The Itinerant Toy Sellers of Eyüp

The old neighbourhoods of Istanbul formed a close-knit society that shared its joys and sorrows alike. In those winding quarters with their cobbled streets, the first stirrings of the day began with the morning call to prayer, and the tradesmen set out to walk the neighbourhoods street by street.

Of all the tradesmen, the ones who mattered most to children were the itinerant sellers of Eyüp toys. On the racks and baskets they carried on their backs were wooden cradles, carts, whistling and mirrored little jugs, whirligigs, roly-polies, spinning tops, rattles, gullet whistles, pipes, arrows, acrobats, rattle carts, tambourines and drums. The moment the peddler’s gullet-whistle rendition of the Algiers March sounded in the neighbourhood, children would run to their mothers and beg for a toy.

In literature and on the silver screen

Many of the toys made in Eyüp Sultan travelled to every corner of Istanbul in the hands of these peddlers. The itinerant Eyüp toy sellers were so common a sight that they appear again and again in the novels, stories and memoirs of the period.

Halide Edip, describing the sellers she came across at the Ihlamur promenade in her memoirs, writes:

“The toy sellers wandered with baskets of Eyüp toys on their backs, the water sellers clinked their glasses, and the taffy men and rooster-candy sellers called out their rhymes.”

A scene featuring an itinerant Eyüp toy seller also appears in the 1968 film Efkârlı Sosyete, starring Sadri Alışık and Necdet Tosun.

From shop to aktar, aktar to street

Toys did not reach Istanbul by a single route. They travelled through three channels at once: from the shops in Eyüp itself, from aktar shops (the traditional herbalist-druggist stalls found in every district of the city), and through itinerant sellers walking street by street (Koçu 1972, s.5461-5462). That three-channel network explains how a toy made in one small quarter of the city ended up scattered across Istanbul, and well into Anatolia besides.

The külhanbeyi’s whistle

A street scene preserved in Koçu’s İstanbul Ansiklopedisi captures what these sellers actually sounded like, as quoted in Yalçınkaya (2006, s.293). When a seller blew his gullet whistle at a street corner, children came running from every direction “as if it were a magic flute” (sanki sihirli flütmüş gibi). The whistle was often played by a külhanbeyi, a street-corner performer who dressed up his tunes with quick, curling flourishes, songs like “Felek bana neler etti, nane suyu, şeker” among them (roughly, “what has fate done to me, mint syrup, sugar”).

The gullet whistle was already on Evliya Çelebi’s 17th-century list of Eyüp toys; three centuries on, it had not left the peddler’s basket. You can read more about that early record in our post The Eyüp Toymakers Through Evliya Çelebi’s Eyes.

Sources

• Koçu, Reşad Ekrem (yay.), “Eyyubsultan Oyuncakları,” İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, C. 10 (ERI-FIR), 1972, s. 5461-5462.
• Yalçınkaya, Tosun (2006). “Eyüp Oyuncakçılığı ve Oyuncak Atölyesi,” Tarihi, Kültürü ve Sanatıyla X. Eyüpsultan Sempozyumu Tebliğleri, Eyüp Belediyesi, s. 290-295.