Coffee Shop Owners as Unexpected Tourist Guides in İstanbul's Fener, Balat, and Ayvansaray Neighbourhoods

Abstract

This study aims to understand how the durability of the past may be visible in a place whose past is constantly reinterpreted and unintentionally remade by coffee shop owners in their conversations with their customers in the framework of ongoing economic transformations while they weave their own identities into that of the neighbourhood. In the absence of any readily available information about the history of the area, the coffee shop owners of the Fener, Balat, and Ayvansaray neighbourhoods of İstanbul interpret the cosmopolitan past of the area within the limitations of the materiality of these neighbourhoods under the influence of economic conditions. In this respect, while this article shows how social memory is commodified and tamed for daily usage, it also argues that it is a process that includes different actors and their interpretations, and that this process is bounded by the materiality and durability of the past.