theartsdesk in Istanbul: City on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown?
The arts and the economy might be prospering, but critics fear old Istanbul is turning into a new Dubai
by Sheila JohnstonSunday, 21 April 2013
Late on a spring Friday evening, İstiklal Caddesi, the main shopping thoroughfare in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district, exudes all the delicious traditional Turkish aromas: roasting chestnuts, fierce black coffee, döner grills and simit, İstanbul’s bagel, still selling like hot cakes way after midnight. Most of all, though, milling with the crowd, you are struck by something else, something less familiar these days, in Europe anyway: the smell of money.
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