Fishy business in Istanbul

Back in the 1950s, it wasn’t unusual for fishermen plying the waters off Istanbul to land tuna weighing hundreds of pounds, or to have one of the massive fish leap out of the sea and over the prow of their boat. Dolphins cavorted alongside fishing vessels that hauled in lobster, oysters, razor clams, four kinds of crab and eight varieties of mussels.

“Fishermen in their 70s and 80s tell stories depicting Istanbul like an island in the middle of the ocean. It’s as if we’ve moved to a totally different place since then,” says Defne Koryürek, the founder of Slow Food Istanbul, which has organized an annual holiday to draw attention to the city’s rapidly depleting waterways and to try and reverse the tide.

Celebrated each October with fishing competitions, film screenings, children’s art activities, talks, and special meals, the holiday is named after one of Istanbul’s favorite fish, the fatty, flavorful — but now endangered — lüfer (bluefish)...

I've been following the issue of overfishing in Istanbul and the fight to save the lüfer for a few years now, previously covering the start of the campaign to increase the minimum catch size; the inaugural Lüfer Bayramı; and the dangerous world of illegal fishing for Treehugger.com.

Now you can read the rest of my latest article on this subject, "Istanbul Chefs Band Together To Save Their Favorite Fish," on Zester Daily.

Seeds of hope for Istanbul's urban agriculture?

Looking out across today's concrete-covered expanses, it's hard to imagine that Istanbul was once a city of gardens -- and not all that long ago, either.

In Ottoman times, according to researcher Aleksandar Sopov, there were bostan (market gardens) all along the ridge passing through Istanbul's old city, many associated with that area's large mosques, and fed by water from the Valens Aqueduct. As recently as 1900, Istanbul was home to more than 1,200 bostan covering as many as 12 square kilometers. Highly productive and tended with sustainable techniques passed down through generations, many of these gardens continued providing food for the local population until mass urbanization kicked off in the 1960s and 1970s.

These days, only a scant few bostan remain in the city. The extensive gardens at the base of the old city walls are under threat from development, as I wrote last summer for The Atlantic's CityLab. Now, so too is the farmland in Gümüşdere, on Istanbul's Black Sea coast and close to the path of the third bridge being built over the Bosphorus Strait.

But the rapid transformation of the city has also sparked a movement to plant new gardens as a form of resistance, with community-based groups of volunteers taking over empty lots and trying to revive urban food-growing.

Read my articles for Culinary Backstreets and Zester Dailyon these interlinked developments:

• Farming on the Edge: Istanbul's Threatened Urban Agriculture

• Traditional Market Gardens Take Root Again In Istanbul (pdf, or read full text below)

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Traditional Market Gardens Take Root Again In Istanbul

by Jennifer Hattam

The purple skin of the Kavak fig is so thin that the fruit can be eaten whole, without peeling – and so fragile that it cannot be transported long distances. One of the few places this Istanbul delicacy is grown is a small market garden (known as a bostan in Turkish) in Rümeli Kavağı, a windswept waterfront settlement near where the Bosphorus Strait opens out into the Black Sea.

“It’s probably the last historical bostan along the Bosphorus, just 100 meters from the water. It’s registered as green space, but threatened with development because of the third Bosphorus bridge being built nearby,” explains Aleksandar Sopov, a Harvard University Ph.D. candidate in history and Middle Eastern studies who is researching Istanbul’s Ottoman-era agriculture.

Fruits and vegetables were once widely grown within city limits, with many neighborhoods becoming well known for their specialty produce. Istanbul old-timers still wax poetic about the flavorful romaine lettuce of Yedikule, near the Byzantine city walls; the fragrant strawberries grown in the Bosphorus village of Arnavutköy; and the cucumbers from Çengelköy, along the Asian side of the strait, and from Langa, now part of the gritty central-city Aksaray neighborhood.

As recently as 1900, historical sources indicate, Istanbul was home to more than 1,200 market gardens covering as many as 12 square kilometers. Today, most have been plowed under and paved over – and most of those that remain face the threat of a similar fate. But the wheels of urbanization and development that began churning vigorously in the 1970s and 1980s have more recently also spurred a grass-roots resurgence in urban food growing.

The Tarlataban garden in the Rümeli Hisarı neighborhood was among the first in this new wave.

“When a Starbucks was opened at Boğazici University, there was a protest against the increasing food prices and commercialization on campus and some of us said, ‘Let’s see if we can grow our own food instead,’” garden volunteer Pınar Ercan recalls as she sits on a tarp picking chard seeds from a stack of dried stalks and gathering them in a jar. “We didn’t know if we could do it or not.”

Three years later, the small plot of land on a woody, remote corner of the university campus supplies produce to a student-run collective kitchen and serves as a laboratory for seed saving, composting and other sustainability initiatives. From a distance, the growing area looks like a wild tangle of plants, but move in closer and bright purple eggplants, red tomatoes and green peppers emerge from their vines, while robust melon and squash flourish in the undergrowth. (Crop diversity and rotation are notable characteristics of traditional bostan, which typically yield 15 to 20 different types of produce a year.)

A small group of volunteers tends the Tarlataban garden each week using techniques derived from the environmentally friendly practice of permaculture. Learning as they go, they have recently been sharing the knowledge they have acquired with students from other local universities who want to start similar projects on their campuses.

Istanbul’s new urban-gardening movement got a dramatic boost last year, when mass protests broke out in response to the threatened destruction of a centrally located green space to make way for a shopping mall. During the week or so that demonstrators occupied Gezi Park, some of them planted a small vegetable garden along its northern edge. After the park was cleared by police, similar gardens began to pop up around the city.

“Many places were cultivated after Gezi – empty plots of land owned by city municipalities and often threatened by development,” Sopov says.

In the Cihangir neighborhood, a short walk from Gezi Park, the Roma Bostan sits on a vacant hillside with a million-dollar view of the city, next to a staircase often crowded with young beer drinkers and littered with the broken bottles they leave behind. A sign on the fence surrounding its cornstalks and cabbage heads reads: “In the summer of 2013, this area was cleared of garbage for the first time. The soil was treated, planting beds created, and vegetables and healing herbs planted from local seeds... It is kept alive by the collective effort of neighborhood residents. We await your support to keep it clean and protected...”

Across the water, on the Asian side of the city, residents of the Kadıköy district have rallied, so far successfully, to keep their postage-stamp-sized Moda Gezi Bostan from being covered with asphalt for a parking lot.

“It’s all totally free – people plant and take whatever they want,” says a local who ambles up to chat with a visitor.

Small in scale and tended by hobbyists, these community plots can’t make up for the destruction of the historical bostan whose gardeners passed down a lifetime of knowledge from one generation to the next and fed the city for so many years with the produce they grew to sell at local markets. But the Tarlataban garden’s Ercan and others hope they might just be able to point Istanbul in a new direction.

“We understood after Gezi that we can be an example,” she says. “We’re trying to make what we need for ourselves, and the garden is a way to show people a more sustainable model for living.”

This article was originally published on Zester Daily (RIP) on 10 October 2014.

Garden party

With the world's largest collection of living plants, and its scientists working around the globe to preserve biodiversity, the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London is internationally renowned for its conservation work. Less well known, perhaps, is the fact that its 300-acre grounds harbor the ingredients for some darn good cocktails...

While visiting London earlier this summer, I ventured out to the Kew Gardens with a journalist friend from the International New York Times to partake in an impossible-to-resist combination: fancy cocktails, fresh air, and a fantastic setting. As we sipped on Kew-cumbers, Rose Gardens, Gooseberry & Fennels, and Strawberry Cups -- all gin-based drinks concocted from fresh botanicals and seasonal fruits that grow in Kew Gardens -- we chatted with Gin Garden founder Jo Farish about her enviable job creating plant-based pop-up bars at all kinds of interesting places in and around London.

Read my article for Zester Daily, "Cocktails Get Royal Treatment In Gin Garden Pop-Up Bar," as a pdf, or see below for the full text.

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Cocktails Get the Royal Treatment in a Pop-Up Gin Garden

by Jennifer Hattam

With the world’s largest collection of living plants, and its scientists working around the globe to preserve biodiversity, the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London is internationally renowned for its conservation work. Less well known, perhaps, is the fact that its 300-acre grounds harbor the ingredients for some darn good cocktails.

“Sweet cicely, or garden myrrh, is very fragrant, but it also has a natural sweetness so it’s good to pair with rhubarb,” says Jo Farish, founder of the Gin Garden, as she hands over a Strawberry Cup. The beguiling early summer concoction of strawberry-infused gin, homemade rhubarb-and-sweet-cicely cordial, and lemon juice is garnished with fresh strawberries, cucumber and edible flowers.

The Gin Garden’s summer residence at Kew Gardens, where Farish and her team have turned a small greenhouse into a jungle-like bar serving up gin cocktails and tonics on weekends (Friday through Sunday) and British bank holidays, offers plenty of inspiration for mixologists.

“We’re taste-testing new ingredients as they come into season – we’ve been infusing cherry gin, with more fruits and berries coming up, and the lavender and Roman chamomile growing over there will be used in drinks when they’re ready,” Farish says.

The cocktail menu, which changes weekly, “uses bits and pieces from the Kew Gardens, but we can’t use too much,” she admits. “The ingredients are all things that are grown here, but these plants have to be preserved.”

Serving drinks based on what’s growing nearby is the focus of the Gin Garden, which Farish started up in fall 2012 after a successful trial run making apple martinis for an event at a historic house and garden run by the U.K.’s National Trust from the apples, lavender and honey from the property’s grounds.

Her company, which has taken its traveling botanical bar to museums, flower shows, design fairs and other locations in and around London, melds Farish’s background in event planning and garden design – and, she says, some very British sensibilities.

“British people are real gardeners and lots of people make their own gin. The two go hand in hand,” Farish says. “People are used to preserving [food] and having something to get through the winter.” She assures urban dwellers with more limited space that plenty of cocktail ingredients are easy to cultivate in a window box.

In addition to its pop-up bars, the Gin Garden also offers workshops on growing botanical ingredients at home and making infusions and syrups.

To make the infused gin that forms the base of their refreshing Kew-cumber cocktail, for example, Farish recommends slicing up cucumbers like you would for a sandwich, filling up a Mason jar halfway with the vegetables, and topping it off with gin.

“Sip it the next morning and see how it tastes,” Farish says. “If the flavor isn’t strong enough, just close the jar up and try it again the next morning.”

A Gooseberry & Fennel cocktail is made from gin infused with the fennel that grows wild along the coast of Norfolk, in the east of England. The drink has a subtly acidic bite – and plenty of health benefits. “Gooseberries have vitamins A, B, C and antioxidants; they were actually used to ward off scurvy before citrus fruit was available in the U.K.,” Farish says.

The temporary Gin and Tonics Garden at Kew is part of the botanic garden’s summertime “Plantasia” festival, which includes a variety of activities, from a healing plants tour to a barefoot walk. The activities are aimed at introducing visitors to plants’ benefits “for body, mind, and soul.”

The passiflora tincture in the Rose Garden cocktail, for example, is said to be good for anxiety, while the namesake ingredient in the Elderflower Fizz is believed to improve resistance to allergens. Angelica root, one of the six botanicals in the No. 3 London Dry Gin used to make the Kew cocktails, has long been employed in traditional medicine as a treatment for digestive issues.

“Nearly all plants have some kind of health benefit,” says Farish, who prefers to use a masticating, or cold-press, juicer for serious cocktail-making because it preserves more of the nutrients in fruits, vegetables and herbs.

Some of the Gin Garden’s drinks get an extra boost from a spritz of aromatic water before serving. The water is applied over the top of the glass with an old-fashioned perfume atomizer. Made by the London-based company The Herball, these aromatic waters are distilled using the same method as gin itself, retaining the complete essence of herbs and flowers like the chamomile spritzed over the Strawberry Cup or the geranium, rose and lavender that add a floral twist to the otherwise classic G&T.

“There are so many botanicals you can use with gin. It’s pretty limitless,” Farish says, mentioning her recent discovery of a small distillery in Cornwall that makes a violet leaf gin. “You really have free reign with ingredients compared to other drinks.”

Though gin is often thought of as a summertime tipple, Farish is already thinking ahead to the chillier seasons to come after the Kew pop-up bar closes its doors Sept. 7. “I’d like to do a winter gin garden,” she says. “Gin makes a great hot toddy with warming winter herbs and spices like ginger, sage and thyme.”

This article was originally published on Zester Daily (RIP) on 28 August 2014. 

Bringing the art world to Istanbul

Eighty modern and contemporary art galleries hailing from Helsinki to Hong Kong are set to join ArtInternational for its return to the banks of Istanbul’s Golden Horn in the fall. This year, the fair will bring with it a fresh focus on collecting practices and on experimental film and video art.

The inaugural edition last September of ArtInternational, brought to Istanbul by Art HK co-founder Sandy Angus, netted an estimated 21 million euros in sales for its participating galleries.

“It’s a truly international art fair with high-quality works, coherence and a good ratio between Turkish and international galleries. That differentiates it from other fairs in Turkey and the region,” says Istanbul collector Tansa Ekşioğlu...

Read the rest of my preview of ArtInternational, which will be held held 26-28 September at Istanbul's Haliç Congress Center, in the Fall 2014 issue of Selections magazine's Art Paper supplement: "Bringing the World to Istanbul" (pdf)

A sweet but fading tradition

The Altan Şekerleme candy shop was a frequent and favorite stop during my time as a tour guide for Istanbul Eats’ culinary walks, but what happened in the candy-making operation upstairs was always a closely guarded secret. At a recent press event at the Istanbul Culinary Arts Center, however, I finally had the chance to see how those glistening hard candies were made, and to return for a chat with one of the master şekerci (confectioners) carrying on a tradition that dates back, with little change, to Ottoman times:

Inside a weathered storefront surrounded by hardware shops, colorful gems gleam in the dim light – large jars full of hard candies flavored with sesame, cinnamon, rose, orange, bergamot and lemon.

Proprietor Hakan Altanoğlu and his forefathers have been making and selling the Turkish candy called akide şekeri at this shop in Istanbul’s Fatih district since 1865, but the bite-size treat’s history goes back to the glory days of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The empire’s elite Janissary soldiers “presented the grand vizier, other dignitaries and their own officers with gifts of akide sweets as a symbol of their loyalty to sultan and state,” a tradition deriving from an alternate meaning of the candy’s name, writes Mary Işın in her book “Sherbet and Spice: The Complete Story of Turkish Sweets and Desserts.” Akide then became, as it remains today for many, “the sweet of choice” at circumcisions, weddings and the Şeker Bayram (literally, “Sugar Holiday”), the three-day festival that will mark the end of Ramadan this year from July 28 to 30.

In the early Ottoman days, the candy, whose name derived from the Syrian Arabic word (akîda) for “to knot” or “to thicken,” was made from grape juice, boiled down into a thick, malleable molasses. Today, the typical sweetener is refined sugar and much akide is machine-manufactured, but a few traditional şekerci (candy-makers) continue to make it the same laborious way it’s been done for centuries.

Showing off a burn scar on his arm that he says dates back to the 1970s, longtime şekerci Hüseyin Aksoy stirs a wooden spoon through a copper pot of boiling water and sugar – with just a pinch of cream of tartar – in the kitchen of the Istanbul Culinary Arts Center (YESAM), occasionally sweeping the inside of the pot with a wooden brush to prevent burning. (This is also a good technique to use when making stews, notes YESAM coordinator Banu Özden.)

When the sugar mixture has reduced to his satisfaction, Aksoy carries the copper pot over to a spotless marble slab and pours its contents out onto the smooth surface to cool, periodically poking at the sticky edges and flipping them over with a spatula. With the candy still as hot as 70 degrees Celsius, he winces slightly as he folds in a small bowlful of flavoring—some lemon salt and lemon oil, ground to paste with a mortar and pestle; or perhaps some mastic resin.

Made from the gum of the mastic (mastiha) tree, the resin’s piney flavor is an acquired taste but one important to many Turkish desserts. Another traditional flavor that has, thankfully, gone out of fashion is musk, a secretion of the musk deer imported from Nepal and Tibet. One of the most popular varieties of akide in Ottoman times, musk, Işın writes, was “appreciated as much as a mark of wealth and power as for its fragrance.”

Back at YESAM, the real show starts. Aksoy takes the multicolored lump that has resulted from his folding and kneading, drapes it over a rounded metal bar, and then begins to pull the ends like taffy, tossing them back over the bar repeatedly until the candy gets thicker and its color transforms from glistening caramel speckled with white into a glorious opaque blonde hue.

“The more you do it, the more your hands and fingers get calloused to the heat,” he explains, laughing a bit as he admits that when he was learning the trade 45 years ago, he once dropped the hot candy during the pulling process. “The master şekerci’s wife hit me with a broomstick for ruining the batch.”

Next, Aksoy presses out a sheet of the newly blended mix, adds a layer of unflavored candy he’s kept in reserve, and rolls the two into a thick cylinder. Tugging at one end of the tube, he pulls out thin ropes, cuts them off with scissors, and passes them to an assistant to roll into smooth dowels. The whole process must be done quickly, or the candy’s consistency becomes too hard to be useable. Taking a handful of the now-firm candy sticks, Aksoy taps them level on top of a square metal bar set above a bowl, then strikes them rapid-fire with one edge of his scissors to produce tiny cylinders of the finished akide, each with a golden roll of color inside.

Though each of the four to five 10-kilogram batches of akide that Aksoy makes every day yields more than 1,000 candies, a machine can turn out 2,500 kilos daily. He insists the taste and consistency of machine-made akide just isn’t the same as handmade, but şekerci like Aksoy and the Altanoğlu family are part of a dying breed.

“Young people aren’t learning this trade anymore; they don’t like the work, and there are other options for them now,” Aksoy says. “After us, there won’t be any more şekerci.”

This article was originally published under the title “Turkish Candy Entices Through the Ages” by Zester Daily (RIP) on 18 July 2014 (view/download pdf).

A Turkish artist 'Through the Looking Glass'

Initially ignored and dismissed for her experimental approach, Füsun Onur has become recognised as one of Turkey’s most influential contemporary artists by steadfastly continuing to follow her own path. She has described her art as "musical work without sound," explaining, "I am taking everyday objects and using them as notes."

Born in 1938, Onur got her undergraduate degree at what is now the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts in Istanbul, where she studied with Ali Hadi Bara. The Iranian-born sculptor was influential in moving Turkish sculpture away from official monuments and into more abstract realms.

Onur made her own mark by pioneering installation art that pushes the boundaries of both sculpture and painting, incorporating everyday objects and aspects of daily life but taking them out of their normal context in a way that prompts the viewer to reassess the meanings typically attributed to them...

Read the rest of my preview of "Füsun Onur: Through the Looking Glass" in the Summer 2014 issue of Selections magazine's Art Paper supplement: "Making Meaning from the Mundane" (pdf)

This Emre Baykal-curated retrospective is being exhibited at Istanbul's ARTER until August 17. Don't miss the complementary video piece downstairs by artist Ali Kazma, who further illuminates Onur's artistic influences with his evocative footage shot in her Istanbul home.

The human cost of Turkey’s building boom

High above the street, construction workers scale rickety scaffolding without helmets or harnesses. Near the sidewalk, a man welds a piece of metal, his face bare as sparks shoot all around. These are common sights in Turkey, where worker safety often seems to be an afterthought.

The horrific death of at least 301 workers in the Soma coal mine disaster last month has put the spotlight on Turkey’s dangerous, under-regulated mining industry, but the construction industry that has fueled the country’s recent economic growth and boosted its global profile is rife with dangers too: One-third of all work accidents reported in Turkey come from the building sector, more than any other industry.

With the deaths in Soma still weighing heavily on my mind, I looked into the safety risks faced by construction workers in Turkey for the Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS), and filed this report: "Turkey's Building Boom Takes Toll on Worker Safety"

Creative guide to a GREAT city

The inaugural GREAT Festival of Creativity rolls into Istanbul next week (20-22 May at SEED), showcasing innovative ideas in a wide range of fields – from fashion and design to technology and education to food and drink.

The festival, which travels next to Hong Kong and Shanghai, is part of the British Prime Ministry's GREAT campaign, an ongoing drive to promote Britain abroad as a place to visit and do business.

To further inspire the "cross-section of creative and commercial Britain" visiting Istanbul for the event, I contributed pithy write-ups of galleries, restaurants, shops and other spots across the city to the GREAT Festival Guide to Creative Istanbul, an online "directory of all that's creative and unusual in one of the world's GREAT cities."

Making soup for Syria

When faced with almost 1 million needy people, a bowl of soup – even a large vat – doesn't go a very long way.

But Barbara Massaad refuses to let the daunting scale of the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon deter her from doing her small part to help – one bowl of soup at a time...

I first heard of the "Soup for Syria" project on Twitter and contacted Beirut-based Slow Food member and author Barbara Massaad about her plans to use a soup cookbook as a fundraising tool to help fight the growing food insecurity among Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Though her project can only affect the lives of a small number of the now 9 million people displaced (internally and externally) by the Syrian crisis, her determination to do something was inspiring to hear in the face of so much hopelessness about the situation.

With Lebanon overwhelmed by refugees and now seeking to limit their number, and a potential drought threatening to worsen the already disastrous state of food production in Syria itself, anything and everything that can be done to alleviate food insecurity for refugees and those who remain in Syria matters.

Read the rest of my article, "'Soup For Syria' Dips Into Refugees' Culinary Lore," on Zester Daily.

Picturing Turkey's urban growing pains

From empty rural schools to blighted inner-city neighborhoods, there have been many victims, along with beneficiaries, of Turkey's rapid urbanization and recent economic growth. Frustration with the pace and nature of the changes, especially in Istanbul, helped fuel last summer’s dramatic street protests. The ups and downs of the country's transformation also sparked the passions of many of the talented students featured in the American Turkish Society’s 2013 Young Photographers Award competition.

“This year’s submissions were striking in their melancholy air, and the focus on abandoned spaces, overcrowded cities, and the everyday difficulties – particularly for children and young people – more conspicuous [than in years past],” competition jurors Karen Haas and Anne E. Havinga told me in an email.

The work of the competition winner and two recipients of honorable mentions, as well as that of other participants that I featured in a photo gallery for The Atlantic's CityLab (formerly The Atlantic Cities), puts an important – if often forgotten – human face on Turkey's ongoing urban transformation.

Read my article, "The Hidden Side of Turkey's Urban Transformation, Told in 10 Pictures," and see more of these powerful photos on CityLab.

Contemporary Istanbul 2013

Istanbul's oldest and largest art fair returned to the city for its 8th edition in November, and once again I was on hand to cover it for the Beirut-based lifestyle magazine Selections, which recently launched its own art-focused supplement, Art Paper.

My highlights feature on Contemporary Istanbul appeared over a two-page spread in the Winter 2013-14 issue of Art Paper, which also included a related "Collector Profile" of Turkish textile magnate Öner Kocabeyoğlu, who opened his private collection up to visitors during the art fair.

Read my Contemporary Istanbul wrap-up for Selections: "Home Colours Stay Strong at Turkey's Top Art Fair" (pdf)

Read my other piece for Selections: "Collector Profile: Öner Kocabeyoğlu" (pdf)

Istanbul's 'GOOD' side

Fascinating, frenetic, and often frustrating, Istanbul can sometimes seem like it’s defined by its unmet potential. With its young population and incredibly rich history, Istanbul should be a hotbed of innovation, but is unfortunately hampered by a lack of diversity, a vast wealth gap, and a political system that limits civic participation – as was plain to see during this past summer’s mass protests... 

The quarterly magazine GOOD reached out this past fall to get my take on Istanbul for its "GOOD City Index," a new feature highlighting "the cities that are emerging, the ones that are figuring out their growing pains or flourishing under the radar."

The final piece, published in GOOD's Winter 2013 issue under the headline "Celebrating Possibility," shines the spotlight on 20 up-and-coming cities, from Accra to Wellington. My writeup on Istanbul appears at number 7 on the index (n.b. I asked for the Bosphorus to be correctly identified as a strait, rather than a "river" but the error was not fixed as promised).

Download a pdf version of the entire "GOOD City Index" or a smaller pdf of the introduction and Istanbul section.

In the Migrant Kitchen

Sara moves around the large kitchen with laser-like focus, filling a tea glass of water to add to a heaping pot of saffron rice with one hand while sautéing a pan of tart, red dried berries, walnuts, raisins and slivered almonds with the other. The resulting dish, zereshk polow (barberry rice), is a popular one in Sara’s home country of Iran, but not so easy to make in neighboring Turkey, where she is living as a refugee...

When the International Organization for Migration’s Turkey office and the food website Culinary Backstreets first organized their "Migrant Kitchen" events last year, the rare chance to eat authentic Ethiopian, Filipino, and other foreign cuisines in Istanbul brought variety-starved expat foodies (myself included) out in droves. This year, I got the chance to peek into the kitchen while Sara, an Iranian refugee, cooked up a traditional feast, and to talk to her about her family's struggles in Turkey and the role food plays in creating a little sense of home in a strange and not always welcoming land.

Read the rest of my article, "Refugees Speak In The Universal Language Of Food In Turkey," on Zester Daily.

Istanbul: an introduction

Earlier this year, Time Out headquarters in London asked the editors of all local editions to prepare an "ultra-useful" mini-guide to their city – its art, nightlife, restaurants, and sights, along with hot tips and fascinating bits of trivia – that could be used by any of the company's 60 offshoots around the world.

The project editor praised my guide to Istanbul as "fantastic. A gorgeous piece of writing – far and away the best one I've had back so far!"

Following my departure from the magazine, Time Out Istanbul published the piece this month as "Istanbul in short." Have a read and discover what has made Istanbul, despite its many faults, a conqueror of visitors' hearts for hundreds of years and counting.

UPDATE: Time Out Dubai published a shorter version of my city-guide in December under the title "Why you must go to Istanbul."

A journey down the Tigris

Fifty years ago, wooden rafts called keleks regularly plied the Tigris River, carrying people, livestock, and cargo – with loads up to 35 tons – from southern Turkey to northern Iraq. Built from logs lashed together and made buoyant by inflated goat skins, a fully loaded kelek could travel the 250-mile distance from Diyarbakır, Turkey, to Mosul, Iraq, in just six days.

Today, the rafts' long, heavy wooden oars push slowly through the brown, flat waters of the Tigris as they traverse northern Iraq. Sometimes their bottoms scrape the riverbed, the water levels low enough on a late September day for a tall man to stand waist-deep in the middle of the river. It takes a full day of hard effort to row eight miles…

When a last-minute invitation arrived last month to join the environmental group Nature Iraq as they paddled, floated, rowed, and (sometimes) towed a trio of traditional boats down the Tigris River from Hasankeyf to the marshes of southern Iraq, it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up.

My stint with their Tigris River Flotilla in northern Iraq included both gritty gravel mines and glorious natural vistas, a night excursion to a Turkish-built amusement park in Duhok, a long night spent trying to cross the border, lunch with a cliff-dwelling hermit, camping (and posing for pictures) with the peshmerga, and some seriously sore muscles – plenty of fodder for numerous stories. My first dispatch from the trip was published last week by the Christian Science Monitor, marking my debut with that publication.

Read the rest of my article, "Dammed, dirty, drained by war: can Iraq's Tigris River be restored?" on the Monitor website.

Art and the city

Every other autumn is eagerly awaited by art-lovers in Istanbul, as it brings (in the odd-numbered years) the return of the Istanbul Biennial. Now in its 13th edition, the biennial itself varies in the quality of its offerings, but reliably brings with it a host of other art exhibitions and events throughout the city – as well as the opportunity to peek into some typically shuttered buildings, from historic Greek schools to crumbling hamams.

This year's biennial curator chose to focus on the public domain, a decision that both dovetailed with and was made problematic by the Gezi Park protests that broke out this summer, increasing both the anticipation and controversy around the international art event.

As editor at Time Out Istanbul, I spearheaded this year's coverage of the Istanbul Biennial, putting together a cover package that previewed the event, looked at parallel exhibitions being organized around town, and delved into some of the local artist residency programs that are helping develop the city's contemporary art scene. My own written contributions to Time Out's "Art Issue" included:

• "Art and the City," the biennial preview (pdf)

• "Things Unseen," on artist Trevor Paglen's new exhibit with Protocinema (pdf)

• "Unearthing Balat," on the "Balat?" exhibit at Plato Sanat (pdf)

A little time at the helm of Time Out

I've just wrapped up a seven-month stint editing Time Out Istanbul, the local English-language edition of the popular international line of arts and entertainment magazines. I spent nine years in the United States as an editor at Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, and this brief return to my roots reminded me of how much I enjoy working with writers and conceptualizing packages – or entire issue's worth – of stories that will work together to provide a rich experience for the reader.

As the head of a very small team, I also did my fair share of writing at Time Out Istanbul. In addition to our Gezi Park protest coverage in the July issue, and our Istanbul Biennial preview in the forthcoming September issue, these are some of the stories I most enjoyed researching and writing:

• “Hidden History” – A stroll through Istanbul’s Byzantine past with Context Travel

• “Resisting Nostalgia” – An interview with Turkish artist Ali Kazma on his fascination with transformation

• “Literature as Travel Guide” – Bored stiff by traditional guidebooks? Find your way in the company of the new 'city-pick Istanbul' anthology

• “Getting Away From Them All” – Four sightseeing itineraries for escaping Istanbul's summer throngs

• “Sharp-Dressed Man” – Meet the 83-year-old Turkish-German tailor who's become a hit in the fashion blogosphere

Amid strife, Turks break fast together for Ramadan

On the first night of Ramadan last month, thousands of people gathered on İstiklal Caddesi in central Istanbul. They laid down newspapers and tablecloths in a long line stretching nearly half a kilometer – then sat down on the ground to break their fast in the middle of the city’s busiest pedestrian boulevard.

Passing food and drinks from hand to hand, participants called out to people walking by, “Is anyone hungry? Is anyone thirsty?” and leaped up to distribute water, dates, baklava and other traditional fast-breaking items. As the meal wrapped up, young men toting large garbage bags chanted, “Trash! Trash! Trash!” as they worked their way through the crowd collecting refuse.

Ramadan, the month when observant Muslims traditionally fast from dawn till dusk, ended this year on August 7, but not before coming against a backdrop of weeks of street protests in Istanbul and elsewhere in Turkey. The very iftar meal that breaks the day’s fast became a forum for Turkish people to express their dissatisfaction with the direction they feel the country is taking.

“Ramadan used to be a time for community, for people to come together and get to know each other, but with rapid urbanization and the social isolation that’s come with that, people have started to [either] stay in their homes for iftar or attend expensive [fast-breaking] meals at restaurants or hotels,” says Abdurrahim Özer, a member of the Anti-Capitalist Muslims. This loosely organized group of pious activists has coalesced in opposition to what they see as the too-close relationship between religion and wealth under Turkey’s current government.

Two years ago, members of the group organized small public meals during Ramadan outside of luxury hotels where local dignitaries, business leaders and celebrities often host and attend lavish iftar dinners. Just one fast-breaking meal at a top hotel can cost nearly a quarter of the monthly minimum wage. Much food is often wasted during Ramadan, and many people (up to 25% of Turks, according to one recent news report) actually gain weight during the fasting month.

Ramadan “shouldn’t be about eating expensive foods; it should be about understanding and helping the poor, the hungry, the needy,” Özer says.

The ongoing demonstrations this year have reinvigorated the earlier effort to protest the commercialization of Ramadan, drawing people of various segments of society and levels of religious belief to share in the yeryüzü sofrası, or “earth tables.” (According to Turkish food writer Aylin Öney Tan, the “earth tables” hearken back to the original meaning of “sofra,” which comes from the Arabic word for a traveler’s provisions, eaten on a cloth or mat placed on the ground.)

Following the first people’s iftar this year on İstiklal Caddesi, a thoroughfare that has hosted regular protests this summer, yeryüzü sofrası spread throughout the city, with individuals and groups organizing them each night in different locations – often places with symbolic importance due to conflicts in the area or threats facing historic heritage.

After a public forum related to the ongoing protests was attacked by people with sticks and knives in the Kocamustafapaşa neighborhood of Istanbul, a communal iftar was held in the area the next night, drawing more than 1,000 people. Another was organized inside the Yedikule bostan, a series of centuries-old market gardens around the city walls that are in the process of being razed to build a landscaped park with tea gardens and an artificial river. Outside of Istanbul, a yeryüzü iftarı was held along the banks of the Tigris River in Hasankeyf, an ancient town in Southeast Turkey that faces being submerged under the waters of a hydroelectric dam.

The people’s iftars are part of a tradition that predates Islam itself, according to Özer. “This goes back to the Prophet Abraham, who shared his food with other people who sat around his table,” he says.

During Ottoman times in Turkey, “rich people would open their homes for the iftar meal,” says Mary Işın, the author of the recent book Sherbet and Spice: The Complete Story of Turkish Sweets and Desserts, and a writer on Turkish culinary history who has lived in the country since 1973. “They made huge amounts of food, mostly for friends and neighbors and colleagues, but theoretically anyone could turn up and be fed.” The sultan’s palace may have done similarly, if reports by foreign observers documenting life in Istanbul at the time are accurate.

That tradition has morphed in recent years into massive municipality-organized iftar tents set up in central locations around Turkish cities to offer free meals to the public, but members of Özer’s group and their allies are critical of the way such charity has been commercialized.

“Outside Kocatepe Camii, the main mosque in Ankara, there’s a huge banner saying who sponsored the iftar that night. That’s not Islamic. There is a saying attributed to the Prophet Mohammed, ‘You need to give with your one hand and the other hand should not know about it,’” Özer says. “We believe that wealth comes from God and people who have wealth are obligated to share it. If they use that as a way of boasting, then it diminishes the act [of charity] in the eyes of God.”

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[SIDEBAR]

A typical iftar table

The elements of the iftar meal in Turkey have changed relatively little over the centuries. Many people still have a date – believed to be the preferred fast-breaking food of the Prophet Mohammed – as their first bite of sustenance after abstaining from dawn to dusk.

“The iftar meal is traditionally served in two sections – you start off with tiny little sauces, dates, olives, spoonfuls of jam and other bits and bobs to nibble to assuage your hunger,” says culinary history writer Mary Işın. “Then you have the evening prayer, a little rest and maybe a smoke, and then the proper meal itself: soups, stews, roasts and pilav [rice].”

Sweets, especially baklava and the milky dessert güllaç, are also closely tied to Ramadan in Turkey because of their importance in Ottoman cuisine. The period following the end of Ramadan is actually called Şeker Bayramı, or “Holiday of Sweets.”

This article was originally published on Zester Daily (RIP) on 13 August 2013.

Grim future for historical gardens?

Walking the 6.5-kilometer length of the city's ancient land walls my first year in Istanbul, I was delighted to discover lush green vegetable gardens growing in the shadow of these 1,600-year-old fortifications. Later, I learned from a historian specializing in Ottoman gardens that these small market plots – known in Turkish as bostan – were established on very fertile soil and had been handed down from generation to generation for hundreds of years.

As with so many other things at that time, it seemed perfectly reasonable to assume that tradition would continue on for many more generations to come. But this summer, with the dust from the Gezi Park turmoil not yet settled down, I received an urgent message alerting local press that bulldozers had moved in to raze some of these gardens near the Yedikule fortress.

With tensions high in the city, a fellow foreign journalist and I who arrived on the scene to report on the story became embroiled in a heated conflict over the future of the gardens – and even targeted as interlopers by supporters of their destruction. The angry rhetoric being spread at the highest levels throughout the Gezi Park protests was on full display.

Shaken but undeterred, I wrote a piece for The Atlantic's CityLab (formerly The Atlantic Cities) about the threat to the bostan and how it ties in with larger issues of urban planning, public space, and public participation that are currently the subject of hot debate in Istanbul.

My story was subsequently picked up by the regional news sites Eurasianet and Green Prophet, and my photos of the bostan were used by the ecological agriculture website A Growing Culture.

Read my article, "Centuries-Old Gardens Are the Latest Battleground in Istanbul," on CityLab.

Gezi on my mind

During the last week of May, I found myself walking through Gezi Park at some point most evenings, drawn to the scruffy, neglected green space near Istanbul's Taksim Square to see how the crowds had multiplied since a few dozen protesters trying to block the bulldozing of trees there as part of a controversial construction plan were teargassed by police.

Each night, there were more and more people in the once largely disused and ignored park, talking, singing, painting signs, picnicking, and pitching tents. And each morning, those who remained at dawn were teargassed once again. After waking up to this news one too many times, I sent off a story pitch about the protests to The Atlantic's CityLab (formerly The Atlantic Cities), which commissioned an article for the next day.

As I reported and wrote, the story changed rapidly; by the time my article about the Gezi Park protests was published, much of Istanbul (and then other cities around Turkey) had erupted into mass demonstrations, with protesters clashing with police late into the night. After a fragile peace was restored in Taksim Square and Gezi Park, I wrote a follow-up piece about the Occupy-style "mini-city" created by protesters, complete with libraries, food tents, and infirmaries.

As the Gezi Park protests drew renewed international attention to Turkey, multiple guest-blogging offers came my way. I wrote two posts for TreeHugger.com, where I previously served as Istanbul correspondent: on how the nationwide demonstrations started with a local effort to defend a park, and on some of the other environmental threats facing Turkey and the risk of a damaging "nature" law being pushed through the Turkish Parliament while all eyes were elsewhere. I also spoke live to CTV News Channel in Toronto about the mood in Istanbul following a promise to put the fate of Gezi Park up to a referendum.

With the protests continuing at full force well into June, there was only one choice for the cover story of the July 2013 issue of Time Out Istanbul, the monthly magazine I was editing at the time. I commissioned stories about the music inspired by the protests, the street art both humorous and biting that was popping up everywhere, the free public library that was created, the role of Istanbul's LGBT community in the demonstrations, and a personal essay by a Turkish author about her time in the Gezi Park community. I also wrote a piece on the "urban transformation" of Istanbul, one of the sparks of the unrest, as well as one on three documentary films that foreshadowed the upheaval. I also co-wrote a piece on the political and social context behind the protests that was eventually pulled amid fears of government retribution.

Living just a few blocks from the protest epicenter, I had some of my own experiences and observations to share too. On my personal blog, The Turkish Life, I wrote about the rapidly changing scene in Taksim Square during the early days of the protests; the spontaneous pedestrianization of the area; and the aftermath of the forceful clearing of Gezi Park. The biggest hit among these posts, though, was my guide to the language of the protests, from "AVM" to "zıpla."

Here is the full list of links to my Gezi Park protest coverage for various local and international outlets:

The Atlantic's CityLab (formerly The Atlantic Cities)

• "Occupy Istanbul? Inside the Growing Mini-City at Gezi Park," June 9, 2013

• "Violence, Tear Gas Greet Protests to Save One of the Last Public Parks in Istanbul," May 31, 2013

Time Out Istanbul

• "Istanbul on its feet," July 2013

• "Istanbul’s changing face," July 2013

• "Foreshadowing frustrations," July 2013

TreeHugger

• "New parks threat looms as Istanbul protests continue," June 4, 2013

• "Park-protection fight In Istanbul sparks nationwide protest movement," June 3, 2013

The Turkish Life

• "Istanbul uprising: Beyoğlu after a grim night," June 16, 2013

• "Istanbul uprising: DIY urban planning," June 9, 2013

• "Istanbul uprising: Turkish vocabulary lesson," June 5, 2013

• "Istanbul uprising: The shifting moods of Taksim Square," June 3, 2013

The following article, written as a primer for foreign residents and visitors about the political and social context behind the summer 2013 protests, was spiked from the final version of Time Out Istanbul magazine:

The roots of unrest

With so many factors at play in the recent unrest, understanding the debates and divisions fueling dissent in Turkey requires a bit of a trip back into history, specifically the mere 90 years that have passed since the forming of the Turkish Republic. Faced with the crumbling remnants of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, first Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk – still an omnipresent figure memorialized in currency, on statues and through imagery all over Turkey – established his new country on a nationalist, secular foundation. The overarching identity of “Turkishness” is still a strong one today but deep fissures remain – between religious and secular individuals and between Turks and members of the Kurdish ethnic group, to name just two of the most fraught divisions.

Until recently, Turkey’s military played a major role in enforcing Turkish unity and secularism, carrying out four coups d’état in the past 60 years, the last of which, in 1997, led to the forced closure of the Islamist Welfare Party and the banning from politics for five years of its leader, then-Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, in what has been dubbed a “postmodern coup.”

Erdoğan, the current prime minister, was a member of Erbakan’s Welfare Party. When the Justice and Development Party (AKP) he later helped found swept to victory in the 2002 elections, it was as a conservative democratic party that advocated a liberal market economy, stronger ties with the West (including Turkish membership in the European Union) and an end to corruption. When AKP won its third national victory in 2011, Erdoğan promised to seek to consensus on major issues and work for the entire population, not just his supporters – something critics now charge that he has glaringly failed to do.

In Turkey’s parliamentary representative democracy, the prime minister holds executive power, and the presidency is considered a largely ceremonial role. A Council of Ministers advises the prime minister, who is the head of the party that wins the most seats in Parliament in a popular vote. What this all means in practice is a system heavily weighted toward top-down control, with few avenues for citizens to communicate their concerns to elected officials. Marches such as those held on İstiklal Caddesi on any given weekend have become a key way to people to try and make their voice heard.

The months leading up to the start of the Gezi Park protests saw an increasingly strong squelching of such demonstrations, in particular with the shutdown of large parts of the city’s transit system to keep workers’ groups and other factions from marching on Taksim Square for this year’s May Day. (This despite Article 34 of the Turkish Constitution, which declares, “Everyone has the right to hold unarmed and peaceful meetings and demonstration marches without prior permission.”)

Anger has also been growing over Erdoğan’s harsh crackdowns on press freedom – Turkey is now the world's worst jailer of journalists, according to research by the international Committee to Protect Journalists – and reprisals against critics in the media and business worlds, as well as what appears to many to be an increasingly Islamist bent.

Erdoğan’s party has removed longstanding restrictions on the wearing of the Islamic headscarf while recently adopting new limits on where, when and how alcoholic beverages can be advertised and sold. The prime minister himself has called repeatedly for Turkish women to have at least three children, decried abortion as “murder” and voiced his wish to raise a “pious generation” in Turkey – all aspects of what are seen by his critics as undue interference in people’s individual lifestyles.

In some ways, too, the AKP has been a victim of its own success – the Turkish youth growing up in the stronger, more prosperous country the party has helped create have higher expectations from government and demand more of a voice.

While the protests have largely been directed toward the government, there have also been waves of discontent expressed against Turkish media networks, which were slow to cover the demonstrations, likely due to the ties many have to the government, and to the way Turkish officials have used financial and political pressure to influence news coverage.

One telling example comes from back in May, before the protests began, when at least 50 people were killed in a car bombing in Reyhanlı, a Turkish town on the Syrian border. Instead of covering this deadly terrorist attack, many Turkish channels broadcast football matches and a popular talent show – in response to an AKP-supported media blackout on all reporting from and about Reyhanlı to “prevent unnecessary psychological damage.”

As the Gezi Park demonstrations have garnered more news coverage both domestically and abroad, Erdoğan has directed much of his ire at the foreign press, specifically targeting the BBC, CNN and Reuters in his accusations, saying, “for days, you fabricated news … This nation is not the one that you misrepresented to the world.”