Scott Newman

In the neighborhood of Vefa there - where on earth is Vefa?? OK. Vefa is in old Istanbul between the Valens Aqueduct Bridge, the Suleymaniye mosque and the main Beyazit campus of Istanbul University. A century ago it was one of the best addresses in town, but now with the rich moving north to the Bosphorus, each of its old wooden mansions seems to house a dozen or more families off the latest bus from some Anatolian village. Now, as I was saying, in the neighborhood of Vefa there is an old Istanbul institution, the Vefa Bozacisi, in business since 1876. What the hell is Boza?!? Boza is a thick yellow goo, with a dusting of cinnamon that was all the rage across the Ottoman lands. It is made from fermented wheat, but the alcohol content is so low that only the most hard line of Mullah would ban it. Boza connoisseurs will tell you that it is spectacularly full of vitamins A, B1, B2, C and E as well as the digestive lactic acids. Some even go as far to claim that it naturally enlarges a woman's breasts!
In 1870 Hadji Sadik Bey moved to Vefa from Albania, and thought that good Albanian Boza was better than the more sour drink the local Armenians were brewing and in 1876 he opened the “Vefa Bozacisi”. Today his great great grand children run the shop, but little else seems to have changed – apart from a little plaque that tells you where Atatürk sat when he visited in the '30s, and even the silver cup he drank from is preserved. Sitting in the cool interior on the old wooden benches, you can believe you have been transported back to the last days of the Ottoman Empire. Old tiles and wooden paneling line the walls and the bozaci fills glass after glass for the regular trickle of mostly Turkish customers.
Boza is of course the main item on sale. It is traditionally a winter drink, as before the modern refrigeration it quickly went bad in the heat of an Istanbul summer. In warmer months it is joined by Shira, made from raisins, as well as traditional Turkish ice-cream and lemonade. The strong, distinctive taste of Boza, to be honest, can seem strange to foreign taste buds, best described as an 'acquired test', but this is a place to come to feel the atmosphere, and sample a piece of Istanbul's history and culture.
The Bozacı is located in a neighborhood that is a little run down, and generally poor and conservative, but with some of the best old wooden houses in Istanbul, as well as two mosqued old Byzantine churches and several old Ottoman buildings, it is worth exploring in its own right. Just don't forget to try some Boza!