Turkey Tonight

Just back from Paris (and New York and London), a global group of young Turks is taking Istanbul by the Golden Horn.

“Istanbul is the only city where no one restaurant is in the same place for 12 months,” says Savaş Ertunç as we sit inside a glass cube atop an Art Nouveau mansion. “Come summer, everything moves to rooftops and to the Bosphorus.” We’re eating cinnamon-scented lamb and fried zucchini flowers stuffed with lor (a salted Turkish ricotta), a modernized version of his grandmother’s Anatolian recipe, at his restaurant Müzedechanga. Surely, this is an exaggeration, given the logistics, but he is underlining what I’d heard about how much Istanbullus nourish themselves on change. “Hell,” Ertunç says, “in this city, they change menus mid-course.” Hell, I want to add, Atatürk seemingly changed the alphabet over lunch.

Ertunç and his partner, Tarik Bayazit, opened the industrial-chic Changa restaurant eight years ago, becoming major players behind the historic city’s new fashionable face. They followed it with Müzedechanga, where the sexy, stylish crowd now eats updated Turkish cuisine in architect Ayşen Savaş’ cube amid 1960s-inspired furniture by hot Turkish design group Autoban. Müzedechanga sits on the top floor of the Sakip Sabanci, an Art Nouveau house that the Sabancş family, Turkey’s Rockefellers, recently transformed into a museum. Müzedechanga is just one of many remarkably creative restaurants and bar-design concepts here that are attracting as much global attention as the music and food coming out of them.

That Istanbul should find itself as the world’s latest style capital should come as no surprise. Istanbul was oozing sophistication when Northern Europe was still in the Dark Ages. As the ancient Greek city Byzantium and later, as Constantinople, it ruled over much of the known world. When Sultan Mehmet II created the Ottoman Empire in 1453, he reinforced the city’s polyglot character – Greeks, Armenians and Jews fuelled commercial life – and for the next half a millennium, poets and writers fell over each other extolling the city’s charms. When Flaubert visited in 1850, he predicted it would one day be the capital of the world: “It really is fantastic as a human anthill.” But the opposite happened. The younger generations left a city that had become a monotonous backwater. Atatürk’s legacy of a modern secular republic notwithstanding, it had fallen into economic decline. The world pretty much forgot about Istanbul.

Now many of the Turks who had been educated and living abroad – or born abroad to Turkish parents – are returning home and discovering Istanbul’s unique voice. Make that voices. They are at the forefront of an Istanbul style offensive almost as forceful as any conquest the sultanates undertook. All the people coming back, Ertunç says, “got bored in Europe. The cities all look the same.”

Later that night, Esra Ekmekçi pours champagne in the living room of her apartment overlooking the Bosphorus. Its monumental suspension bridge, which linked Europe with Asia when it was built in 1973, seems to be within arm’s reach of her terrace. “Nothing compares to Istanbul,” she says. “It has a young energy and millennia-old buildings. The lifestyle offers as many options as the open market.” Ekmekçi was part of a group of Turkish expats I hung with in Paris a dozen years ago, part of the style diaspora Ertunç was hinting at – a generation of tastemakers whose imaginations had been fed not through roots but through rootlessness, to paraphrase Turkish author Orhan Pamuk.

Today Ekmekçi works as a law professor at Istanbul University and runs an advertising agency, Dream Design Factory, with her business partner, Arhan Kayar. We are sitting in her high-ceilinged living room, decorated with mid-century Modern furniture and Ottoman-era art – on the coffee table, there’s fresh fruit and photos from our Paris party days – and I ask her why her generation of expats is becoming a generation of repats.

A growing middle class among Istanbul’s population of 12 million – 75 percent of whom are under the age of 25 – and a surging market economy are certainly factors, she explains. But they’re not the whole story. Here was a city, the style makers thought, that could teach other world capitals a thing or two about modern.

As Ekmekçi says this, Ece Ege – a fashion designer who went on to found the Paris-based label Dice Kayek with her sister, Ayşe – walks in. She has just come from the launch party for the Harvey Nichols store at the Kanyon, the big new Guggenheimesque shopping centre in the Levent district.

Ege, who says she works in Paris but lives in Istanbul “for inspiration,” is surprised by my question. “Why do we come back?” she says, with a whiff of impatience. “Come here.” Pulling us out onto the terrace, she points to the lump-in-the-throat beauty of Istanbul’s nocturnal skyline, with its illuminated floating domes, elegant minarets and music from the superclubs that line the Bosphorus. “That’s why. You can’t see that anywhere else. You can’t feel this atmosphere anywhere else.”

Flaubert’s prediction doesn’t seem so far-fetched as I walk down İstiklal, the main pedestrian street in Beyoğlu, the next day. Home in the 19th century to middle-class Jews and Christians, the neighbourhood had since fallen into ruin, a Kurdish and Gypsy slum. “Ten years ago, no one would go to Beyoğlu,” Ekmekçi told me.