2 Chapter 2. Istanbul

Save for the latest of technologies, and despite half a century of political upheaval during which Turkey was created and Constantinople was renamed “Istanbul,” the city of 1976 would have seemed familiar to Loti. Described only a few years earlier as a “sweet, melancholy city of ramshackle wooden houses and crumbling city walls, without tourists or touts,” Istanbul had grown to a city of 2.5 million people.¹ It was, and remains, one of the world’s great cities—a place still vied over by the forces of tradition and modernity, by religion and secularism, where muezzins call the faithful to daily prayer five times a day from loudspeakers atop thousands of mosques, their voices competing with the blare of motor vehicle horns and the sound of pop music from radios and clubs.

While some Western travellers camped on the city outskirts, most of us ventured into the heart of Istanbul. There we stayed, clustered around the city’s old section, known as Sultanahmet. That area is the site of several historic attractions about which I wrote brief notes, including the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia, the Topkapi Palace, and the Roman-era cisterns—not to mention the famous Grand Bazaar and a host of souks (markets) and hammams (Turkish baths).

Close by these attractions was an assortment of cheap accommodations. I got a room at the Gulhane Hotel, which I described as “bedbug-infested,” but “at twenty lira I am too lazy to move.” My description squared with that of Davi Tomory, who writes that the Gulhane was a “dosshouse”—a cheap lodging house for homeless people and tramps—adding, “Its heyday was from 1963 to the end of the sixties.”²

There were other hotels similar to the Gulhane, and, if not a hotel, there was the youth hostel, located across from the Blue Mosque, just down the street from the Topkapi Palace. A chief advantage of these accommodations was their closeness to the already famous Pudding Shop where I went on my first day in the city.

I took a seat at a small empty table at the front of the restaurant. To my immediate left, but across from me, sat a German youth of nineteen years. He was thin and pale and had a stunned, dishevelled look. I said, “Hello.” He was clearly agitated, twitching nervously, even shaking, the whole time we spoke. I thought for a moment he was going to grab me, but he didn’t. Instead, staring past me, and without a trace of affect, he told me how, the previous day, he had seen a man—“an Arab,” he called him—come out of an alley, put a pistol to the head of “another Arab,” and “pull the trigger” before running away.

We talked a few more minutes, but there was not much else to say. The young German was lost to his thoughts. After a few minutes, I left. I never saw him again. He had no way of knowing the dead man’s ethnicity, and neither did I challenge him, as that first encounter and the nature of his story aligned with my already existing Orientalist conceptions of Istanbul as a place of mystery and intrigue. Nor was I unnerved by his emotionless retelling of the incident: in fact, I was rather excited. I felt as though I had walked into a novel at the same time as my life seemed more real than ever before. I recognize only now the unspoken implications of his narrative of which I was not aware—and not even shocked by—at the time.

But it was not Istanbul alone that, for many of us at the time, had an air of mystery to it. Indeed, the Pudding Shop bore its own reputation. It was there that Billy Hayes (of Midnight Express fame) made the drug deal that saw him later arrested by Turkish police in October 1970 and subsequently jailed. Hayes’s story, and others, added to Istanbul’s mystery but also conveyed a warning.

The Pudding Shop is the best-known marker of those years, and still exists. It was founded in 1957 by two brothers, Idris and Namik Çolpan, and the café’s actual name—Lale Pastanesi—suggested nothing of its later notoriety. In fact, early travellers to Istanbul rarely mentioned it. Rory MacLean contends that “for a couple of years, well-to-do Turks stopped by for frothy black kahve [Turkish coffee] and honey-soaked baklava topped with green pistachios.”³ But one of the shop’s specialties particularly attracted Western travellers: tavuk göğsü, a pudding made from pounded chicken breast, rice flour, milk, and sugar, all topped with cinnamon: hence the restaurant’s name among Westerners.⁴

As its popularity grew, so also did the Pudding Shop’s size. MacLean notes that in 1969, “a refectory and an authentic-looking wooden façade were added,” followed in the 1970s by “a self-service counter.” Tellingly, he adds, “as travellers morphed into tourists, the Çolpans started writing bus tickets and making hotel bookings, charging a dollar for each service.”⁵

As its website proudly boasts, the Pudding Shop became over time “the only place in the area the adventurous could get direct transport to Asia and tourist information on Turkey.” It continues:

The tourists made the Pudding Shop famous, using it as a meeting place and message center.

Idris explained that “pilgrims” travelling East, often driving old cars or Volkswagen vans, would stop at his restaurant to meet new acquaintances and find other travellers with whom to share expenses and experiences. The Çolpan brothers put up a bulletin board to handle all the messages from people offering or hitching rides to Europe or the Far East.⁶

Not all Western travellers were enamoured of the Pudding Shop. Marjorie Kircher was put off by its unwashed walls and floors, the “blue smoke” that hovered on the air, and the famous puddings, which she viewed as “tasteless.”⁷

It was neither food nor mystery alone that brought many of us to the Pudding Shop, however. The fact remains that it was a central hub of information about the countries east and west of Turkey that was useful to young travellers.

This information went beyond maps, which had improved over the previous decades. By the late 1960s, sometimes crudely produced photocopied pamphlets carrying travel information were in circulation. Play Power: Exploring the International Underground (1970), by Richard Neville, founder of the magazine OZ, contained important information on how to navigate the overland trail. This was followed in 1973 by Maureen Wheeler and Tony Wheeler’s publication of the Lonely Planet’s first guidebook, Across Asia on the Cheap, a more extensive version of which appeared in 1975.⁸ Other, less well known, guidebooks soon emerged. When he travelled in 1976, Ernest (a pseudonym) used Paul Dowsey-Magog’s Overland Through Asia: An Underground Guide (1974). Beyond simple maps and guidebooks, embassies and consulates proved necessary, if uncomfortable, in helping with such things as visas, passports, legal help, medical advice, or warnings—often out of date—of dangers lying ahead.

But the Pudding Shop carried other useful information, too. Travelling in 1969, Fergus F. remembered seeing an oversize book filled with stories of travels, people’s contact information, and transportation opportunities. A large bulletin board contained personal notes through which friends could keep in touch.

In May 2014, I returned to Istanbul’s Pudding Shop, which was still owned by members of its founding family. It had been thirty-eight years, but I made a point of greeting them. I noted with some pleasure a poster board sporting comments from new and perhaps nostalgic travellers:

3.01.2011: Hey travellers, new age hippies, weirdos! We wanna re-open the hippie road to the east in 2014. We’ll go to the ocean with our van. Hope to see you somewhere on the road. Peace and Love—Magic Bus 2011.

3.5.2013: It was great to return to the Pudding Shop. The last time we were here was 1974 on our way to India. We’re glad to see you are still thriving—Pam and Stuart Davis, Arlington, Virginia.

8.10.2013: Long live the Hippie Trail.

Dear travellers, if you are curious, we love you. Curiosity is a beautiful thing.

There were other sources of information in 1976, such as hostels or the American Express offices, but no place surpassed the Pudding Shop when I made my journey.

Few Western visitors to Istanbul ventured outside Sultanahmet, but those who did enjoyed the city’s architectural beauty and bustling energy. Bruce Finch remembered touring Istanbul in dolmuş taxis. Today, the vehicles are licensed and regulated minivans, but in the 1970s, “You could ride in a ’54 Chevy or Ford packed with people. One had a portable 45-record player. The records skipped and bounced, but not knowing the music, I had no idea whether it was on track or not!”

I walked throughout the Sultanahmet area, touring the major mosques and the Grand Bazaar. At the best of times, the bazaar is an overwhelming place, a myriad of sights and sounds, of displays of fresh food, carpets, clothing, and more. There, one day, I stopped at a counter where a young dealer was selling jewellery and precious stones. I was convinced to go with him to an apartment where he said he would show me a special selection of stones. Like many travellers, I had no fixed schedule, and I thought the experience might prove interesting. We took a taxi to a nearby building and went up several stories to a small apartment where we were greeted by another Turk. The three of us sat around a low coffee table. As the custom, they gave me chai and a small plate of Turkish sweets. Over the next hour, the two of them poured out onto the now velvet-clothed table an array of stones—purportedly, opals, pearls, diamonds, sapphires, and more—that they said I could sell for a sizable profit when I returned home. I am not a gem expert and was wary that the alleged precious stones might be made of no more than coloured plastic. The young Turks were aggressive salesmen, however, and as the minutes passed, I became more uneasy that the situation was potentially dangerous. Their hostility increased steadily as they became aware I was not going to buy anything. But I like to think that I carried myself in a way that suggested it would be a bad idea to mess with me. I hurriedly left the building, looking back occasionally, and made my way back to more familiar settings.

Not everyone liked Istanbul. Brenda Grant described the city as “busy and noisy (horns honking continuously) and dreary and smelly and drab.” She remembers with anger a man leading a bear around by a leash attached to its nose. The bear was wearing a “silly” hat and “pink ribbons,” while people paid money for the chance to take pictures.

My own initial observations of Istanbul and its people were not generous. I described the city as having a “snickering” quality, as though a “not-so-clever joke is being perpetrated on you, the mechanics of which are only visible to the locals.” I went on, saying that it had “a touch of the sinister, of milling, shoving, exasperated and exasperating crowds, endless reams of traffic with their supercilious horns, and a carbon-monoxide air that one can almost chew.”

I see now in retrospect how my upbringing in a medium-sized Canadian city had ill-prepared me for one as large and complex as Istanbul. Had I lived in New York or Toronto, my reaction would likely have been different. As the days passed, however, my views of the city and its inhabitants moderated:

One evening I waited on the Galata Bridge for the sun to set and form a proper skyline for a photograph. I had already heard that the Turks are very kind to animals. On this occasion as I watched, a gentleman walked out amid the passing cars and lifted to safety, placing on a curb, a seagull which had only at that moment been hit by a car windshield. The bird was flopping helplessly, and I expected that someone would bash its head in and put it out of its misery. Instead, its rescuer set it down. And though he walked off, a series of concerned pedestrians filed by until finally a pudgy, middle-aged passerby in a white shirt picked it up gently in his two hands and carefully walked away down the bridge. I have no idea of what he later did with the bird. For all I know, he may have throttled and eaten it, with some rice on the side, but I doubt it.

The incident of the seagull touched me. In a city that some from the West viewed as harsh, this moment stood out as contrary to that view. Not for the only time was I moved by the care shown to animals. As I wandered through the city, I noticed there are small, doll-like houses outside the gates of the Topkapi Palace where stray cats are protected and fed.

At the same time, life was both hard and relentless:

Everywhere in Istanbul, millions of people are scrambling to make a living. They tug at your sleeves. They call out at you. Old men at fruit stands; boys of various ages standing or sitting on the curbs with packages of Marlboros; hustlers, money-changers, buyers, sellers: they pester and annoy you, but at base you have to commiserate with them. There are only a limited number of tourist dollars, and if a man is to get them and feed his family, he must beat everyone else to them. The pursuit of the means of existence never ends. There can be no day off. His work must be his leisure; his work is his life.

Reading this today, I wince at the gendered language. Yet, as in many patriarchal cultures, men were responsible for earning an income. As I roamed around the city, men were the people with whom I generally interacted.

On my last evening in Istanbul, I sat upstairs in the Pudding Shop with two Turkish friends, one an economics student, the other a musician with the Istanbul Symphony whom I had previously met in Side. The latter had recommended the name of a well-known Turkish rock musician, Bariş Manço, and was pleased that I had bought one of his cassette recordings. We were joined by a Sudanese student from a Munich university. Over Tuborg beer, we discussed soldiering, the futility of war, the mail service, and girls.

I left the next morning to the south.

1. Rory MacLean, Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India, 18.

2. David Tomory, A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu, 42.

3. MacLean, Magic Bus, 28.

4. Rowley Leigh, “Food and Drink and Silver and Spice and All Things Nice,” The Guardian, November 16, 1996, 52.

5. Maclean, Magic Bus, 30.

6. “About Us,” World Famous Pudding Shop, accessed June 6, 2024, https://www.puddingshop.com/about-us/.

7. Marjorie Kircher, The India Traveler: Overland 1973, Returns and Reflections 1983, 1997, 43.

8. MacLean, Magic Bus, 145; see also Tony Wheeler and Maureen Wheeler, The Lonely Planet Story: Once While Travelling.