Lonely Planet İstanbul Guide

SULTANAHMET’S HIPPIE TRAIL Plenty of monuments in Sultanahmet evoke the city’s Byzantine and Ottoman past, but there are few traces of an equally colourful but much more recent period in the city’s history – the hippie era of the 1960s and 1970s. Back then the first wave of Intrepids (young travellers following the overland trail from Europe to Asia) descended upon İstanbul and played a significant role in the Europeanisation of Turkey. The Intrepids didn’t travel with itineraries, tour guides or North Face travel gear; their basic baggage embodied a rejection of materialism, a fervent belief in the power of love and a commitment to the journey rather than the destination. All that was leavened with liberal doses of sex, drugs and protest music, of course. Sultanahmet had three central hippie hang-outs in those days: the Gülhane Hostel (now closed); a cafe run ‘King of the Hippies’ Sitki Yener (now a leather shop on İnciliçavuş Sokak); and the still-operating Lâle Pastanesi ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; Pudding Shop; % 0212-522 2970; www.puddingshop.com; Divan Yolu Caddesi 6; mains ₺ 25; h 7am-11pm; j Sultanahmet) , known to hippie-trail veterans the world over as the Pudding Shop. Sadly, this retains few echoes of its countercultural past, substituting bland food in place of its former menu of psychedelic music and chillums of hash. Nonetheless, you may wish to turn on, tune in and drop by for a çay, to view the period photos on the tabletops, menus and walls recalling the eatery’s halcyon days. Notes stuck in the window by enthusiastic tourists attempt to revive that spirit of old. To evoke those days, we highly recommend Rory Maclean’s Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India, a thought-provoking and wonderfully written history-travelogue.