Pickles

Wandering around Taksim after church Sunday I stumbled across one of what I consider the hidden jewels of this city when a protest or political rally forced me off the main thoroughfare. Tucked into a side street Ann Marie and I came across Petek Tursulari – a pickle shop. Now I know you’re thinking, "How can you have shop just for pickles?" But in turkey pickling is not just about cucumbers. Pickled peppers, pickled carrots, pickled beets, and pickled olives … along with some vegetables I couldn’t recognize in the jar.The colorful display is what caused us to stop. “What a great picture! I have to take that.” And as we opened the door to ask “photograph çıkabilir miyim?”the two guys invited us inside with big smiles. As I snapped a few photos one of them was hurriedly slicing a pickle and offering us a taste. Yum! We exchanged a few sentences – Turkish, or my lack of it, limiting a conversation – and learned that their pickles come from Bursa, and that they actually export to Berlin.Who knew? And so with several more smiles and an olive sample for Ann Marie we parted from this pleasant interlude in a dreary overcast day. Perhaps I need to get detoured more often in this town. Who knows what else I might come across?