Somewhere in the noughties So I was on Potsdamer Straße after boxing, sitting in a Moroccan shisha bar, smoking a water pipe and drinking a Turkish tea with a shot of lemon. Turks, Arabs, Germans, Africans walked by dragging their kids in tow. I had been sitting here for a couple of weeks now after boxing and I was gradually beginning to see the same faces – locals ...
Kreuzberger Nächte sind lang, as the song goes. Kreuzberg nights are long. And nowhere was this truer than at Zigan Aldi’s “X-berger Nächte” parties every Saturday night at the Cake Club on Oranienstraße, where the Turkish DJ and part time taxi driver, spun his a mix of Balkan, Latin, Swing and Oriental beats, the party totally cooking, until six in the ...
Not a whole heck of a lot has changed here at Kottbusser Tor – or Kotti, as it is affectionately called by Berliners - over the past twenty years. People have come and gone, some new places have opened up and some old places have closed. But Kotti remains to this day, the secret heart of west Berlin (like Alexander Platz remains ...
The first I had heard of Taner Akyol was in connection with Derya Yıldırım, the young saz player and vocalist fronting Grup Şimşek, an international band, which have made some waves both here in Berlin and abroad for their groove-laden arrangements of Turkish songs from the seventies. Derya Yıldırım is a fine example of the neo-Anatolian sound whose other main ...
One Friday not long ago I met with Ero Behrić and Alen Hebilović – two erstwhile figures in Berlin’s Balkan party scene – in a Turkish café on Oranien Straße, half an hour before cuma – Friday prayers – at the Bosnian mosque on Adalbert Straße near Kotti. They always had cuma at two o’clock at the Bosnian mosque, which was a convenient thing for ...
It’s a nice thing to be able to walk through the streets of a Turkish neighborhood and not have people stare at you all the time or mob you for autographs. David Bowie must have felt this way in Berlin in the seventies, alone and anonymous for a change – a bit like Ceza, (pronounced “Jeza”, and meaning “punishment”), the ...
Birol Ünel (18 August 1961 – 3 September 2020) is dead at 59. His death is not exactly breaking news. He died three months ago of cancer. I found out about it only now, and I can hardly believe it. Kreuzberg barfly, disheveled rabble-rouser, man possessed – an only slightly less extreme version of his lead role in Fatih Akin’s ‘Gegen ...