I arrived in Istanbul at nightfall, and found the area I was staying in pulsed with life. Here’s my sloppy love letter to Beyoğlu, a centuries-old district on the European side of the city

Arrival by night

When my shuttle coach arrived in Taksim Square, day had just turned to night: Saturday night, to be exact. I walked into Istanbul with the sense that the city was in the middle of a metamorphosis.

All cities change at night. Some just change in more interesting ways than others. I remember a similar feeling walking along Bangkok’s Sukhumvit Road a few years ago, as dusk turned to darkness: a sense that the Thai capital’s Dr Jekyll was morphing into Mr Hyde. Not that Beyoğlu, a kind of uber-district that runs from Taksim Square down to the Bosphorus Bridge, is anything like Bangkok. But there’s a definite schism here in this part of Istanbul. I felt it: something between old and new, conservative and modern, modest and flamboyant, restrained and uninhibited, hospitable and dangerous. It was beguiling. By the time I’d reached my Airbnb, I’d fallen in love.

İstiklal Caddesi

My route there was via İstiklal Caddesi, the central nerve running through Beyoğlu: a boulevard whose mix of confectionary shops, currency exchanges, souvenir stores and ambient tackiness earns it a comparison with London’s Oxford Street. Every ten minutes or so, a red, antique-looking tram takes a course down the boulevard, passengers hanging from its doorway. The relationship between crowds and vehicles in Istanbul seems relaxed to say the least. You’ll hear the pip of tram when it’s a matter of metres behind you; you’ll feel the air swish as a moped swerves around you, before it courses with terrifying fluency through groups of people. But the real life in this area is along İstiklal Caddesi’s backstreets, its buzzing tributaries.

Street vendors

Vendors sell food everywhere on the streets south of Taksim Square. There’s grilled corn on the cob, kestane (grilled water chestnuts), simit (pretzel-like, sesame-coated bread) and midye (mussels doused with lemon). The last of these aren’t so much sold as administered: the vendor takes the mussel, uses one half of the shell as a scoop, dislodges the mussel, and passes it to you. There’s no serving in a bowl: you eat it on the spot. They’re also astonishingly cheap: at the place in the pictures below we paid 5TL for four, which works out as little more than 70p. Given the huge number of midye sellers, you can more or less graze on them as you walk about.

You’ll not step much further than a hundred paces before finding somewhere to eat. I spotted the odd Arabic and Persian restaurant, but by and large they’re all Turkish. Restaurants nearly all have outdoor seating (at least in the 25C-ish temperatures of early September), where people gather to smoke. Fags and food go closely together in Istanbul. Hands wander swiftly between cutlery and half-finished cigarettes in ashtrays.

Bars, booze and Beyoğlu

A huge part of Beyoğlu’s charm, I’d say, is the ambivalent role of alcohol. It’s there, everywhere, but also isn’t. Licensed restaurants in Beyoğlu are the exception rather than the rule - and for every reveller who wants to enjoy a Tuborg or Efes, there’s another teetotaller who prefers Coca-Cola or a glass of çay.

Turkey, of course, is a secular Muslim country, with its own internal dynamic between conservatism and progressivism. You’ll see those who don’t drink gathered in nargile (shisha) cafes, sat on tiny stools around tiny tables beneath fruit-scented smoke, or in restaurants where live bands play traditional Turkish music. For me, there’s something really endearing about establishments who buzz isn’t facilitated by alcohol. It’s novel. If such places exist in the UK, I don’t go there.

The bars themselves are lazy, leisurely places. I’d describe Turkish bar service as friendly but distracted. You’ll be happily seated, but it might take some work getting the waiter’s attention to order. The staff prefer to stand vigil on the streets, waiting for new patrons, versus fussing over the ones they already have. The ‘no smoking’ signs inside bars seem to be largely decorative. People sit at tables, rather than stand in groups. We discovered a run of bars along Solaksade Sokak where bands played Turkish pop songs, and men and women danced, arms raised, shoulders bobbing.

You’ll find a fair few rooftop bars and restaurants in the area. Avoid 360 Istanbul: the food was good, but the service close to non-existent, and the vibe plastic and aspirational. It’s a place for 18-year-olds who want to impress their dates, and nothing more. Snog Bar offered a thrilling views. Bar Ritim is an establishment of two halves. It’s sedate at ground level, but when we climbed the stairs to the top floor, we found a melee of bodies and sparklers and English-language hits. It’s been a while since I last heard Tom Jones’s Sexbomb.

Everyone there was shitfaced; but drunkenness, for the most part, isn’t that visible around Istanbul. There’s no puke in doorways, no scrapping blokes, no stag party groups. Kids are still walking around with their parents at 1am. Young Istanbulites on a night out are fascinating to behold. Whilst being deeply polarised in some ways - the men are macho, the women hyperfeminine - both genders definitely share the same level of concern in their appearance. The men sport thick beards and military-style haircuts, and wear neatly ironed shirts and bootcut jeans (never shorts). The women dress in figure-hugging outfits and heeled sandals. Both sexes are smart, not showy.

Not showy. That, I think, another reason I love Beyoğlu: there isn’t an ounce of performance to be seen anywhere. Life ticks by here as it has for millennia: vendor to buyer, barman to patron, driver to passenger, colleague to colleague. Of course, the area has evolved with the boom of tourism - but I think it’s fair to guess that the midye sellers have been plying their trade here since the days that city was called Constantinople. I could happily give whole days over to simply people-watching here: following the intricacies of each human interaction, thinking about their lineage in a city that’s pretty much as old as cities come.

There’s the odd sad scene. Kids are sent off by their mothers to beg at restaurant tables; beggars lie prostrate in the street. But by and large, Beyoğlu is a joy. Other areas like Kadıköy and Bebek have siphoned off some of its status in recent years; and it being as touristy as it is I doubt that trendy Istanbulites would be singing Beyoğlu’s praises in the same way as me. As I sat on our balcony on my final day here, I listened to the sound of Despacito from a bar below, interjected by the call to prayer, megaphoned from a nearby mosque. To my ears, they harmonised. MB