Beşiktaş Çarşı

Neighborhood · BeşiktaşIstanbul,Türkiye

A market grid behind Beşiktaş's ferry square in Istanbul, running on fish, cheap taverns and football, and named for its club's supporters.

Beşiktaş Çarşı is a grid of market lanes behind the ferry square, and it runs on food and football. A fish market sits at the centre under a curving concrete roof, iced slabs of the morning's catch laid out fresh each day. Fruit sellers, spice stalls, coffee roasters and cheap kitchens pack the streets around it. Grilled fish and roasting chestnuts scent the air, tea trays rattle between the shops, and chants carry out of any corner café showing a match. The football club founded in this district in 1903 gave the quarter its second identity, and its supporters took the market's name for their own. By day students haggle over sea bass and buy stuffed mussels from the carts; after dark the meyhane tables spread into the lanes and the crowd stays young. A few steps downhill the ferry square holds the tomb of Barbaros Hayreddin Pasha, grand admiral of Süleyman's fleet, and beside it the Naval Museum, where the sultans' gilded rowing barges are kept. Few central Istanbul quarters are this loud or this unpolished.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Match days turn the square into a stand — When Beşiktaş play, the çarşı stops being a market and becomes an open-air terrace; come on a quiet morning if you want the stalls rather than the roar.
Know what is in the shell — the stuffing is rice cooked with onion, currants and warm spice, so a midye dolma eats more like a cold pilaf than like seafood.
'Kartal önü' is the only address you need — Locals arrange everything 'in front of the eagle'; use the statue as your anchor and the tangle of lanes suddenly makes sense.
The fish market is liveliest just after it opens — The catch looks its best and the fishmongers are at their loudest early, before the lunch cafés pull the crowd away.

Things to do

1
Eat mussels the way the square does
Find a midye dolma cart and point. Squeeze the lemon over a shell, tip the rice-stuffed mussel to your mouth, drop the empty on the tray, reach for the next. Do it in the flow of the crowd, half in conversation, and keep going until you have had your fill and wave the vendor off.
2
Feel a match take over the streets
On a Beşiktaş matchday, step into a corner café or lokanta with a screen and stand shoulder to shoulder. When the team scores, the roar leaves the room and rolls out across the square. You do not need a ticket, or even to like football, to feel the black-and-white pulse run through the lanes.
3
Let the back lanes turn into a meyhane
After dark, wander the narrow streets behind the market where plastic stools and long tables edge out from the meyhanes. Order a few meze, share a fish, and stay as the tables merge and strangers' conversations overlap. This is Beşiktaş at its loosest — tables becoming one, no one in a hurry to move you along.