Daily life in Istanbul during the 1950s

A grounded look at a city of ferry commutes, neighborhood grocers, wooden houses, new apartments, factory work, cinemas, tea glasses, and rapidly growing settlements at the urban edge.

Istanbul in the 1950s stood between familiar neighborhood routines and unusually rapid physical change. Ferries still stitched together waterside districts, trams rang through crowded streets, and shopkeepers often knew customers well enough to extend credit. Yet migrants from across Anatolia were arriving in growing numbers, industrial districts were expanding, apartment construction was altering middle-class streets, and broad new roads cut through older quarters. The city's population rose sharply over the decade, but growth did not bring the same comforts to everyone. A clerk in Beyoğlu, a dockworker in Karaköy, a seamstress in Fatih, a factory hand in Zeytinburnu, a shopkeeper in Kadıköy, and a newly arrived family building a small house near the city edge inhabited very different Istanbuls.[1]

Housing and Living Spaces

Housing ranged from timber houses, masonry row houses, old mansions divided among several households, and rooms above shops to modern flats, workers' dwellings, garden houses, and new gecekondus. In established districts such as Fatih, Balat, Üsküdar, Kadıköy, Beşiktaş, and along the Bosphorus, a household's routines were shaped by narrow streets, slopes, courtyards, gardens, staircases, and proximity to an iskelesi, market, mosque, church, synagogue, school, or tram stop. Older buildings could be draughty and difficult to maintain. Roof leaks, fire risk, damp, shared toilets, and steep wooden stairs were ordinary concerns, while a good view or garden did not necessarily mean reliable plumbing or winter warmth.

Middle-class apartment living expanded in districts such as Şişli, Nişantaşı, Kurtuluş, Cihangir, and on the Asian side. Flats promised piped water, bathrooms, fitted kitchens, central locations, and a more private family life, although amenities varied greatly. Apartment residents negotiated common entrances, doorbells, stair cleaning, coal deliveries, caretakers, and relations with neighbors above and below. Magazine advice and advertisements presented the orderly modern home as the responsibility of an efficient housewife, surrounding domestic labor with new ideals of hygiene, furniture arrangement, and appliance use.[2] Construction of the planned Ataköy development late in the decade offered a particularly visible image of the new apartment city, but only a limited part of the population could obtain such housing.

Rural migration produced an urgent need for inexpensive shelter. Families often stayed first with relatives or fellow villagers, rented a single room, or built small houses on peripheral land near work and transport. In early gecekondu areas, residents might carry water from a fountain, well, or shared tap, use a pit latrine, follow unpaved paths, and wait years for electricity, drainage, roads, or regular municipal service. Construction relied on saved wages, reused timber and tiles, cheap brick, and collective labor by kin and neighbors. These homes could be insecure in law and physically rough, but they also represented a family's foothold in the city. In both formal and informal neighborhoods, rooms were multipurpose: bedding was folded away, a sofa became a guest bed, a table served meals and homework, and balconies, doorsteps, courtyards, and rooftops extended domestic life outdoors.

Food and Daily Meals

Most households ate food that was seasonal, filling, and carefully budgeted. Breakfast might consist of bread, white cheese, olives, jam, eggs when affordable, and tea poured into small tulip-shaped glasses. Everyday lunches and dinners drew on soups, bulgur or rice pilaf, beans, lentils, chickpeas, potatoes, stuffed vegetables, greens cooked in olive oil, yogurt, pickles, and bread. Meat was less frequent for poorer families and often reserved for Sundays, guests, or festivals. Fish from the Bosphorus and Sea of Marmara—including bonito, bluefish, horse mackerel, sardines, and anchovies—appeared according to season and price. A household's table also reflected region, religion, class, and migration history: Black Sea, Balkan, Armenian, Greek, Jewish, Kurdish, Circassian, and central Anatolian practices all remained part of the city's food culture.

Shopping was usually local and frequent because refrigerators were uncommon. The neighborhood bakkal sold staples and might record purchases in a notebook until payday; bakers supplied fresh loaves; greengrocers displayed seasonal produce; butchers, fishmongers, dairies, and open markets completed the daily circuit. Vendors announced yogurt, milk, simit, boza, salep, roasted chestnuts, corn, or household goods in streets and courtyards. Women and children often carried baskets between several shops to compare price and quality. Food was stored in tins, jars, cupboards, cool corners, or mesh-fronted cabinets, and leftovers were reused rather than discarded.

Cooking itself required repeated labor. Coal, wood, charcoal, kerosene, or town gas heated stoves and small burners; water had to be fetched or heated; vegetables were washed and sorted; dried foods were inspected and stored against damp and pests. Aluminum, copper, enamel, and tinned vessels remained common. Coffeehouses, meyhanes, pastry shops, restaurants, workers' canteens, and street stalls formed the public side of eating. A ferry commuter might buy simit, a laborer carry bread, cheese, olives, or a metal lunch container, and a family mark an outing with pudding, ice cream, or tea. Hospitality mattered even in a crowded room: offering tea, coffee, preserves, sweets, or fruit was a practical expression of welcome and respectability.

Work and Labor

Istanbul's economy joined port trade, manufacturing, small workshops, construction, transport, retail, offices, education, domestic service, and street commerce. The docks and warehouses of the Golden Horn, Galata, Karaköy, Haydarpaşa, and nearby waterfronts employed stevedores, sailors, boat crews, railway workers, porters, clerks, customs workers, mechanics, and carters. Factories and workshops around the Golden Horn, Bomonti, Bakırköy, Zeytinburnu, and other industrial areas produced or processed textiles, tobacco, food, leather, metal goods, glass, chemicals, and machinery. Building projects created work for masons, carpenters, laborers, drivers, electricians, plumbers, and demolition crews.

Small enterprise was everywhere. Tailors, cobblers, barbers, grocers, bakers, printers, watch repairers, metalworkers, furniture makers, photographers, laundry workers, and restaurant staff served dense neighborhoods. An apprentice might sweep the shop, carry deliveries, prepare tools, and learn by watching an older craftsman. Regular employment in a municipality, bank, school, railway office, post office, or established company promised a predictable wage and social standing. Yet many households combined a salary with casual shifts, home sewing, taking in laundry, renting a room, selling food, or help from relatives.

Women's work crossed the supposed boundary between home and workplace. Women cooked, cleaned, queued, managed fuel and water, cared for children and elders, maintained clothing, and kept household accounts. They also worked in textile and tobacco production, workshops, shops, schools, hospitals, offices, domestic service, laundry, entertainment, and family businesses. Their movement through factories, central streets, markets, ferries, and public transport became increasingly visible, although class and family expectations still limited independence. Oral-history research on women in republican Istanbul shows how streets, workplaces, neighborhoods, and modernizing domestic spaces all shaped these changing lives.[3] Children attended school in growing numbers, but some still ran errands, minded siblings, sold small goods, or entered apprenticeships early.

Social Structure

Istanbul remained socially and culturally varied. Long-established Muslim families lived alongside Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Jewish, Catholic, and other communities, while new arrivals brought the languages, accents, foods, music, and mutual-aid ties of towns and villages across Turkey. Neighborhood identity could cross these differences: residents shared shopkeepers, street news, school routes, ferries, apartment entrances, and concern for the same local reputation. Greeks, Armenians, and Jews were especially visible in parts of Beyoğlu, Kurtuluş, Şişli, Balat, Hasköy, Kuzguncuk, Kadıköy, and the Princes' Islands, where churches, synagogues, schools, workshops, taverns, and shops formed part of ordinary streetscapes.[4]

These relationships existed within unequal and sometimes dangerous conditions. The attacks of 6–7 September 1955 devastated many Greek-owned homes, shops, churches, and institutions and also harmed Armenian and Jewish residents. For affected families, the consequences were intensely domestic: broken doors and windows, destroyed stock, interrupted work, fear in familiar streets, and decisions about whether to remain in the city. The violence deepened insecurity and contributed to the erosion of Istanbul's older plural neighborhoods. Any picture of cheerful cosmopolitan life in the decade is incomplete without this rupture.

Class differences were equally visible. Industrialists, merchants, professionals, and wealthy families could occupy spacious apartments or Bosphorus houses, employ domestic workers, educate children privately, and own cars. Clerks, teachers, skilled workers, artisans, and small shopkeepers pursued respectability through steady wages, clean clothing, education, household order, and careful saving. Casual laborers, porters, servants, vendors, pensioners, and new migrants had less secure housing and income. Kinship and hemşehri ties—connections among people from the same place of origin—helped newcomers find work, rooms, credit, and marriage partners. Coffeehouses, religious congregations, neighborhood associations, unions, schools, and workshops added other networks of help and obligation.

Leisure was woven through the working week. Residents listened to radio music and drama, followed football, read newspapers, attended cinemas, visited relatives, walked along waterfronts, picnicked in green areas, or took Sunday ferry excursions. Beyoğlu offered theaters, cinemas, music halls, pastry shops, and evening crowds, while neighborhood cinemas brought films close to home. Children played football, marbles, skipping games, and improvised street games wherever traffic allowed. Access depended on money, time, gender, and district, but sociability rarely required a formal venue: a doorstep conversation, tea in a kitchen, a coffeehouse table, or the deck of a ferry could all sustain city life.

Tools and Technology

Transport gave the decade much of its daily rhythm. Ferries connected Eminönü, Karaköy, Beşiktaş, Üsküdar, Kadıköy, the Bosphorus villages, and the Princes' Islands; new passenger vessels joined the City Lines fleet in the early 1950s.[5] Commuters waited at piers, bought tickets, carried parcels aboard, drank tea, and watched weather determine the comfort of a crossing. Electric trams still served both sides of the city, but road building, buses, taxis, and cars were changing the balance. The municipality officially recognized dolmuş service and approved its first tariff in 1951.[6] These shared taxis filled gaps between fixed routes, while suburban trains, the Tünel funicular, bicycles, carts, and extensive walking remained essential.

Road reconstruction in the second half of the decade widened arteries and opened new routes, accelerating buses and motor traffic but also demolishing buildings and disrupting established streets. A resident could experience modernization as a shorter bus journey, a noisier road, a lost shopfront, and a rent increase at the same time. Traffic lights, petrol stations, repair garages, asphalt, road machinery, and growing numbers of cars became more conspicuous, although private car ownership was still exceptional for most households. Ferry timetables, tram bells, bus queues, and the last connection home structured the day more directly than the automobile did.

Inside homes and workplaces, older tools coexisted with consumer technology. Radios were central sources of news, music, sport, advertisements, and serial drama. Telephones were useful but far from universal, so letters, postcards, telegrams, messengers, and personal visits remained routine. Cinema was a mass entertainment; television experiments began in Istanbul during the decade but ordinary households did not yet have regular television service. Sewing machines, charcoal irons, hand mills, pressure cookers, mechanical clocks, typewriters, adding machines, scales, cameras, record players, and electric refrigerators circulated unevenly. Repair was a normal technical skill: shoes were resoled, radios rewired, pots retinned, umbrellas mended, furniture reupholstered, and clothes altered so that possessions stayed useful.

Clothing and Materials

Clothing signaled occupation, means, generation, religion, and ideas about urban respectability. Men commonly wore trousers, shirts, jackets, sweaters, caps, overcoats, work clothes, and leather shoes; office workers and professionals might add a suit, tie, felt hat, or polished briefcase. Women wore dresses, skirts, blouses, cardigans, coats, stockings, scarves, and practical aprons, while headscarves and regional garments were more visible among some migrants and working women. Schoolchildren wore uniforms or carefully kept school clothes. Work demanded its own materials: overalls and sturdy boots in factories, aprons in shops and kitchens, uniforms for transport and municipal staff, and coats against cold ferry crossings.

Cotton, wool, linen, rayon, silk, leather, felt, and increasingly nylon and other synthetic materials appeared in wardrobes. Ready-made clothing was available, but tailors, dressmakers, knitters, cobblers, and home sewing remained important. A foot-powered sewing machine could clothe a family and earn money at the same time. Garments were brushed, aired, darned, patched, turned, let out, re-dyed, and passed down. Laundry required basins, soap, washboards, boiling, wringing, and lines strung across courtyards, rooftops, gardens, and balconies. Public neatness mattered: even a household with little cash tried to maintain a clean collar, pressed dress, polished shoes, or a good outfit for school, work, worship, weddings, Bayram visits, and Sunday outings.

The material city was itself a mixture of old and new. Timber siding, cobbles, roof tiles, baskets, copper pans, handcarts, and wooden shop fittings stood beside reinforced concrete, asphalt, neon signs, aluminum utensils, plastics, chrome appliances, and buses. Advertising and shop windows made modern comfort visible before many people could afford it. As a result, 1950s Istanbul was not divided neatly between tradition and modernity. Most residents assembled their lives from both: tea on a new gas burner, laundry beside an apartment radiator, a radio in an old wooden room, or a bus ride followed by a walk along an unpaved track.

Daily life in Istanbul during the 1950s was shaped by movement: across the Bosphorus, from village to city, from wooden house to apartment, from tram to bus, and between household production and wage work. The decade brought roads, construction, factories, consumer goods, and new forms of housing, but also crowding, demolition, insecure services, and painful losses within long-established communities. Its ordinary history survives in ferry tickets, market baskets, coal scuttles, shop ledgers, sewing machines, tea glasses, school uniforms, repaired radios, and the networks of relatives and neighbors that helped residents make a home in a fast-changing city.

References

Tuna, Işıl. “1950–1960 Yılları Arasında İstanbul'da Kentleşme ve İmar Faaliyetlerine Genel Bakış.” MSGSÜ Sosyal Bilimler 3, no. 20 (2019). https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/msgsusbd/article/1105185
Gürel, Meltem Ö. “Defining and Living Out the Interior: The ‘Modern’ Apartment and the ‘Urban’ Housewife in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s.” Gender, Place & Culture 16, no. 6 (2009): 703–722. https://repository.bilkent.edu.tr/items/b9f8ceda-1f83-4d9d-bc2b-dae727ae4d5c
Atasoy, Zehra Betul. Recovering Untold Stories: Everyday Lives of Women in Republican Istanbul. PhD diss., New Jersey Institute of Technology, 2020. https://digitalcommons.njit.edu/dissertations/1692/
Mills, Amy. Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance, and National Identity in Istanbul. University of Georgia Press, 2010. Related article from the same research
Governorship of Istanbul. “İstanbul'un Nostaljik Vapurları.” https://www.istanbul.gov.tr/istanbulun-nostaljik-vapurlari
İETT. “Kronolojik Tarihçe.” https://iett.istanbul/icerik/kronolojik-tarihce