After the Second Constitutional Monarchy, Yakup Kadri and his mother İkbal Hanım moved to a small two-storey house surrounded by wooden railings, with caged windows and a garden on the Kızıltoprak side of Kurbağalı Creek. Yahya Kemal would not leave that house much either. Healing, which was a “dilldar in the district” for Safiye Erol, would begin when she walked up the Kurbağalı Dere, towards Moda. It is known that the ancients called it “The Clerk’s Vineyard”. Safiye Erol’s “Kadıköyü’nun Novel” and “Ülker Storm” are Kadıköyü novels. “Safiye Erol from Kadıköy” has greatly influenced the unique heroes of both novels.
Ahmed Rasim lived for a while as a tenant in the mansion at “Iskele Sokak No.2” in Rasim Pasha. That mansion later became the property of Hikmet Memduh Kızılağaç. Born and raised in the mansion at No.2, Gönül Öztürk Kızılağaç said, “Before us, writer Ahmed Rasim lived as a tenant in this mansion. He loved dinner. My father used to say that he always told his wife, Ahmet Rasim, ‘Don’t be late, come early’. That’s why that famous song was born and Ahmed Rasim composed it in this house. Bedia Güleryüz, one of our first female painters, also lived here as a tenant for a while. She was a very successful painter, she. She is also Mehmet Güleryüz’s aunt,” she says. Our correspondent was a tenant in Rasim Pasha, but as soon as he left his house, he was either in the Pastor’s Vineyard or in Şifa. Pastor’s Vineyard is a wooded place behind today’s Fenerbahçe Stadium. While Ahmed Rasim was brewing there, he often said to Mihran Efendi, the owner of Sabah newspaper, with a waiter, “I’m hostage in the Pastor’s Vineyard. Hurry send two gold coins. Ahmed Rasim” sent the same note,
Ahmed Rasim used to drink in Aristidi, Mardik, Kara Miço, Kadifeli, Hasırcının Galib, Vasil and Todori, but his favorite tavern is Şifa Coffeehouse, run by an Armenian named Yervant Ağa. is . This place is on the right side of Yoğurtçu, on the slope overlooking Kalamış Bay. It is very close to Yakup Kadri’s house. Adnan Giz, in his work titled “Once Upon a Time in Kadıköy”, included what Muharrem Giray, who was at Ahmed Rasim’s desk, told:
“Ahmed Rasim Bey would come here with his bag in hand almost every night during the moonlight times, and the tenant of the garden, Yervant, would meet the master with his bag and take it to the table he had prepared before under the gum tree. Opening his bag, the master would take out young cucumbers, fresh tomatoes, thin green peppers, white cheese, chickpeas, and some seasonal fruit, and put the raki bottle into the ice that Yervant brought with a bucket. While they were preparing the appetizers with their own hands, the table setting would slowly begin to disintegrate.”
When Ahmed Rasim said, I went a few hundred meters ahead. However, before arriving at Yervant’s place, the storyteller Fahri Celâl resides with his family in a house by the stream. His younger brother Kadri is Fenerbahce’s fierce back. Fahri wants to go everywhere on foot, does not like to sit in one place, and walks his friends from Kuşdili to Şifa and Moda, from Moda to Yoğurtçu, and never listens to their begging. It turned out that the reason for this was that a tall, stout and plump widow, whom he liked very much, was wandering around. The name of the widow, whom Fahri Celâl had a crush on, is Hamide Nebile. He married her in 1924 and moved to Hamide Nebile Hanım’s mansion in Anadolu Hisarı. However, when Hamide Nebile Hanım passed away in 1927 after the birth of their daughter Hatice Hulya, Fahri Celâl would marry Melâhat Hanım for the second time.
They used to call the Pastor’s Vineyard “Hadika-i Basariye”. The fame of this place is that it is the market of Kadıköy. If you say male, “Miss Kavuncu”, if you say woman, “Miss Meadow”. Also, an old and perverted woman from Strawberry Street called “Canary” made the Pastor’s Vineyard its market. But those beauties did not care about Ahmed Rasim and Neyzen Tevfik. They just loved to brew at Hamdi’s Casino.
One day, Neyzen Tevfik will not be able to stand when he slams an ounce of raki without eating it at Hamdi’s Casino. They ask whoever is there, especially Hamdi, the owner of the place, to go to his house and take a nap. Neyzen doesn’t break their request, either, staggering out of Hamdi to go to his house. However, despite reaching his street, he cannot find his forty-year-old house. While covered in blood, he encounters the guard of the neighborhood and asks him. “My son, where is Neyzen Tevfik’s house?” The guard, thinking that the master was joking with him, said, “Oh my lord, you are the Neyzen Tevfik!” Doesn’t Neyzen say, “My son, I didn’t ask you who Neyzen Tevfik is, I asked you where is Neyzen Tevfik’s house!” he berates the poor man.
Another day, while Neyzen Tevfik was brewing and playing the ney at Hamdi’s Casino, a painter boy approached him and said, “Uncle, should I paint?” he asks. After Neyzen gives the boy money, he lies on his back and says, “Come, paint my face!” says she. When his face is painted, he leaves Hamdi’s Casino and goes to Yervant in Şifa. When Ahmed Rasim saw him, he said, “What is this, Neyzen? Did you play Revenge of the Arab at the Kuşdili Theater?” he asks. Neyzen laughs and replies, “Mercy sometimes turns a person’s face black”. After telling Ahmed Rasim how he felt sorry for the painter boy, he said the last point, “I wanted to appear in the universe in this majesty. Thank God I had such a disgrace. What if I just painted on your predicament and walked around, then who would look at me?” he will put it.
While Ahmed Rasim and Neyzen Tevfik were brewing at Hamdi’s Casino, Leyla Hanım was residing in Kızıltoprak, a little further in the direction of Bostancı. Kızıltoprak, which was called “Zühtü Pasha” by the old people, has always preserved its feature as a “small-populated summer resort district” for many years, unlike Göztepe and Erenköyü. According to what Ali Neyzi wrote, even in the 1930-1940 period, it consisted of at most twenty mansions and one hundred fifty or two hundred households clustered around them. Just like in Suâdiye, in Kızıltoprak, the railway used to divide the district by class and divide them into “under the train line” and “over the train line”.
The poet and composer Leylâ Hanım came to Kızıltoprak after her mansion in Bostancı burned down and settled in Mehmet Ali Aynî’s mansion at the address “Hüseyin Paşa Çıkmazı No.4”. Mehmet Ali Ayni is the husband of Feride, one of Leyla Hanım’s daughters. Ali Neyzi, on the other hand, is the marriage of one of their daughters, Nefise Hanım, and Muzaffer Bey. Nezih Halim Neyzi, the author of “Redland Memories”, is also Ali Neyzi’s older brother. Leylâ Hanım is a short woman with a wrinkled face. Leylâ Hanım, whom everyone calls Mimi in the mansion, knew Greek, Arabic, Persian and French perfectly, and she read the classics in their own language. His poems were collected in a book called “Faded Flowers” in 1928. The memories of Leylâ Saz from the palace circle were published in the newspaper Vakit between 1920-1922 under the title of “Harem-i Hümayun and Sultan Palaces”. Translated into French by his son Yusuf Razi in 1925, this work was published in France with a foreword by Claude Farrere, and later in English in England. Her memoirs, which consist of two parts, include Leylâ Hanım’s observations on the harem life in the Ottoman Palace in the first part, and her observations on the lives of Ottoman women in the 19th century in the second part.
Mehmet Ali Ayni Bey is much older than his wife Feride. Feride Hanım was married to Mehmet Ali Ayni Bey at a young age. Ali Neyzi writes the following about Feride, who was married at a young age without her consent:
“Fearing her husband, little Feride woke up one night in bed, found her bed sheet wet and realized that she had slipped it under her clothes in her sleep. Anyway, at a young age. He was scared at first. Then she saw her husband sleeping snoring next to her. She gathered her courage and slipped out of the bed softly. Then she went to the other side of the bed and went back to her husband. For an hour or so she pushed her husband to the other side of the bed without waking her, and then she fell asleep herself. When the groom woke up in the morning, he saw that the gold was wet and thought that he had committed a crime while asleep. He was so embarrassed that he gave his young wife a solitaire diamond ring that evening.”
Mehmet Ali Aynî Bey and Feride Hanım are also different in terms of temperament. Mehmet Ali, who is fond of his books and curious about reading and writing, has nothing to do with sports and entertainment. Feride Hanım, on the other hand, used to ride a horse, go hunting and use a gun. So, a real “Tomboy”! While Feride Hanım was wandering around the creek all day, Mehmet Ali Bey would not come out of the library room on the third floor of the mansion, sit cross-legged on a big sofa there, and write his works in old letters on the papers he put on his knee. Then he learned new letters, but he always complained that he could not write with new letters as fast as before.
Over the years, I have always wondered: “Hüseyin Paşa Exit, No. Did Leylâ Hanım, at the address 4”, know that Ahmed Rasim and Neyzen Tevfik were brewed in the Pastor’s Vineyard, a short distance away?