Moda Çarşısı

The shopping streets around Moda, on Istanbul's Asian side in the Kadikoy district, have built a reputation less around any single anchor store than around density: a run of vintage clothing shops, antique dealers, independent record stores, and coffee roasters concentrated on streets like Tellalzade Sokak and the backstreets running toward Moda's seafront. The coffee side of that mix is unusually deep for a single neighborhood -- Cekirdek, generally credited as the first specialty coffee shop on Istanbul's Asian side, sits alongside newer roasters including Walter's Coffee Roastery, known for its science-lab-styled interior, Story Coffee Roasters in nearby Caferaga, and Cherrybean Coffees, which imports raw green beans and roasts them in-house rather than buying pre-roasted stock. Elsewhere in the broader Kadikoy market district, some family coffee sellers have worked the same street corners since the 1920s, giving the area a coffee-trading history that predates the current wave of independent roasters by nearly a century. The result is a strip better understood as a browsing route than a single destination: vintage and antique shopping threaded between small, independently run coffee roasters, in a neighborhood that has kept its residential, unhurried character even as Kadikoy around it has become one of Istanbul's busier districts.