ISTANBUL: The enticing smell of grilled corn and chestnuts wafted from Hakan Deniz’s red and gold food cart near a mosque in Istanbul’s old city. But local customers are hard to come by these days.

With Turkiye mired in sky-high inflation, Istanbul’s ubiquitous street vendors, who have been part of the cityscape since the Ottoman Empire, are worried about their future.

“Our tomorrows are uncertain,” said Deniz, 18, after pushing his cart past the Rustem Pasha mosque.

“I have lost almost half of my customers because of inflation,” Deniz said as he weighed and handed a bag of chestnuts to an American tourist. He wondered aloud if vendors like him would “still exist in the future”.

Inflation rose across the world after the Covid pandemic and soared further after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, but it has been particularly bad in Turkiye. Officially, it rocketed to 85 per cent in October 2022 before slowing and rising again to reach 75pc in May this year. Inflation has since fallen, with data showing it at 52pc in August. The streets of Istanbul, a metropolis of 16 million people, would not be the same without its street vendors.

At night, mobile stalls with bright neon signs form constellations of light along the picturesque city’s streets. They fill the air with an array of smells — from stuffed mussels to simit, rings of delicious sesame-encrusted bread.

The merchants enjoy a “positive image” in general, said Osman Sirkeci, a researcher at the Izmir University of Economics. Some, such as sellers of the sweet toffee paste known as macun, are seen as heirs of an “Ottoman tradition”, Sirkeci said.

Published in Dawn, September 5th, 2024