Taksim’s main square is surprisingly small considering how important a hub it is. When I was still back in Seattle, before I had ever set foot in Istanbul, I spent hours staring at maps of the city. I imagined Taksim would be a huge open area like Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where the concrete seems to stretch to the horizon and on a hot summer day you might want to rest up for a couple hours before venturing out to cross the square again.
Taksim’s square isn’t like that at all though. You can cross it on foot, from one end to the other, in three minutes. The impressiveness of the square is not in its size, but in how well it moves huge numbers of people into and out of itself. At each of the square’s four corners are major boulevards that carry a continuous stream of cars and buses into and out of the square, and in the center of the square stairs from the subway spew forth a never-ending flow of people like a natural spring disgorges water from the center of the earth.
Very few people actually hang out in the square itself. The surrounding neighborhoods host one of densest concentrations of restaurants, nightclubs, retail stores, and hotels anywhere in the world, and almost all of the people in the main square are going to or coming from one of those establishments.
Taksim is one of those places where the rich, the middle class, and the poor all come together to enjoy life and see and be seen. It is a place where society types head to the ballet while punk rockers head to a club while transvestites head to wherever it is transvestites go. Taksim is a place where you can fill your belly with street food for $3.00 while breathing exhaust fumes from a bus, or you can dine on the finest French fusion cuisine for $1,000 while taking in a stunning view of the city from a restaurant’s penthouse patio.
Taksim sits at the north end of one of the main tourist corridors, so it attracts more than its share of naive, slack-jawed newbies and the shady characters who prey on them. The side streets a few blocks north of the square are home to some pretty questionable bars, and battle-weary backpackers around the world pass along stories of unexpectedly pricey glasses of scotch followed by strong-armed trips to the ATM. Sometimes the stories even morph into tales of foreigners entering a bar only to be drugged and then wake up the next morning on a park bench with a kidney missing.
I suspect the missing kidney story is a hyped-up urban legend, a cautionary tale passed down from generation to generation of traveler. Real life itself is far less dramatic, but far more fascinating, and one thing I always found fascinating, if slightly annoying, about Taksim was its street urchins, its beggar kids. Many different species of street urchins rub shoulders with each other in Taksim, but few are as spirited as the shoeshine boys.
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[This is an excerpt from the chapter “Threatening the kids” in A Tight Wide-open Space.]