|
 | Istanbul Nightlife | Tips 21 - 30 of 255 |  |
Popular Nightlife | Miscellaneous Nightlife Tips | All Tips (255)
 | |  |  | Tea Among the Tombstones | Tip Rating:    |  |  | |  |
Drinking tea in a “tea garden” is an Istanbul experience you shouldn’t miss. These little cafes serve only tea or coffee – no cakes, pastries, sandwiches or alcohol. You can also have a narghila, or water-pipe, brought to your table. For some reason I have yet to discover, many of the tea gardens in Istanbul are located in cemeteries. Imagine walking at night through the paths of an ancient graveyard lit up in an eerie light, to reach a café, nestled among the tombstones.
And bizarre looking tombstones they are, many of them white marble columns of various heights. Some of the graves are marked by a monument sprouting a bulbous appendage. Even if you can’t read the Arabic script, you can figure out if a man or woman is buried there by looking for certain symbols: A shell or flower shape indicates that the deceased is a woman; a turban or fez shape indicates that it is a man.
Unlike the Western custom of treating death as a kind of taboo, something to avoid if humanly possible, tea-among-the-tombstones in Istanbul seems to be a kind of merging of the living and the dead. You enjoy life, leisurely sipping small glasses of tea or tiny cups of Turkish coffee in a quiet garden, away from the noisy street, with the dearly departed at your feet.
The tea garden we went to was on Divan Yolu, the main boulevard of Sultanahmet. Stepping through the gate, we found ourselves in a cemetery containing the dazzling white mausoleum of Sultan Mehmet II. Further inside is the café, where we drank apple tea and orange tea. Both were very nice, but the “apple tea” was actually a brew of apple syrup and hot water, and if you grew up in the States, the orange tea will bring back memories of Tang, only hot. Leave a Comment Theme: Eating and Drinking
|
 | |  |
first bars began in the second half of the 19th century around Kadikoy(Asian side) and Tophane..They were called Balyoz...There are more than 8000 bars&restaurants in Istanbul;twice of Rome that is!
except the bars that are picky ,you can dress anything! Leave a Comment Theme: Nightclub
|
More Sponsored Links for Istanbul |
|
Istanbul
on May 28, 2003
on September 22, 2003
on December 7, 2004
on September 5, 2006
on August 16, 2007
on August 15, 2003
on September 15, 2004
on May 11, 2005
on March 19, 2006
