The Last Master: A Century of the Şengöz Family

The last century of Eyüp toy-making is, in many ways, the story of a single family: the Şengöz. From 1918, Kadir Şengöz worked from original moulds he held, producing toys; it was he who, working within the technology of his day, turned that production into a small-scale series. In those years, a shop like his went through wood, leather, clay and tin; every piece that came off a mould was hand-finished with earth pigments and yellow gilding. But the craft faced a formidable rival: Europe’s toy factories. We told the story of Kadir Usta’s bitter words from 1939 in our post Toymakers’ Lane.

The apprentice who inherited a craft

Halit Şengöz learned the craft as a boy, apprenticed at his father’s side in the workshop, watching him handle the moulds, work the clay, apply the paint. When he took over the 77-year-old shop in 1955, he was still a young master, but he too could not hold out against the flood of tin and plastic toys. In his own words: “I surrendered to plastic.” Father and son were the last two links in a mastery passed on mould to mould; in 1958, a redevelopment of Eyüp Square removed the street’s last historic shops as well.

A fuller inventory of the shop

Kadir Şengöz’s bitter words from 1939 were roughly half a century behind him when, in 2004, Hülya Yalçın sat down with his son Halit Şengöz for an interview; that interview was later carried into Fadime Geleş’s research. What Halit Şengöz described there shows the shop was never limited to a single kind of toy. In his own words: “Here we made more than just camels — wooden two-horse carriages, duck carts, mirrored cradles, clowns, Karagöz and Hacivat figures, side drums, drums, tambourines, trucks, rattles, cradles — we made and sold them all” (Hülya Yalçın, 2004; qtd. in Geleş, 2015). Alongside wood, clay passed through their hands too: “We didn’t only make wooden toys; we also made whistling clay jugs, mirrored jugs and darbukas” (Hülya Yalçın, 2004; qtd. in Geleş, 2015).

In the same interview, Halit Bey also spoke of his father’s resistance. Kadir Usta’s stand against tin toys lasted a long time before it, too, gave way: “My late father had rebelled against tin toys. But he held out for 16 years” (Hülya Yalçın, 2004; qtd. in Geleş, 2015). For himself, Halit Bey reaches a harsher verdict, one about the loss of a city, not merely a craft: “…I am deeply saddened to have watched a beauty unique to Istanbul disappear” (Hülya Yalçın, 2004; qtd. in Geleş, 2015).

Behind the window, in front of it

Eyüp’s toy shops carried out two functions in one space: the back was the workshop, the front a glass-fronted display window, with wholesale and retail sales both going out from the same shop (Geleş, 2015). The same layout ran across every shop on Toymakers’ Lane, not just the Şengöz family’s; a customer looking in through the window might have been a few steps from watching that same toy still taking shape by hand.

After the redevelopment, the Şengöz family opened a new shop at İskele Meydanı, but what continued there was no longer a production centre; it had become a shop selling toys as tourist keepsakes (Geleş, 2015). In a way, this was the craft’s last stand before it gave out entirely: the shop was still open, the workbench still there, but the street was no longer fed by a workshop — only a window selling its own past.

The last link in the chain

Even after closing his shop, Halit Şengöz remained the tradition’s last living witness; with him, half a century of knowledge about moulds, methods and paint techniques stood on the brink of being lost. According to Yalçınkaya’s 2006 conference paper, when the “project to revive Eyüp toys” reached him, Halit Bey looked on it warmly and said he could pass on his knowledge and experience (Yalçınkaya, p.294). One master’s closed shop became the bridge to a new workshop’s opening.

What remains today

Kadir Usta’s 1918 moulds, the knowledge Halit Usta passed down, the hands the 2005 project trained: all three strands of what we produce in our workshop today trace back here. The Şengöz family’s century did not end; it changed shape and continued. Some of what Halit Bey listed (the horse cart, the mirrored cradle, among others) no longer comes off the same hands, but it lives on under similar names in our catalogue. The toy types on display in our museum are the trace, a century later, of that same labour coming off the same moulds. What one master learned as an apprentice, another generation learned again in a workshop. Despite the silent years in between, the knowledge was never entirely lost. It stayed kept in one family’s memory, and was passed on when the time came.

Sources

• Yalçınkaya, Tosun (2006). “Eyüp Oyuncakçılığı ve Oyuncak Atölyesi,” Tarihi, Kültürü ve Sanatıyla X. Eyüpsultan Sempozyumu Tebliğleri, Eyüp Belediyesi, s. 290-295.
• Geleş, Fadime. “İstanbul Çocuk Oyuncakçıları,” Antik Çağ’dan XXI. Yüzyıla Büyük İstanbul Tarihi, C. 4, İSAM + İBB Kültür A.Ş., 2015. https://istanbultarihi.ist/138-istanbul-cocuk-oyuncakcilari
• Yalçın, Hülya. “Eyüp Oyuncakları Müzesi,” Tarihi, Kültürü ve Sanatıyla Eyüpsultan Sempozyumu VIII: Tebliğler, İstanbul, 2004, s. 69-70.