Much of Orhan Pamuk’s seminal novel The Museum of Innocence is set in the cosmopolitan quartier of Çukurcuma, a vertiginous warren of lanes between the Bosphorus and the teeming Taksim square. The plot, both fevered and wistful, revolves around an obsessive love for a woman of a lower class projected on to objects related to her by the collector protagonist. Delving into the dynamics of 1970s Istanbul society, the book reflects the mores of the time and cleverly evokes the atmosphere of this singular neighbourhood. The district’s name, meaning ‘Friday Valley’, stems from Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror choosing to perform the Friday prayer there just after the conquest of Constantinople. It is part of the wider region of Beyoğlu, known for its European flavour, where the Naum Theatre hosted Verdi’s Il Trovatore, the bells of Greek Orthodox churches rang out across the star-etched domes of Imperial hammams and impoverished Russian countesses sold flowers in the streets after the 1918 revolution.
It was also here that many Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Italians from Venice and Genoa settled as merchant magnates and built handsome town houses which today play host to art galleries, antique stores and boutique hotels. Having endured the dark day of the state-sponsored 1955 Istanbul pogrom when elderly priests, among others, were barbarically murdered and thousands of predominantly Greek-owned businesses were destroyed – one account describes the smashing of ‘pearls one by one with a hammer’ – the area lost much of its cosmopolitan flavour, but the elegant buildings remained, forlorn and often colonised by large Kurdish and Turkish families.
It was in this decrepit atmosphere that the young hotelier-turned-kilim dealer Erkal Aksoy stumbled across a three-story bone-white town house while wandering through the streets in the mid-1990s. ‘It was perched on the side of a curving hill called Francesco Della Suda, named after an Ottoman pharmacist of Italian origin who was made a pasha for his work during the Crimean War,’ recalls Aksoy as we sit drinking potent cherry wine on a leather chesterfield in his salon. ‘You cannot believe the state it was in. It had been the home of a Greek family who would have been employed by the much richer Genoese palazzi across the street. The architecture was simple but it moved me, and then when I glimpsed the courtyard garden at the back, I was lovestruck.’
For 11 heady years, Aksoy was Hali magazine’s director in Turkey and specialised in bespoke sourcing trips. ‘Carpets are my culture,’ he says simply, ‘and I have built my world on them.’ Descending from an Ottoman Empire Georgian family on his paternal side – most of whom changed their names in the days of Atatürk – and Anatolian on his mother’s, Aksoy is a man entwined with his roots, declaring that he cannot bear to be more than a week abroad. Working alongside his friend architect Serra Kaslowski, he took over a year to restore the building and, in the vein of Pamuk’s antihero, began to transform it into a veritable temple of obsession – his very own museum of innocence. The results, indeed, bear witness to a mind fevered with the spell of beholding, acquiring, secreting away or, in the manner of the Levantine caravan, selling to passing collectors and dealers. Having his own home in place – a distinguished set of rooms across a yalı next to the Bosphorus – Aksoy cast the newly-formed Alaturca House as an urbane salon where clients, friends and travellers could gather, chatter and be introduced to his burgeoning congeries of delicious finds.
‘Its name comes from the old Ottoman word that has a special place for us Turks,’ he avers. ‘Alaturca refers to the spirit of classical Turkish living, and, in a way, that is what I wanted to create here: a sense of theatre, discovery, bonhomie and the thrill of walking away with something you may never have found elsewhere. Everyone leaves here as a friend…’ Aksoy’s expansive manner suggests both his hosting of impromptu soirées (he is a famously late riser) and the distinct rhythm of a master conductor at work. Walking up the curving stairs, made into a kind of ‘first act’ with a revolving cast of modern Turkish art, one reaches a door to a tiny kitchen which reveals tumbles of 19th-century Lyonnais Kashmiri paisley shawls and crescent-topped Ottoman oil portraits among the piled-up crockery and glasses. A left turn leads into a room lined with églomisé calligraphy-covered cabinets, arranged with scroll-filled apothecary jars and Kütahya ceramics, the startlingly modern colours of the lattermost belying 19th-century origins. Here, disparate paintings of Asante men and 1930s beauties are propped above kente cloth-cushioned antique chairs. Most striking of all, though, is the Aladdin’s cave of kilims (mainly from the Konya and Sivas regions) stacked, rolled up, on shelves – an opulent background to a portrait of an 18th-century Versailles virago and her spaniel.
An early story illustrates Aksoy’s singular talent for welcoming in the right people at the right moment. ‘There was one rainy September afternoon when David Rockefeller turned up,’ he recalls with a wry smile. ‘Naturally I lit the fire and we settled in. He left with two huge Ushak carpets that he couldn’t resist.’ Other influential clients have included Valentino, John Galliano – ‘he came with Issy Blow and bought the kitschiest red velvet chair you can imagine’ – Uma Thurman – ‘charming but with wet hair from the pool, so I had no idea who she was’ – and Ralph Lauren, who, recognising a synergy in their tastes, sourced rugs and then furniture from Aksoy over many years. ‘I love what is happening in the present generation of Turkish artists; I grew up among our family collection of old master-type paintings, but they don’t move me.’ Instead, to get his fix of pieces by emerging talents, he works with the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts and buys from its promising practitioners directly. ‘When I showcase their works at Alaturca, it’s a way of sharing with people around the world what we have here – like scattering seeds.’
Every nook and corner of this house is an idiosyncratic melange of visual derring-do. One room is filled with gold-thread-embroidered ottoman cushions, antique silk ikat robes spilling, Narnia-like, out of an armoire in the shadows. The rambling cellars (we stopped to stand in adoration at the patterns of old Ottoman nails dancing on the stairs) are a hoard of Turkish pottery, mottled Aegean water vessels and deep-green-glazed Anatolian urns – jolts of blue join the fray in the forms of hand-blown glass cheese dishes, buried underground to age, and turquoise-painted roundels from Ottoman mosques that swirl with the names of the prophet’s family. ‘I bought my first kilim fragment aged 16 in Bodrum, and there began my journey of collecting – I have kept it ever since as a talisman,’ Aksoy says. ‘Kilims were only used in summer traditionally and their fineness is what first drew me in – the thrill of the hunt has kept me going.’ Another handsome house down the hill has been restored and filled with Turkish and Italian art, dubbed Alaturca Modern.
‘I am heading south to grow olives and make the best olive oil,’ comes his final cheery remark. The parting shot reveals something more of his love for reinvention, and his boundless energy for new ventures. Who knows what he will create in the foothills of Bodrum – magic guaranteed.
For more information about Erkal Aksoy, visit Instagram @alaturcahouse or alaturcahouse.com
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