Two Antraniks of Moda: The Shoemaker and Plumber Who Left Their Mark on Kadıköy

Moda has had more than one Antranik. In the mid-twentieth century, the neighborhood's trade directory included at least two men with that name who were known well beyond their own doorsteps: a handmade shoemaker on Bahariye Street and a plumbing master whose work ran through construction jobs across the district. Their stories are worth reading side by side, partly because they show how a small neighborhood economy actually worked, and partly because one of those shops is now preparing to shut its doors.

A shoe shop that became a street address

Antranik Avedyan ran a handmade shoe business with his brother Boğos Avedyan on Bahariye Street, a short walk down the slope from Altıyol. The shop was called "Antranik Kundura." Kundura is the Turkish word for footwear, and the sign was modest, but the name became a fixture of the district. Inside each pair, near the heel, a ribbon-style label read "ANTRANİK."

The brothers opened the shop in 1956. Antranik was born in 1919 and Boğos in 1921, and both were raised in Kadıköy. Their father had come to Istanbul from Erzincan Kuruçay during the years of exile and started out baking bread before the family moved into shoemaking. At its height, the shop had a large workshop with 15 employees. It built a reputation for custom women's shoes made from 100 percent leather, and every pair was made by hand.

The partnership ran smoothly until Antranik died in 1992. He is buried in the Armenian Cemetery in Hasanpaşa. Boğos, who remembers his brother in nearly every sentence of the interview, describes him as a flamboyant, tall, handsome man who drew admirers without trying. The division of labor between the two was clear. Antranik handled sales and managed the shop floor, while Boğos worked in the workshop. "I was behind the scenes," he says.

How a shop name became a landmark

The name itself was a deliberate choice. Boğos explains that "Antranik" means the first-born male child in Armenian, and he argued that the shop should carry his brother's name. When other people questioned it, he compared it to a doctor's office, where the sign carries the doctor's name. He says the arrangement was accepted in the end, and that the other tradesmen on the street didn't object.

The name held up as a wayfinding tool. People giving directions in the neighborhood would say, "Follow Kadıköy, and there's Antranik's shop at the corner." Antranik Kundura became a reference point for addresses. Another shop now occupies that corner, but locals still give directions using the old name. That kind of informal landmark is hard to build on purpose, and it's one reason a closing shop can leave a bigger gap than its size would suggest.

The craft: models, materials and skills

The shop's product line followed the fashions of the 1950s and 60s. Women of the era wore wide skirts with layered frills, known as petticoats, and the shop made low-heeled shoes, typically 3 to 5 centimeters, for college students and young women. Patent leather pumps stayed fashionable for years. Two-tone and studded styles were popular too, partly because they paired well with the double-breasted suits that were a major trend for men at the time. The shop also worked in suede.

Antranik reportedly studied imported shoes closely, copied the good designs quickly and sometimes pushed them further. That's a familiar pattern in custom footwear: a workshop with strong pattern-making skills can turn a foreign model into something local clients want to wear, and the stamp models that carried the shop's identity came from Boğos's hands.

Boğos was clear about his own role. He describes himself as a worker who made the upper and the sewing, not a shoemaker in the strict sense, saying he doesn't know how to drive a nail. He learned his trade by apprenticing with a shoemaker in Üsküdar, a master named Kasım whom he describes as a pioneer in the business and as a dervish who taught him as much about humanity and mysticism as about shoemaking. Antranik, by contrast, started apprenticing with a shoemaker in Karaköy at a young age instead of continuing school.

The shop's current workforce reflects how long these skills have been kept in-house. Kasım Eroğlu, a veteran master, has worked at Antranik Kundura for 47 years and continues to produce the handmade shoes. Haydar Bey, who has been at the shop for many years, runs sales. The shop doesn't buy ready-made stock. Everything is made on site, which is why the models on display don't change much and why Boğos says there are few handmade shoemakers left.

The closing and what it means for the craft

The shop is now preparing to close. Boğos is 94, and his nephews don't want him working any longer. A large "We are closing" sign has gone up in the window, and the building that houses the shop and workshop is expected to shut its doors within a few months. A 2014 interview with Agos newspaper, which first recorded Boğos's account of the shop, described it as one of the neighborhood's meeting points. That role is harder to preserve than the stock.

From a trade standpoint, the question is what happens to the knowledge when a workshop like this closes. Handmade footwear depends on pattern work, stitching technique and the feel of materials, and that knowledge usually passes from master to apprentice on the floor, not through paperwork. When a shop closes with a staff of long-serving masters, the loss is usually as much about the people as the product. My read is that the most useful thing a closing shop can leave behind is documentation of its models and methods, but that's rarely how these shops end.

The other Antranik: a plumbing master in Moda

Antranik Taşcıyan, the second Antranik in this story, was known as Tesisatçı Antranik Usta, or Plumbing Master Antranik. He ran his plumbing business for decades in the Old Moda Bazaar at No. 16, working through the 1950s and 60s. He first operated from a shop on Bademaltı Street and later worked from a location on Dalga Street. He also ran a hardware store on Bahariye, and he took plumbing work on construction sites, which is how many trades in the district built their reputations.

His son, Aret Taşcıyan, was born on April 7, 1951, at Üsküdar Zeynep Kamil Hospital and has lived in Moda most of his life. Aret went to the Aramyan Uncuyan school in Mühürdar, then Saint Joseph High School, before a teacher encouraged him to sit the entrance exam for Robert College. He won a scholarship, boarded at the college and graduated in 1971. He later attended METU with support from the Gulbenkian Scholarship and the encouragement of his uncle Aram Balıkçıyan. Today he works in the United States as a director at Lockton, which he describes as the world's largest privately owned insurance brokerage. He still keeps a home in Moda.

Antranik Taşcıyan was also a bicycle and motorcycle racer. Aret recalls that he took part in races held on the grounds of the Taksim Barracks, organized by the Turkish Touring Club, and that medals from those events meant more to his father than almost anything else. Aret says his own love of motorcycles comes from his father. Antranik died in 1983, and his wife followed in 1993.

The family tree, and a bit of Moda life in the 1950s

Aret explains the family's names in some detail. His first name, Aret, is the name of a bird in mythology and the Armenian equivalent of the Turkish name Turgay. The surname Taşcıyan traces back to stone quarries owned by his great-grandfathers in the years when the surname law was introduced. Those quarries were eventually sold. His mother was born in Sevastopol in 1918, after her mother had traveled there while pregnant and was stranded by the Russian Revolution. When Aret's mother was two, her mother found a ship back to Turkey, and the family settled in Üsküdar. His grandfather is recognized as the first person to bring Singer sewing machines to Turkey and later worked as the company's first service master.

Aret's childhood memories also capture how tight-knit Moda was. He recalls being scolded by his father after failing to give his place in a dolmuş queue to a woman standing a few people behind him. Someone in the neighborhood had mentioned it to his father the next day. "That's how it was in Moda back then," he says. The same closeness that made the neighborhood warm also meant nothing went unnoticed.

More voices from Moda

The neighborhood's older residents describe a mixed community. Academician Dr. Berken Döner, also from Moda, recalls the quiet of the district in those years, its clear sea, spring gardens and few cars. Greeks were the largest group, followed by Armenians and Jews. Armenians lived mostly on Nef'i Street, while Greeks lived on Neşe Street. Fabric merchants around Altıyol and the Rıhtım side were mostly Jewish. Döner names a long list of tradesmen, including a pastry chef, a tavern keeper, a butcher, a barber, a tailor and a baker, along with the Armenian plumbing master Antranik Taşcıyan and a manufacturer of sewing and textile goods. He also recalls a doctor, Dr. Jirayr Kaynar, who did not charge poor patients, and his father Agop Kaynar, who built the first airplane for aviation pioneer Vecihi Hürkuş.

Döner describes the neighborhood's mix of trades and communities as lively until the 1970s, though weakening along the way. He marks the sharpest blow to that world on September 6/7. In his telling, the decline wasn't sudden, but it was steady.

A third Antranik, and a taxi that wouldn't quit

Moda had two more well-known Antraniks. The tailor Antranik Şirinoğlu worked in a small shop on Moda Street, where he sewed suits, jackets and shirts by hand for years. His name stood for old-school elegance and for the kind of tailoring that is now rare.

Antranik Demircioğlu was a taxi driver nicknamed "Pat Pat Antranik," after the sound his old car made. When he was interviewed in 1998, he was 75 and had driven a taxi for 56 years. He drove a 1953 Dodge and was described as the oldest dolmuş driver in Kadıköy. He came from a poor family, worked as a car mechanic for ten years after elementary school, and learned to drive while serving in the army. After his service, he started taxi work in 1946 with a friend in a 1938 Plymouth and later became the owner of a 1950 DeSoto with a partner. The car ferry crossing to the Asian side was a key part of that early work, and it was a friend's loan from the Grand Bazaar that let them move the car to Kadıköy.

The story of the taxi driver is a reminder of how transport and trades fed each other in Kadıköy. A mechanic who could keep an old car running had a job, and a driver with a reliable vehicle had clients. Cars were scarce at the time, and that scarcity made every working vehicle valuable.

What to take from it

These accounts cover more than a few names. They show how a neighborhood economy was built on craft shops, repair work and small transport businesses, and how a shop name could become a map reference. The Antranik Kundura closing is a concrete case of a trade running out of hands, with two masters who learned on the job still at work and no clear successor in the building. Whether the Bahariye shop's models, labels and methods survive in some form will say something about how small handmade trades are remembered. For anyone tracking Kadıköy's craft history, that's the detail to watch in the coming months.