Istanbul had a hundred toy shops in 1635

The first thing I wanted to know when we started the workshop was simple. Who did this here before us? The answer turned out to be Eyüp, and it was much bigger than I expected.

A hundred shops in 1635

Evliya Çelebi counted them in his Seyahatname: 100 shops, 105 toymakers. That same year they took part in the guild parade held for the Baghdad campaign, riding on carts, showing their toys and doing impressions. Other records push the craft back to the reign of Ahmed I, the early 1600s.

The location was not an accident. Eyüpsultan was a pilgrimage site, and families with children came especially for circumcision ceremonies. The toymaker did not have to find customers. They were already there. The shops stood on a lane off İskele Street still called Oyuncakçı Çıkmazı, Toymakers’ Dead End.

They did not buy raw material

This is the part that stayed with me. The Eyüp toymaker did not purchase wood. He collected the city’s waste.

• Offcuts from the timber merchants of Tahtakale
• Scrap tin from stove makers
• Hide from the Sütlüce slaughterhouse, for drum and tambourine skins
• Clay from the silt of the Kâğıthane and Alibeyköy streams

Colours came from earth and root pigments, with gold leaf on top. The palette was red, blue, green and white. The patterns were simple: soft wavy bands, plain lines.

The product names survive: the State Barge, the Mirrored Cradle, the Bird Cart, the String Top. Alongside them came wooden swords, pinwheels, drums, tambourines, clay whistles and shadow puppet figures. Travelling sellers bought wholesale and carried them in baskets across the city and beyond.

The collapse came in three stages

First, competition. Through the 19th century, shops selling European toys opened in Pera. Bon Marché and Bazar Allemand dominated the market. The number of toymakers in Eyüp fell to thirty.

Second, imports. One figure tells the whole story: in the 1894 fiscal year the Ottoman Empire imported 3,166,839 kuruş worth of toys and exported none. A newspaper piece from the same period criticised Eyüp toymaking for falling behind new production techniques and new ideas about how children learn.

Third, demolition. By the 1920s one or two shops were left. The last maker stopped in 1955. In 1957 the Eyüp Boulevard was cut through and the toy market disappeared entirely.

What is left

The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality holds 28 original Eyüp toys: drums, tops, miniature carts. Sources disagree about whether they are currently on display.

Revival started in 2005, with an EU funded project run by a women’s cooperative. In 2017 Şennur Ülker opened a museum workshop in Eyüpsultan. In 2021 Eyüp toys entered Istanbul’s inventory of intangible cultural heritage.

Why we are writing this

Because we are inside the same equation. What cheap imports did to local production in 1894 is what they do now. The difference is that nobody was writing it down then.

The scrap sourcing is usually told as a story about poverty. We do not read it that way. They built a system that turned a city’s waste into raw material and ran it for three centuries. We are nowhere near that resourceful yet.

And there is one more thing. Looking at the wooden toy traditions that survived elsewhere, they all share something. Erzgebirge in Germany holds on through a collective trademark, Channapatna in India through a geographical indication, Japanese kokeshi through official craft registration. Eyüp never had any such shelter.

Sources: Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname. The article on Eyüp toymaking in the journal Belleten. Archives of the Eyüpsultan district administration and municipality.