The smell of sizzling meat mixes with the cordite of firecrackers and the sound of a crowd intent on the best New Year’s Eve ever. Around a giant TV screen pedestrians cheer and throw sparklers in the air while drivers pound their horns in time to the music thumping out of absolutely enormous speakers. This isn’t New York or Paris. Listen to the songs. One moment it’s Tarkan, the strutting pretty boy of Turkish rock; the next Sertab Erener, the Madonna of Istanbul, belting out Satılık Kalpler Sehri (City of Hearts For Sale). This is Istanbul, the best and youngest party city in Europe.
The Turks have always known how to party, but it’s only recently that they’ve taken to the streets. Taksim’s the traditional place to gather if you’re on the European side of Istanbul; Bagdat Street on the Asian.
This is the only city in the world that straddles two continents. For years after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, that divide led to identity crisis. Was Istanbul European or was it Asian? And what was its purpose once Ankara became Turkey’s capital city?
In the 1990s things began to change. Turkey got a green light to discuss EU membership and liberalised a lot of the old laws that had been put in place by Kemal Ataturk, the man who saved his country from dismemberment in 1920, but curbed a lot of freedoms in the process.
Suddenly, a new generation woke up to its uniquely advantageous position at the meeting point of two great cultures. Istanbul’s youthful population (over 55 per cent under 30) seems intent on making the most of East and West.
You see them at Ortakoy, once a small farming village on the Bosphorus that fed the Ottoman capital from its orchards. Now, there’s a thriving café and wine bar scene down its narrow alleys. Here, every 31 December, free concerts welcome in the New Year from a stage set up between the huge modern Bosphorus Suspension Bridge and the ornate 19th-century Mecidiye Mosque.
You also see these young Turks partying in Istiklal Caddesi. Most shops along this fashionable pedestrian zone stay open all night on New Year’s Eve and all the way through to New Year’s Day too, so as not to lose a minute of trade. People shop all the way down Istiklal, pile into Cicek Pasaji, an Art Nouveau arcade of good value restaurants, and then shop all the way up again.
And they do this alongside posters of Santa Claus. Because Turkey doesn’t formally celebrate Christmas, the traditional Western decorations – the jolly fat man, snowflakes, Christmas trees and sleighs – get co-opted into the New Year celebrations instead.
I first spent New Year here three years ago and I’ve been coming back ever since. My journalist friend, Ersun, took me to a music venue called Babylon on Seyhbender Street and told me that tonight I was going to hear some real music. “Babylon is turning this neighbourhood into the Soho of Istanbul,” he insisted proudly. “First though we drink some raki!”
Despite the potency of the Turks’ national spirit, no-one got rowdy, though the music – Ersun called it Heavy Sufi Electronica – was wild at times. At two in the morning we washed up at 5kat in the Cihangir district, a late-night drinking club run by the flame-haired Yasemin Alkaya, a stunning Turkish indie actress. “What’s she been in?” I asked. Ersun drew on his cigarette. “Woman smelling a candle” he said. “And Woman without a roof.”
I didn’t bother to ask whether they were any good. I was just enjoying the atmosphere of this place with its long red sofas and a louche clientele of tramps, vamps and resting actors.
