(Yah, I know. It's been a while. I'm lame)With mandatory wine consumption quotas and creative menus, Sunday dinners chez Carpetblogger- Producer have always been a coveted invitation. Not surprisingly, given the volatility of some of the guests, dinners get out of hand from time to time. What started out as a low key event with a small, well-behaved guest list on Sunday night turned into a near-riot that involved a rusty meat cleaver, at least 15 neighbors and a midnight trip to the police station.We often make fun of our gentrifying, too-cute-by-half Cihangir
neighborhood. With its twee cafes, gourmet food stores and antique
shops, it's easy to forget that there are plenty of residents of "Yabanc?? K??y"(foreigner village, as we call it) who don't spend their days sitting in Kahvedan....
This is an interesting article about the historic Tophane area of Istanbul, which, the writer neglects to mention, is also prime Carpetdog habitat.
Stage for social life
One
of the first structures encountered at Tophane apart from the Nusretiye
mosque is the impressive fountain that occupies the corner of the
square opposite the mosque.
Erected in 1732, the richly
decorated, monumental fountain was the end of one of the water pipes
leading downhill from Taksim.
In contrast to the solemn,
military atmosphere of the nineteenth century, in the eighteenth
century Tophane Square was lively and populated, dominated by the
fountain at its center and surrounded by large trees. Travelers busily
arrived and departed at the ports, goods were sold at market stalls...
I've started a new NGO. It's called the Drummer Accountability Project. So far it has achieved measurable results: The drummers who asked me for money on Friday were the same ones I photographed earlier in the week.
Did I give them money? Ha Ha. Would you reward people who stood underneath your window at 3 am every morning for a month banging drums? At best, wouldn't you ask them for payment or alternatively, pelt them with eggs? As a grant-giving organization, DAP believes that its grant recipients need to strive for sustainability and cultivate local funding sources.
DAP also noticed that the local drummers are building capacity for future activities. As they paraded through the neighborhood, their intern -- who based on the tone of his voice was probably seven -- was calling out the...
Couples sit beneath the reddening grape arbor, sipping tea in the garden beneath the minaret of the green Firuzaga mosque. On every corner, greasy doner kebabs slowly rotate in front of glowing orange heat panels, providing a quick lunch to doctors in white coats from the nearby public hospital. Tobacco
smoke mixes with car exhaust on Sirasilever Caddesi.
The casual observer of my Istanbul neighborhood might not know it’s the middle of Ramazan, Islam’s holiest month.
“Should we not eat outside today?” I asked my lunch companions, wanting to avoid offending those who are keeping the fast.
“Why not? It’s Cihangir! No one’s fasting here.”
Turkey’s polarized secularist-versus-Islamist political environment, some residents disregard
their neighbors’ religious...
In what may become a regular feature, we're starting up "Neighborhood Blotter" here at Carpetblog. Its success will depend on my neighborhood's capacity to be interesting.
As the owner of an old wood house, I have more than a casual interest in fires. So when my bedroom was filled with red and blue strobe lights from firetrucks at 5 am this morning, I got up out of bed almost as fast as I did when the terrorist cat woke up the Carpetdogs.
Because Turks cannot resist a spectacle -- from a minor car accident to a five alarm five -- the whole neighborhood was already standing in the street, commenting, speculating and selling. The television cameras were there, as was the Simitci (guy who sells which are sesame covered bread-rings called simits, the ubiquitous Turkish street food). Women...