Flower Passage(Cicek pasaji)

Beyoglu's ornate Cicek Pasaji (Flower Passage) on Istiklal Caddesi at Galatasaray Square is filled with restaurants.

It is one of the most popular entertainment points of Taksim which is regarded as the center of European side of Istanbul.Each evening the tables are filled with Turks and foreigners who come to talk, eat, laugh and linger over dozens of plates of meze, succulent kebaps, seafood, sweet desserts, and glass after glass of milky Turkish raki, beer or wine.The Pasaj is a shrine to Turks' love of long, congenial group dinners, but...the Pasaj has no flowers. So why the name?The Cicek Pasaji is the L-shaped courtyard of a building named Cité de Péra, one of the first European-style buildings constructed during the Ottoman Empire's late-19th-century effort to modernize.

In its 19th- and early 20th-century heyday the Cité de Péra building housed posh shops on its ground floor in the Pasaj, and offices on the floors above.During 1968, the Pasaj had become a bunch of workmen's meyhanesi (tavernas) serving cheap but good food and strong drinks.The shops were now all simple restaurants. Beer barrels were rolled out into the Pasaj, square slabs of marble placed atop them, low three-legged stools set around, and Istanbul's taxi drivers, craftsmen and minor merchants used to come to eat, talk, shout, sing, and sometimes drink a bit too much.

It was a jolly place, with itinerant musicians, vendors, pimps and catamites circulating freely ,and getting lots of business.Then, in the late 1980s, about a century after it was built, part of the Cité de Péra collapsed. The building was closed.But Turkey's tourism boom had arrived, so the building was restored, renovated and re-opened as a more upscale eating-and-drinking locale for a somewhat richer class of patrons. The patchwork of tarps sheltering it from the elements was replaced with a modern canopy.

Source: http://www.turkeytravelplanner.com