Ok!
Time Out has come out with the fifty coolest neighborhoods in the world, and two — arguably three — of them are Greek; one in Athens, Kypsele, and another in the capital of the Greek diaspora, New York: Astoria. (Yeah, Melbourne…ok…chill). Now there are only what, 14 or 15 million of us in the whole world, and we corner 8th and 16th outta 50. Not just not bad, but figures that make it clear there’s a connection between Greek-ness and urbanity — even Greek villages are really just tiny Greek cities — the polis and everything political life implies, that runs deep.
Astoria
Kypsele
What if you have no Greeks (or worse, no Jews). Well, brother Turk, take a walk, or a nerve-wracking tourist shove, down what you’ve turned your “İstiklâl” into: its new garish, overlit, Gap-outlet, Gulfie, Saudi hideousness… And weep. That we left.
Oh, and what’s arguably the “third” Greek neighborhood… Ok, I scrolled down the list, nervously expecting to find Pera (Beyoğlu) there, the formerly, largely Greek mahalla — the formerly Greek, Jewish and Armenian heart of the City actually — because Turkey’s American public relations firms deserve every dollar they get from the Turkey accounts and they manage to shove a fictitious Turkish tolerant multiculturalism in our face whenever they get the chance, and Pera has, for about the past 15 years, taken pride of place in this masquerade of Istanbul hipness and Turkish cosmopolitanism — quite an accomplishment since the Midnight Express days. (Too bad Turkey itself reverts back to Midnight a little bit more every day.) And Pera wasn’t there, not on the list!
The old Grande Rue — Pera
And… Well, and…a few years back I wrote a post here called: “Nobody really cares about Gezi Park: Greek thoughts on the protests of 2013“. And perhaps the biggest stinger in the article was:
“All – I thought a lot about whether I should use “almost all” in this sentence and decided against it –because all the hippest, funkiest, most attractive, gentrified neighborhoods in the historic parts of İstanbul are neighborhoods that were significantly, if not largely, minority-inhabited until well into the twentieth century: not just Pera and Galata, but Cihangir and Tarlabaşı, and Kurtuluş — of course — and up and down the western shores of the Bosphorus and much of its eastern towns too, and central Kadiköy and Moda and the Islands. (And if serious gentrifying ever begins in the old city it’ll be in Samatya and Kumkapı and Fener and Balat; I wouldn’t put any big money into Çarşamba just yet.)”
And so, happily, I didn’t find Pera being prostituted again by Turkey as a symbol of a multiculturalism that the Turkish Republic eradicated, exterminated, expelled and that no longer exists. But I scrolled a bit further down…and there was Kadiköy and Moda, #42, also, until well into the 60s, heavily Greek and Armenian. More sweet justification!
(I’ll take Egyptians on for the empty, dingy Alexandria they got stuck with after our good-bye party in another post.)
Kadiköy
Finally, came the sweetest of all, my beloved Dorćol in my beloved Belgrade. 50th on the list of 50. You have to be pretty attuned to the Serbian soul to know what coming in 50th out of 50 means. It doesn’t mean being last. It means: “You think we’re cool? Who asked you?”
The Rakia Bar in Dorćol
Plus, Belgrade comes in in way first place over all of these cities in one important way: the guys. No joke.
Some restaurant notes:
Don’t go to Çiya in Kadiköy. Unfortunately, the food is spectacular, and I’m a sadist for posting this picture:
But the unfortunate part is that Çiya is owned by a sociological type: the newly comfortable, if not rich, provincial, pious middle-class; that’s the AKP’s and Erdoğan‘s political power base. What that means on the ground is that your great food is prepared by puritans who won’t serve you alcohol, so you can’t have a leisurely rakı or beer dinner, but have to scarf it all down and leave, paying with dough that might indirectly end up in the AK’s coffers or ballot boxes. The same goes with the otherwise excellent Hayvore in Pera. Amazing Black Sea dishes but no booze. Go ahead if you want. You can go to Saudi too if you want. I refuse to. Even if I didn’t want to drink: just on principle. And they — Hayvore — make one of my absolute favorite dishes which I can’t find anywhere else: an anchovy pilav. But I’ll live without. Or make it myself.
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And then, a little less geopolitically charged, there’s the completely baffling phenomenon of Cyclades in Astoria. I can’t argue with the fish. And if fish is their mission statement then fine, because it’s always fresh and expertly cooked — even if the owners are Albanian and hadn’t seen the sea till they were sixteen. But you do want to eat something along with the fish and everything else is awful. The cacık and eggplant salad is made inedible by that crazed Greek overuse of raw garlic, so that all you have is the bitterness of the bulb and not even the taste or aroma. The zucchini and eggplant are fried in old oil. The raw oil served for greens or salad is horrible — cheap, and I’m not even sure it’s 100% olive. And in a Greek fish meal, where almost everything is dressed with raw oil, it really needs to be the best quality or everything else is shot. The bread — and one thing we do well, γαμώτομου, is bread — is nasty and old. This place reminds me of food in tourist traps in the old days before the foodie revolution in Greece in the 00s.
And they commit one incomprehensible abomination. They serve oven-baked potatoes — with lemon, fine… But. With. The. Fish. These are potatoes, that according to the taxonomy and order of Greek food, if such a primitive cuisine can be said to have such order, are baked in the oven with meat in a composite dish or casserole. It’s a sin of commission to serve them with fish, with which they haven’t even been cooked, unless you’re going for plaki which means tomatoes and a whole different palate. And they taste as if they’ve been soaked overnight in lemon. And I dunno, but the yellow color is so suspiciously bright that it looks like yellow dye #2. Investigate them; I’m sure I’m right. And, of course, everything comes garnished with piles of more lemon wedges, to satisfy that deep Greek urge to obliterate the taste of everything else on the table.
And people — Manhattan people — come out to Queens and wait, for over an hour, malaka, to get a table at this Soviet cafeteria (the lighting is awful; the music is deafening). They’ll often go cross the street to wait to be called, to get a drink at Michael Psilakis‘ MP Taverna, where the food is phenomenal. It’s only slightly reinterpreted Greek — it’s deeply faithful to the roots but Psilakis — I dunno — freshens things, and combines traditional ingredients in ways that make you wonder why no one else had ever tried this. It’s generally full and has a great and friendly bar that looks out on the bustle of Ditmars Boulevard. But it should be a destination spot and it’s not. And Cyclades is. It makes me think that white people will eat bad food if they think it gives them woke and authenticity street cred. And convince themselves it’s good.
He dicho.
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Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 