York or Boston, returned home. As the rest of the world cowered in a financial crisis, Turks revelled in their booming economy. They wanted better restaurants, more sophisticated bars, artistic and social freedom. Westerners followed. Even the secularist kids, Turkish patriots to the core, embraced the swagger Erdogan brought to the world stage and the pride he took in
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being Muslim, Ottoman, Anatolian. It was no longer a given that Istanbul’s creatives would look west for inspiration. There is no better place to revive cosmopolitanism than Beyoglu, which houses less than two percent of the city’s 1.5 crore inhabitants. But this tiny area has transformed at lightning speed. If I go out for a week, I return to find that my deli has become a secondhandglasses shop, that the old-school bakery is now a high-end burger joint. I know that when I step inside one of the many art nouveau buildings, it will be renovated, with high-quality tiles and 100-year-old paintings. Many of these new places have a recognisable style. The House Café, a popular restaurant chain; the pricey Witt Istanbul Hotel, in Cihangir; even the Turkish Airlines VIP lounge, all share the same look: large mirrors and heavy leather furniture, huge
windows and high ceilings which let in that resplendent Aegean sun. Greyand-cream-patterned floor tiles are so common that I began to wonder if contractors were in thrall to some Grey-Patterned Floor Tile Mafia. I was wrong. These tiled floors often show up in spaces by Autoban, a design and architectural firm that opened its first showroom in 2003 on Mesrutiyet Caddesi, now the trendiest nightlife street in Sishane. Autoban’s aesthetic— warm, retro, playful—not only dominates Beyoglu’s urban renewal but is also an international sensation. I emailed founders Seyhan Özdemir and Sefer Caglar, who always seem to be flying off to New York, about the Turkish influences in their work. “We don’t think that design style should be coherent to a city or a country,” they wrote back. “Istanbul is a multi-layered, flexible, and very chaotic city where several cultures have come to melt into its stone. It has been rapidly changing, and the attitudes have definitely been developing for a couple of years now.” Such reluctance to be defined is why architect Alexis Sanal surprised me by being so direct. “Autoban is retro-modern and has captured an aesthetic that is very important here,” she explained, when we met over lunch at the Scandinavian design-inspired Lokanta Maya, one of Istanbul’s best restaurants. Alexis is American; her husband and partner, Murat, is Turkish. Steeped in Turkish culture, Murat has an insider’s vision, whereas Alexis can still wear the glasses of the (very well-informed) newcomer; their work together has a f resh clarity. “If you go to SALT Galata right now, they are showing a Turkish living room from the 1950s. That massive wood”—similar to that in Autoban’s style—“was what the ateliers in Istanbul did in those years.” The existence of Turkish modernism was news to me, but it’s been easy to be uninformed: civic projects that celebrate Turkish culture have only recently started popping up. The newest is SALT Galata, a cutting-edge art and research space that opened last year in an enormous building that originally housed the Ottoman Bank. It is fitting that Constantinople’s bank, whose vaults also contained the accounts of Greeks and Italians and r