Kadife Sokak: The Street of Bars and Meyhanes
Why is it significant?
You are standing in a narrow lane of old two- and three-storey houses, their ground floors opened up into bars, their balconies hung with plants and fairy lights. By day it is sleepy. By night, Kadife Sokak, the Velvet Street, becomes one long, loud, happy terrace.
Key Facts
| Place | Kadife Sokak: The Street of Bars and Meyhanes |
|---|---|
| Address | Kadife Sokak, Caferağa, 34710 Kadıköy/İstanbul, Türkiye |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.98680, 29.02680 |
| Part of Walk | Fish, Pickles and Sunset Tea: Istanbul's Asian Side from Kadıköy Market to Moda |
| Generated | Generated |
You are standing in a narrow lane of old two- and three-storey houses, their ground floors opened up into bars, their balconies hung with plants and fairy lights. By day it is sleepy. By night, Kadife Sokak, the Velvet Street, becomes one long, loud, happy terrace.
Most of these houses were once family homes, many of them built for the Greek and Armenian families of nineteenth-century Kadıköy, when the district was a quiet suburb of gardens and wooden mansions. As the city grew and the old families moved on, the houses filled with students and artists, and from the 1990s the bars arrived. Everyone calls it Barlar Sokağı now, Bar Street, and many Istanbulites remember their first concert or first heartbreak here.
But the deeper tradition behind this street is the meyhane, the Istanbul tavern. A proper meyhane evening is slow. First come the cold meze: white cheese, melon, aubergine purée, fava, pickled fish, little dishes of greens dressed with olive oil. Then the hot ones, perhaps fried calamari or liver, and only later, maybe, a fish. Nobody rushes, and the conversation matters more than the food.
And the drink is rakı, the anise spirit that turns milky white when you add water, which is why Turks call it lion's milk. The ritual is precise: rakı first, then water, then ice, never the other way round, and a glass of plain water beside it. When glasses meet, the bottoms touch gently, and someone always says şerefe, to honour.
The old meyhanes were famously mixed places, where Greek, Armenian, Jewish and Turkish neighbours sang the same songs at the same tables, and that memory still hangs in the air. Now head south out of the lane onto Moda Caddesi, where the streets grow leafier and the sea begins to appear between the buildings.