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Foreign investors are looking for "sexy deals," according to Muzaffer Yildirim, co-founder of a deluxe movie chain, Mars Entertainment Group, in which U.S. private international investment firm Colony Capital recently acquired a sizable stake. "It's very recent that direct investment came into Turkey," explains Markus Lehto, the managing director of Kanyon, who is well qualified to comment, given that he was formerly an investment banker in New York. "It was less than $1 billion two years ago and will be $15 billion this year and probably up to $25 billion next year."
Lehto recalls how aghast associates were eight years ago on hearing he was moving "to a Third World country. But there's been a huge surge forward in terms of modernization. People who never had a landline telephone have gone straight to cell phones; their first TVs are plasma screens. Things here are changing very fast and Istanbul is the locomotive pulling the rest of Turkey forward." (Turkey is also in long-term negotiations to join the European Union.)
There's energy in the arts too. The elegant Oya Eczacibasi (a member of one of the premier industrial families, equivalent to New York's Rockefellers in the 19th century) is the chairwoman of Istanbul Modern, which opened in 2004. Eczacibasi, who campaigned tirelessly for a museum of modern art, says it's important to emphasize that culture here did not stop at manuscripts and carpets. "We were very proud of our Ottoman past. Now we can be proud of our present and our future," she says.
Still, the Ottomans are certainly back in style. There's the funky T shirt label, Ottoman Empire, which features groovy graphics of sultans and taglines like THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. The latest hotel, Les Ottomans, looks as if it has been there since the days of the empire but is in fact a new building with interiors by designer Zeynep Fadillioglu, a striking 51-year-old who wears Rick Owens clothes and is responsible for the look of some of the city's smartest restaurants and bars.
Fadillioglu, who grew up on the water, is first cousin to fashion designer Rifat Ozbek. Now the designer for Pollini in Milan, Ozbek is thrilled that his hometown is back on the style map. "I love that it is once again one of the world's great cosmopolitan cities," he says, "and with such a young energy and so many incredible places to go."
The latest project for his cousin is not another bar, however, but a mosque that is being privately funded. "Yes, people are surprised that a woman has been chosen, because some think that Islam is all about male power," says Fadillioglu, who aligns herself with the liberal side of the faith. "There is nothing about covering in the book," she explains, when quizzed about why many Muslim women here do not cover up and are passionate in their freedom not to do so, while other women, including the Prime Minister's wife, are equally insistent on wearing a head scarf.