We’ve written before about how the area around Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar is in fact far more exciting than the bazaar itself: a tangled web of surrounding caravanserais, with winding alleys and wormholes leading to the most unexpected places. No wonder, then, that one occasionally runs into ghosts here — just as elsewhere, up in Eminönü or across the water in Pera. Not long ago, on the way to the Büyük Yeni Han, along Tarakçılar Street — the Street of Comb Sellers — another ghostly inscription caught my eye. As I later discovered, Yasin Karabacak also discusses it in his recently published book on Istanbul’s multilingual inscriptions (İstanbul’un çokdilli kitabeleri, 2024).
At the corner where the small street of the Mahmut Paşa hamam meets Tarakçılar, there is now a modern clothing shop — but above the current sign, the old inscription is still visible.
In the cartouche at the center is an Arabic text stressing honest, God-pleasing prosperity:
الکاسب حبیب الله | علیك عون الله
[al-kâseb habibullâh | aleyke avnullâh]
He who earns [in a lawful way] is loved by God | May God help you!
On either side, a lively mix of scripts and languages still advertises the former merchandise:
ΚΤΕΝΟΠΟΙΟΙ ΚΑΙ ΗΛΕΚΤΡΟΠΟΙΟΙ ΧΑΤΖΙ ΑΚΙΑΧ & ΥΙΟΙ
ԹԱՐԱԳԾԸ ՎԷ ՔԷՀՐԻՊԱՐԾԸ ՀԱԾԻ ԱԿԵԱՀ ՎԷ ՄԱԽՏՈՒՄԼԱՐԸ
[taraqji ve kehribarji haji agiah ve makhdumlari]
طراقجی و کهربارجی حاجی اکاه و مخدوملری
[tarâqjı ve kehribârjı hâjı âgiâh ve mahdumları]
FABRICANTS DE PEIGNES ET D’AMBRE HADJI AGHIAH & FILS
The multitude of languages says the same thing in unison — in Greek, Armenian, Ottoman Turkish written in Arabic script, and in French alike: this was once the shop of Hâji Âgiâh, who sold amber combs and no doubt other expensive amber goods as well. This cannot have been much earlier than the turn of the century, since the Biraderler — today Koçulu — han that housed the shop was built in 1898/99, in the shadow of a much larger arcade block opened just a few years earlier, in 1895. The former name of that complex is still proclaimed today above its main entrance: Istanbul yeni çarşı, the New Market of Istanbul. It still appears under this name on Charles Goad’s early-20th-century insurance maps, though a few decades later it was renamed Abud Efendi Han after its founder, as on today’s modern signage. On Jacques Pervititch’s maps, this latter name is already used, while Biraderler appears as Narin Han.
But let’s not stray too far from Âgiâh’s shop. According to the trade directory Annuaire oriental, by 1907 his sons were already running their own store nearby — and the entry even gives their names: Hilmi and Cevdet.
The corner shop has yet another surprise in store. From below you can’t see it, but if you climb a few steps up the staircase opposite the shop, another inscription emerges above the modern sign:
טאראקג֗י ו קי֗יחריבארג֗י חאג֗י ׃אקייאח ו מאחמומלירי
[taraqji ve qehribarji haji aqiah ve mahmumliri(!)]
The script is Hebrew, but the language is not the espanyol (Judeo-Spanish, Ladino) spoken by the Sephardim. Instead, it is Ottoman Turkish — just like the Armenian and Arabic-script versions of the inscription. Although Sephardic Jews had lived in the empire since the late 15th century, Hebrew script was not widely used to write Ottoman Turkish, unlike Armenian or Greek. From more than three and a half centuries before the 19th century, we know only a handful of isolated examples: one 16th-century chronicle and two fragments from the 17th–18th centuries.
It was precisely the reforms of the Tanzimat era, beginning in 1839, that led some Jewish community leaders to encourage the learning of Ottoman Turkish. To make this easier, Ottoman Turkish began to be written in Hebrew characters — and newspapers seemed the best format for spreading it. Thus Şarkiye (The East) appeared in 1864, Zaman (Time) in 1872 (perhaps modeled on the similarly named Judeo-Spanish El tiempo, launched the same year), Ceride-i tercüme (Translation Magazine) in 1876, and Ceride-i lisan (Language Magazine) in 1899. This is still a little-researched field, so there may well have been further attempts, but most seem to have been short-lived. The longest-running was a fifth paper, Üstad (The Teacher), which appeared for three years between 1889 and 1891 in Smyrna, today’s Izmir. Its survival may have owed something to the fact that it was bilingual, published in both Judeo-Spanish and Ottoman Turkish — although the latter was reserved mainly for domestic and foreign news, national and local reports, jokes, and anecdotes, while the pieces of greater interest to the community were all in espanyol. Its publisher was Moïse Franco, who in 1897 produced the first comprehensive history of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire in his Essai sur l’histoire des Israelites de l’Empire Ottoman depuis les origines jusqu’à nos jours.
Mr. Âgiâh’s Hebrew-lettered shop sign is therefore not quite as self-evident as one might think — even in multilingual Istanbul. It would be fascinating to see copies of the newspapers mentioned above (especially the chronologically close Ceride-i lisan) to find out whether the person who transliterated the Ottoman text into Hebrew letters worked from one of them. Even from the inscription alone, some simplifications are apparent: the two Arabic letters for k (ق, ک) are both rendered as ק qof, and the three different h sounds (خ, ح, ه) are all reduced to ח het, despite the existence of Hebrew equivalents. One particularly distinctive solution is the rendering of the ‘j’ sound (ج) with a dot written above the gimel — reminiscent of one of the cantillation marks in classical Hebrew used to indicate stress (֗ revina) — as is the colon-like sign before “Aqiah” (׃ sof passuk). Finally, a mistake also crept into the last line: the Hebrew letters spell “mahmumliri” instead of the correct “mahdumları” (his sons). With such a complex inscription, of course, only a master stonecutter would avoid errors altogether. Let’s hope Mr. Âgiâh never noticed.
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