Spoiled for Choice at Hafiz Mustafa 1864 in Istanbul
By now, I am no longer blown away whenever I see a place which is hundreds of years old. Istanbul itself has been around for very long. It has gone by other names like Constantinople and Byzantium before that. For a city to have gone through three different names really speaks to the richness of this history of this place. Walking along the pedestrian shopping street of Istiklal Avenue, I wasn’t really expecting to see a lot of historical places but it turns out that the buildings along the street here are also historical with a lot of them dating back to the Ottoman Empire. It is by walking along here that I found a place named Hafiz Mustafa 1864.
Stacks of Boxes at Hafiz Mustafa 1864 in Istanbul
Hafiz Mustafa 1864 is a maker of confectioneries and as the name implies, this one has been around since 1864. The founder is actually not named Hafiz Mustafa but rather his father. However, when Hafiz Mustafa finally took over the business, he made it big. He was awarded for his skill in making confectioneries and could just possibly be the person to make Turkish confectioneries famous. These days as with a lot of these types of places, Hagiz Mustafa 1864 is a chain of stores which sells various Turkish confectioneries. One of their best sellers is the lokum or what we would call Turkish delight. The shops are packed with people and there is always people buying stuff there. You can choose any combination of whatever they have on display. Although, I didn’t buy anything that day, I will find myself buying boxes of the stuff back for people back home.
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