Toward the end he gestures, and a younger woman by his right side stands to join him. She bows her head as he talks, then smiles as he hands her a scroll. The listeners applaud and take pictures with their mobiles.
But this is not an awards event, nor a prize-giving. The setting is not an arena, nor a banquet hall.
The walls of this cluttered room are sliding panels of paper. Overhead hangs a single bulb. A poster pinned behind the speaker shows a cursive character encircled in white on a blue field; it reads “wind.” The listeners are nine women and two men. They sit shoeless on floor mats around a low table, and their legs are folded beneath them.
The speaker, Zenjiro Tagomori, is the 17th-generation head of the Suwa school of falconry, a tradition of Japan’s emperors that extends back centuries to the era of the samurai. Around the table is his current crop of students. Bird pictures crowd the walls. And the reason for the festive gathering is that Tagomori, who is 68, is stepping down. As of this night, the recipient of that scroll—Tagomori’s protégé of 20 years, Noriko Otsuka—is Suwa’s 18th-generation falcon master.
She smiles, says a few words marking the honor of the occasion, takes more applause, and the cheerful hubbub resumes as everyone reaches across the table to pass bowls of vegetables and fish, and tucks in.
From the darkness outside this cramped little party, in this tumbledown shack on a rural mountainside in Mitake, west of Tokyo, an unearthly screech breaks the still of the enveloping forest.
In 2010 the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (unesco) declared falconry to be part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Perhaps most familiar in the West from its prominence in the courts of medieval England, falconry—or “hawking,” as it has also been called—is a catch-all term for the sport of hunting with raptors, or birds of prey, and the long process of training that enables a human handler to work effectively with a wild raptor.
Falconry is older than recorded history. It probably began when nomadic herders observed eagles killing prey in open country and glimpsed the potential in training them to hunt for human benefit. One popular theory suggests that happened first in Mongolia, perhaps more than 5,000 years ago. Another claims it was in Persia, or it may have been somewhere on the vast Central Asian steppe in between.
Either way, there is evidence that falconry was already being held in high esteem in Mongolia during the first millennium bce, when military campaigns brought the practice westward. Coins from Greece show Alexander the Great (who died in 332 bce) with a falcon on his fist. Celtic tribes introduced falconry to the Romans in the fourth century ce, after which falconry remained popular in Europe for more than a millennium.
But as the necessity of hunting for food receded, falconry became loaded with cultural meaning. In England, it became tightly woven into the aristocratic world of knights and nobles, codifying divisions between social classes. In Arabia, poets extolled the virtues of patience, endurance and self-reliance cultivated by hunting with birds.
Practiced chiefly by social elites across much of the world, with regional variations but a broadly similar base level of knowledge, falconry took on further layers of significance as a form of diplomatic communication. Kings and princes exchanged falcons, compared techniques and developed vast holdings of lands, birds and handlers.
One example centers on Frederick ii, Holy Roman emperor between 1220 and 1250, and king of Sicily. Falconry, which is mentioned in the Qur’an, had been practiced in Arabia for many centuries before Frederick began to establish links between Arabian and European traditions: From his court in Palermo, Sicily, he consulted with Arab falconers, imported Arab falcons and ordered a number of Arabic and Persian treatises on falconry translated into Latin for wider European consumption.
And falconry also went east. It is documented from as early as the seventh century bce in China, and then, via the Korean peninsula, it crossed the sea to Japan, where written records date its arrival at 355 ce.
“Japanese falconry is closely related to the prestige of the emperor,” says history professor Yasuhiro Nihonmatsu, one of the few researchers in the field.
A key function of emperors throughout Japanese history has been to secure the cultivation of rice. The most powerful symbol of successful rice stewardship is the crane—a grayish-white, long-necked, leggy bird that would fly in after the harvest to feed on abandoned rice husks.
“So the emperors were also compelled to protect and manage the crane population,” says Nihonmatsu. “They did that by bringing in falcons.”
An added layer of complexity references Japan’s indigenous religion, Shinto, in which everything—animal, plant and mineral—is deemed to have a spirit.In 1603 Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616) was proclaimed shogun, the military ruler of Japan who exercised power in the name of the emperor, founding a dynasty that would endure for the next two and a half centuries. Ieyasu was a keen falconry enthusiast, and with his approval the samurai openly embraced falconry as a symbol of a new national order.
A demonstration of falconry became a demonstration of power, embodied for more than half a millennium by the leaders of the Suwa school.
Noriko Otsuka talks slowly, quietly and very carefully. She weighs each thought before speaking, sometimes for minutes at a time. In a week with her—at the festivities in Mitake, at a training session with students, eating together, watching her fly hawks in riverside fields—I got the distinct impression that unspoken communication matters more to her than words. She listens. She notices. She waits.
“The first time I held a falcon, I felt she was very sensitive, with this noble atmosphere. I don’t know why, but I thought: ‘I can handle this bird; I understand what she feels.’”
Now 45, Otsuka was born in Chiba, south of Tokyo. Her father is a successful businessman.
“He said I have to be like him,” she says. “Study hard, no friends, no enjoyment, and get a good job. But I thought, ‘I want to see nature.’”
In college Otsuka began to explore urban parks—“artificial places,” as she calls them. For her 1994 graduate paper in sports anthropology, she searched for a subject that could embody a link between people and nature.
“I asked some falconers, but they rejected me because I’m a woman and was so young. But then I met Mr. Tagomori, and he showed me how to fly the hawks. I was so impressed, and also surprised: He seemed to know what the hawk was thinking and feeling. After I wrote my paper, I asked if I could become his pupil.”
Under Tagomori’s guidance, Otsuka watched and learned, although she was shunned by her fellow students. (“All old men, they didn’t want to help me or have me involved at all,” she says.)
“To start with, I couldn’t do anything. Nature is severe, not artificial. I knew I had to grow a sixth sense about survival and hunting. That’s so hard! But I had the idea I could connect with nature and with animals. It made me feel truly human.”
After three years of study, Otsuka scraped together enough money, and confidence, to buy her own falcon. Now, 20 years on, she trains her own students, like many Japanese falconers using birds bought from European breeders. Japanese law on local capture of wild raptors is strict.
In the Mitake forests, I watch as Otsuka and Tagomori lead a class through some of the basics. The venue is Tagomori’s home, a wooden shack set amid broadleaf woodland a short hike above a country road on the slopes of Mount Mitake—a holy mountain whose summit hosts a 2,000-year-old Shinto shrine.
It’s October, and the leaves are starting to turn.
“This is the season to start educating the falcon,” Otsuka says, as she guides me behind the house, past tall, meshed enclosures set into the tree cover, past a dog kennel, to a small grass clearing.
Below, a stream gurgles away to join the Tama River, which flows on through Tokyo and out to the Pacific. Above, hidden by the foliage, a waterfall crashes. Silent in the deep shade of its enclosure, an erect Harris hawk watches us pass. As a dog barks ahead of us, the hawk suddenly screeches, the same sound I heard during the evening celebration—a cold noise of rending metal close to my ear that squirts danger and ancient superstition and wild fear into my muscles. I stumble a little.
Death is close, but not mine.
Eleven students are gathered in the clearing. An ax has been thwacked into a stump by its blade. Logs smolder in a rusted oil drum. Simply dressed in a hiker’s vest and narrow-leg jeans, her hair tied back, Otsuka holds a live pigeon in one hand, gripping lightly but firmly behind its wings so the bird is immobilized.
She is explaining the importance of patience, respect and gratitude for the falcons and for the nature all around. The students, a touch incongruous in their urban casualwear, are mostly in their 20s and 30s with office jobs in the city. They have each paid ¥30,000 (roughly us$300) to sign up for Otsuka’s October-to-March half-year course.
I chat with one, Fumihiro Kasahara, 37, a bright-eyed man with highlighted hair and two silver rings in his left ear. “I read a newspaper article about hawking,” he says. “It was my dream as a kid to have a pet hawk. I’d love to be a falcon master.”
Otsuka talks while gathering equipment.
“When I was young, I knew nothing about nature or animals or where my food came from,” she’s saying. “I just went to school and studied hard because my parents said so. But then, luckily, I came across falconry. I understood there was another world.”
She passes the pigeon to Tagomori and prepares a table, spreading it with a large sheet of paper marked out in squares, each labeled with a body part: “heart,” “wing,” “neck.”
At the back of the group, Satoko Sakakibara, 28, a reserved, bespectacled office administrator, has brought out the Harris hawk. It perches on her gloved fist. Its name is Nowaki, which means “Fall Storms.” Half a meter tall, the bird bobs and stares, all curves—curved black talons, curved pin-sharp beak, hooked yellow toes, coiled energy beneath an arched back of chestnut-brown plumage.
“I first handled birds in 2011,” Sakakibara tells me. There’s no danger, but it’s still disconcerting to chat with such a beak so close.
“They didn’t listen to a word I said. But the distance between me and them has reduced now. It’s a spiritual connection. We are not in charge. This hawk controls me, not the other way around. You just have to keep calm. Falconry has helped me develop as a person.”
As she talks, Tagomori—avuncular, slightly stooped, in a simple fleece top—is apologizing (“I’m no good at this; I feel too sorry”) as he quickly and without fuss ends the pigeon’s life, its neck squeezed between his knuckles.
Within a few minutes, the pigeon has been plucked and its organs laid out on the blood-smeared table for the students to identify. Death is integral to falconry. Otsuka discusses raptor nutrition. All the meat will be used.
But Nowaki isn’t here to eat. Instead, Otsuka demonstrates wamawari—walking around the clearing with the hawk (which weighs almost a kilogram) perched calmly on her outstretched fist. Her body absorbs the unevenness of the ground; the hawk feels no wobbles. Strength and poise can be learnt, but it strikes me that the inner discipline required for falconry perhaps cannot.
Some students copy Otsuka, making a circuit with Nowaki. Less confident beginners walk instead with a liter bottle of water balanced on a forearm.
“The water shouldn’t slop,” warns Tagomori. “Keep it steady.”
Otsuka and Tagomori’s reverence for nature, and the emphasis they place on discipline and calm, brings home that their falconry isn’t a sport, and that these birds aren’t pets. It’s also no longer about hunting for food. So what is it?
“I was 10 or 11 when I got interested in hawks, going to the library, reading up.”
Tagomori sits on the floor matting in his Mitake house, beside a low table crowded with books and papers. He sips tea as he tells the story of browsing Tokyo libraries as a young man in the mid-1960s and unearthing a work by Kaoru Hanami, at that time falconer to the Japanese imperial household and 16th-generation head of the much reduced Suwa school. A sympathetic archivist guided him to meet Hanami in person.
By then the formal link between falconry and the imperial family had been broken: Although the Imperial Household retained the post of falconer, since 1945 traditional forms of hunting and ceremony had been ended.
Hanami nonetheless accepted Tagomori as a pupil and, on his retirement in 1976, continued supporting efforts to keep falconry skills alive amid rapid social change. With an eye for a slogan, Hanami redefined the Suwa tradition as Jinyoh-Ittai, or “Human and Hawk as One.” He named Tagomori his successor.
“It took 18 years after I met Mr. Hanami for me to be able to call myself a master,” says Tagomori. “I realized from him that a falconer is very different from what most people understand. It’s not about control. A falconer has a completely different role from, say, an animal trainer. There’s a communication between falcon and falconer. We have a spiritual connection.”
This chimes with the atmosphere at Mitake. But the Suwa school—now retitled the Suwa Falconry Preservation Society—is a shoestring operation in the hands of a few individuals, reliant on tradition, isolated within its own country. How could it secure a viable future?
Soon after Hanami’s memoir, The Emperor’s Falconer, was published posthumously in 2002, Tagomori was contacted by the organizers of the Abu Dhabi International Hunting and Equestrian Exhibition (adihex), an annual world gathering of experts and practitioners of field sports. They’d seen the memoir, and with Japanese falconry largely unknown outside Japan, they were inviting Tagomori to adihex for mutual benefit, to broaden knowledge and share experience.
Falconry in the countries of the Arabian Peninsula has become one of the symbols of nationhood, a cultural endeavor rooted in centuries of practice. According to the International Association for Falconry, the Middle East hosts half of the world’s falconers. As it was a thousand years ago, the Peninsula is again a center for world falconry. And everybody goes to adihex.
“Mr. Tagomori asked his students who wants to come with him,” says Otsuka with a smile. “He wanted to show Japanese falconry to the world, and to learn from them too. I said I wanted to go.”
Otsuka visited adihex with Tagomori in 2005 at the invitation of the Emirates Falconers Club and has been back every year since. She has done a three-month internship at Abu Dhabi’s world-renowned falcon hospital, she has compared techniques and traditions with Arab falconers (including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi), and she is exploring ways of forging deeper links with the region to help raise awareness of Japanese falconry.
She also senses an affinity between traditions.
“In Europe they focus on data, what the weight of the hawk is, how its health is, using statistics. In Arabia, as in Japan, they feel the bird’s condition. You rest your hand on the falcon’s breast. If there’s stress, you feel the tension. We share a connection with the bird and a way of trying to understand it.”
October 19 in Japan marks an important festival date. Every year on that day, the former imperial capital of Kyoto commemorates the city’s conquest in 1568 by the daimyo Oda Nobunaga—one of the early allies of the falcon-loving shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu. Celebrations focus on Kyoto’s Kenkun Shrine, a Shinto holy place dedicated to Nobunaga—now a national hero—which hosts a religious service mixed with cultural performances.
This year the Suwa falconers are guests of honor, participating in the public worship and also offering a demonstration of their skills.
I’m with them backstage as they prepare. Otsuka has brought both Nowaki and her smaller goshawk Murakumo (“Gathering Clouds”). She, like her companions, is in traditional costume: a cross-fronted tunic, knee-length cape, beret-style cap and distinctive split-toed boots, with a whistle, lure and a box at her waist that holds raw meat scraps.
“Arab falconers use falcons,” Otsuka tells me, checking everything is in order. “They fly for as much as five kilometers—perfect for hunting in huge deserts. But here in Japan we have mountains and not much open countryside. That’s why we use hawks. They fly fast, but can’t go for more than about 500 meters.”
She smiles and straightens up.
“For most people, today will be just a bird show. Only a few get that it is more—a very important aspect of culture linking nature and human beings.”
As the event begins, led by white-robed, wooden-clogged Shinto priests, the shrine compound is packed with hundreds of people, observing in silence as rice, fish, seaweed and salt are solemnly presented to the deified spirit of Nobunaga residing within the inner sanctum. A ritualized performance of noh theater is followed by bugaku, a 1,200-year-old form of masked dance, its reedy, discordant music of high flute and slow drum leaving—from the looks on faces all around—a 21st-century audience spellbound.
Senior priest Takako Matsubara steps forward to deliver an address.
“Falconry has a 5,000-year history,” she says. “Nobunaga is known to have loved it. He kept 140 hawks, and to lighten the spirits of his battle-weary fighters, he would stage a performance of falconry for the emperor. Others followed him, bestowing the role of falconer, until today, 17 generations later, we have Mr. Tagomori and Ms. Otsuka.”
They take their bows.
Their display adheres precisely to a tradition that reaches back centuries, faithfully maintained by the Suwa falcon masters. It passes in the sunshine of midday to murmurs of wonder rippling around the crowd as the hawk swoops.
High school student Sorato Nakano, 16, tells me his whole school has been given the day off. “I’ve loved falconry since I was a kid. I want to be an independent falconer, self-sufficient.”
Chieko Yoshii nearby is beaming. “I forgot my age today to see the falconry,” she grins, telling me she is 90 years old. “It’s a dream day.”
Later, as the falconers pack up, Otsuka reflects on her journey.
“I think it’s not that men should do falconry, or women should, but the person who understands it. My father wanted me to have social status and a good income, and that is very important, but I am now trying to benefit my culture [through falconry]. I try to explain to people that birds of prey are sensitive, and that falconry is a sustainable, very ancient practice. If this culture is rebuilt, then I think my breakthrough will be understood.”
Tagomori adds a thought.
“From the hawk you learn who you are, what a human being should be. This spiritual element goes along with nature, and it should be handed on to the future.”
And he looks across at Otsuka, his pupil-turned-successor.
“I think this will last very well,” he says.
Within minutes, I took my first bite of döner. It was like nothing I had ever tasted before. Fragrant, crisp, succulent morsels of marinated meat combined with an exquisite medley of flavors from chopped tomatoes, cumin, parsley, red onions, green chili peppers, pickled cucumbers, salt and pepper, and other ingredients I couldn’t begin to guess.
The next day, when I told a Turkish friend about my discovery, he laughed and told me that döner in Istanbul was as common as hotdogs in New York city. I didn’t care. It was my introduction to Istanbul street food, and that first bite tasted like a delicacy prepared in the kitchens of the Topkapı Palace, fit for an Ottoman Sultan.
Over the next few days, I wandered the waterfront neighborhood of Eminönü sampling street food in and around the 17th-century Spice Bazaar. I tried golden sundried apricots stuffed with walnuts; charcoal-roasted corn on the cob; fresh cow’s-milk yogurt covered in wild-bee honey; a cheese cured in a goatskin; roasted chestnuts still hot to the touch. I even tried a grilled fish sandwich prepared on a brazier perched on a cardboard box at the edge of a parking lot. I was captivated by how Istanbul street food was, it seemed, everywhere. It was fresh, simply prepared, delicious and inexpensive. I left Istanbul a few days later wondering what other delicacies might be cooking in the backstreets. Forty-two years later, I returned to find out.
Istanbul is famous for chaotic, adrenalin-inducing pedestrian traffic that ebbs and flows throughout the city day and night. Street food is tailor-made for this human tide. Office workers and construction crews, shoppers and shopkeepers, university students and schoolchildren: All have their favorite vendors, and all know where to find them at different times of the day.
For the vendors, success is often determined by location, and this is why they often set up strategically next to bustling food markets, ferry boat terminals, and street corners and laneways with heavy foot traffic. There is nothing chic, trendy or fashionable about the stalls. The fare itself is all about familiar, favorite flavors and traditional foods for people on the move with only a few minutes to spare at a cart or at an open-air table shared with strangers. Street food culture is a part of the daily lives of the more than 15 million inhabitants of Istanbul. Each develops favorites at an early age and learns to recognize quality, which depends on fresh ingredients and a proper balance of flavors. A vendor who cannot meet these high standards will not be in business for long.
To help me sample as many of the classic street foods as possible and find the best of them, I joined forces with my friend the literary agent Nazlı Gürkaş, a longtime resident and, as it turned out, a street-food sleuth of the highest order. Together we visited both the European and Asian sides of the Bosporus to explore open-air markets, working-class neighborhoods, thoroughfares, sidewalks, alleyways and tiny storefront shops with walk-up window service. We tracked down itinerant vendors, such as the cucumber man who runs his business from a homemade wooden wheelbarrow on the Galata Bridge, but we failed to cross paths with a legendary pomegranate juice-maker who was constantly on the move with his pushcart, following a schedule known only to himself, or so it seemed.
Nazlı explained how Istanbul street food has dishes from distant regions of Turkey and broadly reflects the cultural diversity of a city that has been at the crossroads of four civilizations over more than 3,000 years. The city was one of the great centers of the spice trade between Asia and Europe, and by the time of the Muslim conquest of the city by Sultan Mehmet ii in 1453, Istanbul had already combined culinary traditions from Central Asia, Anatolia, Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans, southern Russia, Persia, the Middle East and North Africa.
Shortly after dawn on our first morning, we stepped onto the street where we were enveloped by the fresh smell of cobblestones washed by the night’s rain. The air was heavy with the fragrances of deep-roasted coffee and baked bread. Salty sea air mingled with the smoke of charcoal fires and the heady scents of an open-air flower market. A cruise liner sounded its horn, a tram rumbled by, and we could see street food vendors setting up their tables and wheeled carts. Istanbul was waking up, and for the next 10 days we wandered, sampling and searching for the best of what the vendors had to offer.
Of course, no two people in Istanbul will ever agree on exactly the same list of top street foods—or where to find the best—but as a result of our discoveries, here is a sampling we agreed is a “must-try” list.
Galata Simitçisi, Mumhane Cadessi No. 47/A, Karaköy (Beyoğlu)
A bagel-like, twisted ring of chewy bread, flavored with molasses and covered with toasted sesame seeds, simit is an Istanbul staple. Dating back to at least 1525, it is still baked throughout many regions of the former Ottoman Empire. It is found at kiosks, in wheeled food carts and stacked high on trays perched atop the heads of its vendors. The very best simit? We found ours at Galata Simitçisi (“Galata Simit-maker”), a bakery run by Emir Özdemir. If you go, sit on a chair out front to eat it hot from the oven, and order sweet black tea from across the street.
Merkez Börekçisi, Mühürdar Caddesi 15, Caferağa (Kadıköy)
Çengelköy Börekçisi, Prof. Dr. Beynun Akyavaş Caddesi No. 104/A-1, Güzeltepe (Üsküdar)
According to some food scholars, börek was developed by the Turks of Central Asia, while other experts claim that a Byzantine baked dish of dough and cheese called plakountas tetyromenous is the common ancestor of not just modern day börek, but also baklava. Börek is baked in thin layers of dough called yufka, which is similar to phyllo dough, filled with an assortment of ingredients such as kaşar or feta cheese, spinach, potatoes, minced meats and vegetables. There are many different types of börek, but the two most commonly found on the street are su boreği (“water börek”), which often comes filled with spinach and feta cheese layered on flat trays, and kol böreği (“arm börek”), which is rolled up in tubes of yufka before being baked. Everyone holds opinions, usually strong ones, about the best type of börek and where to find it, but after sampling probably more than two dozen places, my first choice is börek filled with cheese, minced beef and walnuts. Two excellent places:
Çengelköy Çınaraltı, Çınarlı Çami Sokağı No. 4, Çengelköy (Üsküdar)
This is a popular Turkish breakfast dish of tomatoes, garlic, onion, oregano and green peppers served with egg, all made to order. It is often brought to the table bubbling hot in a metal skillet. A pleasant place to try menemen is at the scenic waterfront establishment Çengelköy Çınaraltı.
Hocapaşa Pidecisi, Ankara Caddesi No. 19, Sirkeci (Fatih)
Meşhur Filibe Köftecisi, Ankara Cadessi No. 34, Sirkeci (Fatih)
Kadıköy Balık Pazarı (Fish Market), Caferağa (Kadıköy)
Found often on street carts throughout the city, midye dolma are steamed mussels on the half shell stuffed with pine nuts, currants and rice seasoned with cinnamon, black pepper, chili flakes, parsley, dill and a generous squeeze of lemon juice. The fish market in Kadıköy is an excellent place to sample this delicacy at it freshest.
Ismailağa-Asırlık Kanlıca Yoğurtçusu (Beykoz)
At any time of day, it’s a refreshing and healthy snack. We found our favorite on the waterfront in the old Greek fishing village of Kanlıca, on the Asian side of the Bosporus. Its slightly tangy, Bulgarian-style yoğurt comes with a choice of three toppings: powdered sugar, honey or rich, thick berry jam. The tree-shaded, open-air garden right next to Kanlıca pier is the perfect setting to watch the boat traffic.
Baazen Tantuni, Levent Cadessi, No. 1, Levent
Beşaltı Kirvem Tantuni ve Künefe, Mumhane Caddesi No. 35/B, Karaköy Mahallesi (Beyoğlu)
This is a wrap (dürüm) of thinly sliced, spiced beef or lamb that is first steamed in salted water and then sautéed in cottonseed oil with onions, parsley, black pepper, hot chili flakes, sumac and green peppers. It is topped with fresh lettuce and tomatoes and then rolled up in flatbread that is heated on top of the ingredients as they cook. Tantuni has humble origins: It was formerly considered to be a “poor man’s food” because it was originally prepared with lung, fat and offal. According to 46-year-old Nevzat Koçak, chef at Baazen Tantuni, the dish made its way from Syria via the Turkish south coastal city of Mersin. In his 35 years of kitchen work, he estimates he has made more than 3 million tantuni.
Karadeniz Pide ve Döner Salonu, Mumcu Bakkal Sokak No. 6, Sinanpaşa (Beşiktaş)
Literally, “turning roast,” from döner (to turn) and kebap (roast). In recent decades, this has become the most commonly known Turkish street food worldwide. Just as I had first seen it in 1973, döner is prepared on a vertical spit that roasts stacked layers of meat. The quality of döner can vary greatly depending on the meat (usually a mix of beef and lamb) as well as the usta (master). Döner is served either wrapped in pide bread with tomatoes, onion and other ingredients, or tucked in a round crusty bread roll. Karadeniz Pide ve Döner Salonu is the place to go for Istanbul’s very best.
Eminönü or Karaköy side of Galata Bridge
Literally “fish-bread,” this is the famous grilled-fish sandwich of Istanbul. First-time visitors usually try balık-ekmek at the floating boats of Eminönü moored at one end of the Galata Bridge, but these often serve imported frozen mackerel from Norway. At the ferry stops further up the Golden Horn, or at the temporary stalls in the parking lot on the Karaköy side of the Galata Bridge, you will find better. (Note: It is traditionally accompanied by şalgam suyu, pickled purple carrot juice—which you have to try at least once.)
Dürümzade, near the corner of Kamer Hatun Caddessi and Topçekenler Sokak, Hüseyinağa (Beyoğlu)
This is the Turkish wrap. At its best, dürüm is a lightly grilled piece of flatbread (lavaş) smeared with juices from the cooking meat and red pepper paste, and then filled with spicy minced chicken or beef cooked on skewers over a charcoal fire. Tavuk şiş (chicken) or Adana kebap (spicy minced beef) are two favorites. Dürüm comes rolled up with chopped tomatoes, parsley, onions and a sprinkling of sumac. A well-prepared dürüm far exceeds the sum of its parts. Dürümzade is the most famous vendor in Istanbul.
Halil Lahmacun, Güneşli Bahçe Sokağı 26A, Caferağa (Kadıköy)
Çiya Sofrası, Güneşli Bahçe Sokağı 43, Caferağa (Kadıköy)
From the Arabic lahm ajin, “meat with dough,” lahmacun looks like a thin-crust pizza topped with a smear of finely minced meat, onions, cumin and salça, a paste of tomatoes and red peppers. As soon as the lahmacun is pulled from the brick oven on a wooden paddle, it is brought to the table piping hot. The customer sprinkles parsley, lemon juice and sumac on it and then rolls it up while still warm and pliable. For this, these neighboring shops in Kadıköy tied for the best.
Kadıköy Balık Pazarı (Fish Market), Caferağa (Kadıköy)
The famous Turkish anchovy (engraulis encrasicolus) has been praised in folk poems recited by itinerant storytellers along the Black Sea coast since ancient times, according to food historian Alan Davidson in his book Mediterranean Seafood (Penguin, 1972). Hamsi is a seasonal fish, available from mid-fall until around February, depending on the weather. Dipped in flour or cornmeal, fried, salted and then drizzled with a squeeze of lemon juice, it offers street cart finger food at its very best.We found excellent hamsi at cafes and street stalls along the edge of the bustling fish market in Kadıköy. Nazlı explained that locals favor hamsi from the cold waters of the Black Sea, north of the Bosporus, over hamsi from the warmer waters of the Sea of Marmara, at the strait’s southern end.
Grilled or boiled corn on the cob. Sprinkled with salt and served on a piece of green corn husk. Found everywhere, especially during summer.
Asrı Turşuçu, Ağa Hamam Caddesi No. 29/1, Cihangir (Beyoğlu)
Meşhur Özcan Turşuları, Güneşli Bahçe Sokağı 7, Osmanağa (Kadıköy)
Turkish people are wild about crisp pickled vegetables. These can include whole garlic, carrots, beets, peppers, corn on the cob, decoratively wrapped-up cabbage, green beans and many more. The window displays alone are spectacular, as clear jars show off vibrantly colored edibles. Try either of these venerable pickle shops.
Kral Kokoreç, Büyük Postane Caddesi No. 50, Sirkeci (Fatih)
Spicy, spit-roasted lamb sweetbreads, neck meat, offal and other specialty cuts wrapped in small intestines of lamb, kokoreç is roasted on a horizontal spit and then sliced into bits and cooked on a griddle with onions, tomatoes, green peppers, cumin, salt, pepper and other spices that vary from vendor to vendor. Generous portions of kokoreç are piled on a slightly toasted white bread roll. Excellent stalls with succulent and flavorful kokoreç are everywhere, especially near the main bazaars and shopping areas.
The fragrance of charcoal-roasted chestnuts is one of the most evocative smells associated with the markets of Istanbul. Available for much of the year throughout the city, especially during fall and winter.
Baked potato stuffed with any or all of these ingredients: sliced hot dogs, sweet corn kernels, pickled beet root, butter, yogurt, grated kaşar cheese, grilled or fresh sliced mushrooms, green peas, sliced black and green olives, grilled red peppers and steamed carrot slices. Kumpir, too, is found in shops and food stalls throughout the city, but the best place to try it is along the waterfront of Ortaköy neighborhood in Beşiktaş, where Kumpir Sokaği (Baked Potato Street) was named for good reason. Although the culinary elites of Istanbul disdain kumpir, the crowds of loyal customers it draws means it is well on its way into the city’s polyglot pantheon of street food classics.
Even after sampling a couple of dozen dishes each day, we concluded that there was still much work to be done. Even in a few weeks it would be impossible to sample more than a fraction of the food offered on the streets of Istanbul. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of other delicacies to tempt the passerby. Things like salepi dondurma, a chewy, elastic ice cream similar to gelato made from powdered orchid tubers; or nohut dürümü, a spicy pide wrap from the southeast of Turkey filled with garbanzo beans, onions, peppers and lemon juice; or içli köfte, the golden, deep-fried, torpedo-shaped bulgur wheat shells filled with onions, ground meat, parsley and secret spices. And künefe. How can I leave out künefe? The sweet, buttery dessert of wiry threads of kadayıf or shredded phyllo dough sandwiching a molten layer of salt-free hatay cheese all drenched in a syrup of honey and sugar, served piping hot and topped with kaymak, the thick cream-top skimmed from the surface of yogurt, it is finished with a flourish of ground green pistachios.
Clearly, it is time to return to Istanbul to continue the search for these and other streetside wonders.
Afiyet olsun! (Good appetite!)
A devoted wife and mother, she was also a politician, a businesswoman, a fashion designer and trendsetter, a developer and garden planner, a philanthropist devoted to women, a battlefield commander and even a tiger-hunting sharpshooter.
The empire she ruled with her husband, Jahangir, stretched at its height across much of India and southern Afghanistan. It had been founded in the first half of the 16th century by Turco-Mongols (hence “Mughal”) who claimed descent from Genghis Khan and Amir Timur through its founder, Babur. From then until the mid-19th century, the Mughal state was renowned for its organization, learning, tolerance, culture and prosperity.
The future Nur Jahan—the name is her later, royal title—was born Mihrunissa (Sun Among Women) in 1577 in Kandahar in what is now Afghanistan, the fourth child to her mother, Asmat Begam, and her father, Mirza Ghiyas-ud-din Muhammad. Aristocrats of Persian descent, they found favor in the court of Mughal Emperor Akbar. Taking the Turkic title beg (pr. bay), Mirza Ghiyas received also the honorific Itimad-ud-Daula (Pillar of the State) while young Mihrunissa received a royal education where she excelled in art, music, literature and dance.
At 17, according to Heinrich Blochmann, an 18th-century translator of Akbar’s official chronicle Akbar Nama, she was wed to another transplanted courtier who had previously served in Persia, Ali Quli Beg Istajlu, upon whom Akbar’s son Shah Salim conferred the title Sher Afkan (Lion Slayer) because of his courage in battle. The union produced Mihrunissa’s only child, her daughter, Ladli Begam. When Salim ascended to the throne in 1605, he adopted the imperial name Nur-ud-din Muhammad Jahangir Badshah Ghazi, or, more concisely, Jahangir (World Conqueror). Two years later, Mihrunissa’s husband was killed in an altercation with the governor of Bengal and his officers.
Royal diarist Mu’tamid Khan, in his Iqbal Nama, recalled that some four years after the Lion Slayer’s death, during the spring new year celebrations of 1611, Mihrunissa “caught the King’s far-seeing eye, and so captivated him that he included her amongst the intimates of his select harem.” They were married less than two months later, on May 25. She was just shy of 35; he was 41. Among the last of many wives, Mihrunissa became Jahangir’s favorite and chief consort.
“Day by day her influence and dignity increased,” Khan observed. Distinguished from other ladies of the court, she enjoyed lofty titles including Nur Mahal (Light of the Palace), Nur Jahan Begam (Lady Light of the World) and Padshah Begam (Imperial Lady), until Nur Jahan (Light of the World) became her ultimate title.
Part of her growing power came from the custom of appointing family members to high court positions: Her father became chief minister; her mother became chief matron of the harem; her brother Asaf Khan became head of the royal household and his daughter Arjumand (Nur Jahan’s niece) married Jahangir’s son Shah Khurram. Her influence was such that Dutch merchant Francisco Pelsaert took note of where real power rested. “[Jahangir] is King in name only, while [Nur Jahan] and her brother Asaf Khan hold the kingdom firmly in their hands,” Pelsaert remarked. “If anyone with a request to make at Court obtains an audience or is allowed to speak, the King hears him indeed, but will give no definite answer of Yes or No, referring him promptly to Asaf Khan, who in the same way will dispose of no important matter without communicating with his sister, the Queen.”
Another of Jahangir’s diarists, Muhammad Hadi, surmised that nothing “was wanting to make her an absolute monarch,” but the symbolic “reading of the khutba [Friday sermon] in her name.” Not only did she conduct administrative business with the public, but nobles came to “receive her commands. Coins were struck in her name, and the royal seal … bore her signature.”
A character sketch by Venetian Niccolao Manucci, in his history of the Mughal court, qualified Nur Jahan as “a woman of great judgment, and of verity, worthy to be a queen.”
In part, her power was compensatory. The emperor was a self-confessed alcoholic and opium addict. Hadi reported that Jahangir “used to say that Nur Jahan Begam has been selected and is wise enough to conduct the matters of State” while all he desired was “a bottle of wine and piece of meat to keep himself merry.”
As Jahangir’s health declined, he continued to praise Nur Jahan’s “skill and experience” as “greater than those of the physicians,” and he poignantly credited her “affection and sympathy” for diminishing “the number of my cups [and keeping] me from things that did not suit me.”
It is in this context that historians most remember Nur Jahan. She juggled the care of her chronically ill husband with the demands of the empire, and she did so famously. “It is impossible to describe the beauty and wisdom of the Queen. In any matter that was presented to her, if a difficulty arose, she immediately solved it,” wrote Khan.
The range of her accomplishments bears out their praise. In commerce, she turned land grants (jagirs) given to her by Jahangir into profit centers. She collected shrewdly calculated duties on imports, Pelsaert noted, “of innumerable kinds of grain, butter, and other provisions.” She owned her own ships that sailed to and from Arabia, Persia and Africa, trading spices, ginger and dyes for perfumes, ceramics, ivory, amber and pearls. She managed rivalries by playing the English off the Dutch and the Portuguese off them both, granting trade concessions (primarily for indigo and embroidered cloth) for sizeable fees.
She used wealth and influence to support painters, poets and musicians. Especially keen was her interest in designs for building that impacted Mughal architecture: Her fondness for the domestic art of embroidery, for example, is reflected in ornamental reliefs in the tomb of her father in Agra.
Her refined tastes were also evident in the “very expensive buildings” she erected “in all directions—sarais, or halting-places for travelers and merchants, and pleasure-gardens and palaces such as no one has ever made before,” Pelsaert wrote. She designed, among others, the famed Achabal Gardens in Kashmir state, with its lavish array of fruit trees, fountains and a man-made waterfall illuminated at night from behind by “innumerable lamps,” wrote the gobsmacked French physician Francois Bernier, who traveled almost a century later.
Yet Nur Jahan could also be as thrifty as a village housewife. On one occasion recounted by 18th-century Delhi historian Khafi Khan, Jahangir, upon questioning the expense of finely embroidered caparisons for the royal elephants, was pleased to learn that Nur Jahan spent “practically nothing on them,” having them instead made by palace tailors from used mail bags.
When it came to her own couture, she pioneered what would be regarded today as a line of designer clothing. She set fashion trends at court with her designs of silver-threaded brocades (badla) and lace (kinari), light-weight, floral-patterned cotton and muslin textiles (panch-toliya and dudami) for veils and gowns, and her own signature scent made from rose oil, Atri Jahangiri. For cost-conscious brides (and grooms), she is also credited with creating the (now traditional) nurmahali, an inexpensive set of wedding clothes. More than a gesture, her concern for the poor—especially poverty-stricken young women—was genuine. “She was an asylum for all sufferers,” Hadi recorded. “She must have apportioned about 500 girls in her lifetime, and thousands were grateful for her generosity.”
Yet when the need arose, she swapped flowery gowns for battle gear. Ambushed by rebel forces on her way to Kabul with Jahangir in 1626, Nur Jahan directed the imperial army’s defense from atop a war elephant. When a female servant beside her was shot with an arrow in her arm, the queen “herself pulled it out, staining her garments with blood,” Hadi reported.
Nur Jahan was praised also by her husband for her skill with a hunting gun from the teetering perch of an elephant litter. In his memoirs, he recorded how she shot four tigers with six bullets, acknowledging that “an elephant is not at ease when it smells a tiger and is continually in movement, and to hit with a gun from a litter (imari) is a very difficult matter.”
An unnamed poet present during the hunt was moved to compose the following verse:
That rebellion of 1626 stemmed from earlier unrest stirred up by Shah Khurram, who envied Nur Jahan’s influence over his father. When Jahangir died in 1627, a war of succession followed. Nur Jahan attempted to enthrone Shahryar, the youngest of Jahangir’s sons, who had married Nur Jahan’s daughter, Ladli Begam. But Shahryar was slain, and Shah Khurram ascended the throne as Shah Jahan. The “Light of the World” did not interfere further, and she lived for 19 more years in quiet retirement in Lahore with her widowed daughter.
Putting aside finery, she is said to have worn simple white clothing and abstained from parties and social functions. Her life drew to a close on December 17, 1645, at the age of 68. She is buried in Lahore, in a mausoleum of her own design, upon which this epitaph to her grace and modesty is etched:
Art direction for the “Malika” series is by Ana Carreño Leyva. Calligraphy is by Soraya Syed. The logo graphics are produced by Mukhtar Sanders (www.inspiraldesign.com).
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