Around six o’clock in the evening… The ladies in hats must be tucking in their skirts as they rush to catch the evening ferry from Haydarpaşa to Kadıköy… They need to be careful, though—the herringbone mosaic tiles on the ground are quite slippery, and if you rush around frantically trying to catch the ferry, they’ll send you flying through the air all the way to Suiskelesi…
They’ve likely just finished an afternoon tea gathering at one of Pera’s pastry shops or stepped out of a matinee showing of a popular film of the day, and without wasting a moment, they’ve taken the Tünel down to Karaköy—now they need to get back to Kadıköy as soon as possible. The kitchen is waiting for them. Otherwise, there’ll be no hot meal for dinner to serve their husbands… The one running in front might be a widow, a bit past her prime. But the one in the middle doesn’t stand a chance. She’s definitely married and has a tyrannical husband. Just look at the poor woman’s panic. She’s gathered her skirts so hastily that her white cotton panties with cuffs have come into plain view of everyone (I don’t even know why I’m spreading this pointless gossip in the evening. Just idle chatter. Maybe the lady had a husband as gentle as an angel).
Further back, the tram heading toward Domuzhane Street will definitely continue along the coastal road; it won’t climb up via Bankalar-Voyvoda. Because it has a car attached to the back. Tram trains with trailers can only be seen in that area on the Beşiktaş, Ortaköy, and Bebek lines. Trams heading toward Okçumusa are generally not given a trailer; otherwise, they can’t climb the hill, and they’ll run out of steam halfway up. Even before they reach the level of the Kamondo Steps, there’s a risk they’ll slide backward toward Minerva Han—especially in rainy, wet weather…
Incidentally, Karaköy is the square that is home to one of the first two traffic lights ever installed in Istanbul. The other was installed at the Galatasaray intersection.
The mosque rising behind the closed transit tram stop is the Merzifonlu Karamustafapaşa Mosque. It graced the square in the 20th century but was dismantled and removed in 1958 after serving for a little over half a century. It is one of the interesting mosques known as “Fevkani.” Simply put, “fevkani” refers to buildings stacked one on top of another. It’s the “fevk” in that famous phrase, “fevkalâdenin de fevkınde…”—meaning “above” or “on top.” It can also be described as a structure consisting of a ground-level entrance and the upper levels that form a unified whole with it. This is because the mosque’s main prayer hall is on the upper floor, while only the entrance is at street level. The letter “K” is pronounced with a thick sound. It is written as “Kaf.” Not “fevkani”; it’s “fevkani”… Its opposite is “tahtâni.” That term refers to the ground floor and the lower levels (in modern terms, we could also call them “basement levels”). “Tahtâni” is derived from the word “taht.” It means “below” or “lower”—think of it as sitting on a “throne” (taht).
A transit stop—a station that nearly all of the city’s tram lines pass through in one way or another… Fourteen different lines crossing the Bridge first pause at this point before dispersing to the Pera or Bosphorus coastal neighborhoods. The routes to Kurtuluş, Maçka, Şişli, Harbiye, and Mecidiyeköy branch off from Voyvoda (Bankalar), while the routes to Beşiktaş, Ortaköy, and Bebek turn onto Necatibey Street and head toward Tophane. This area is, so to speak, the neck of the bottle—the bottleneck. The routes from both sides of the city converge on the Valde (Galata) Bridge, then fan out again in different directions at Karaköy.
The spare tire mounted on the back of a private car passing by the bus stop was a manifestation of the “do-it-yourself” mentality of those years. If a tire were to blow out unexpectedly on the road, the spare would be waiting right behind the car, ready for action… Taking out the lug wrench, unscrewing the bolts, changing the tire, and then tightening them again takes no more than a quarter of an hour, but that way you won’t have to owe anyone a favor.
The imposing building on the right is the Wiener Bank, today’s Ziraat Bank. It stands out for the Masonic symbols used in the balcony decorations on the upper floor of its facade facing the pier. Located at a point commanding a view of the inner harbor, the building is one of the structures that narrowly escaped demolition under the 1957–59 expropriations.
Only a few years had passed since the 1925 dress and hat revolution and the 1928 alphabet reform. A hat craze had begun among men and even many women. Among a segment of the population with below-average incomes, caps were the norm. But heads were definitely covered in one way or another. I scanned the photo and couldn’t find a single person not wearing a hat, cap, or bonnet—as if it were medicine.
5:25 p.m. The Kadıköy ferry must be sounding its horn right at that very moment. Our people are sprinting with all their might toward Rıhtım Street so as not to miss the ferry. If they don’t slow down and don’t slip and fall along the way, they might reach the pier entrance in a minute and a half—but the ferry might have already left by then. It’s up to fate now… If you’re not in a hurry, wait for the next one at 5:50 p.m.—hold on… They should get some hot tea from the tea vendor at the pier with the dome and drink it. There’s also a newsstand selling magazines on the lower level. From there, they can pick up one of the magazines—like *Hanımlar Âlemi* or *Hanımeli*—that are specifically aimed at women, and while waiting for the ferry, sit on one of the wooden benches to both shake off the stifling exhaustion from all that rushing around and flip through the magazine’s pages. These were the popular magazines of those years…