The marble slab below the door sagged on one side, worn concave by the countless thousands of shoes that had trod upon it over the last 68 years.
Until this weekend, many feet still passed through the threshold of
İnci Pastanesi each day, especially on weekends, when Turkish families, couples, and not a few tourists would crowd into the long, narrow pastry shop, grabbing a plate of profiteroles drenched in chocolate syrup to eat at one of the small, low tables along the wall opposite the counter.
Neatly printed signs above them read, "We don't have any table service" and "We don't have any other outlets." Boxes covered in shiny wrapping paper lined the upper walls, interspersed with tidy spools of equally colorful ribbon. Sometimes a face might peek out from the loft office, above the cash register and next to one of the framed photos of
Atatürk. In the back, partly visible through an open doorway, a seemingly un-diminishing pyramid of pastry puffs were continually hand-filled with custard, while chocolate churned in a large white vat.
Opened in 1944 by Lukas Zigoridis, an Istanbullu of Albanian Greek origin, İnci hearkened back to an earlier time when Istanbul, and the
Beyoğlu district in particular, was a place where religious minorities -- Greeks, Armenians, Jews -- and various residents of European descent made up nearly half of the population and
İstiklal Caddesi was a grand avenue lined with fashionable local shops and elite residences.
Following
anti-Greek riots in 1955, mass
rural-to-urban migration, and a host of other factors, today's Istanbul is overwhelmingly Turkish and İstiklal Caddesi is home to three Starbucks, a Burger King, a Sephora, and a Gap (just to name a few). The fading memories of Beyoğlu's cosmopolitan past lend a melancholy undertone to the bustling and often rowdy neighborhood, where this history lingers only in the quiet, tucked-away old churches, in the Greek- and Armenian-origin dishes served at local
meyhanes... and at İnci. But no longer.
On Friday, the local
zabita (civil police) arrived at the
storied pastry shop to carry out a long-fought
eviction order of İnci and the other remaining tenants of the historic Cercle d’Orient building, an 1884 Baroque- and Rococo-style beauty reportedly slated for the same fate as its neighbor: renovation into yet another
shopping mall.
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