Sipping tea on the window ledge of the rug shop he runs in Sultanahmet, Huseyn Caglayan gestures towards the deserted street with a look that says he can’t quite believe it. “I’ve been in this area since I was 12 years old. I’ve never seen it so empty.”
Sultanahmet, home to the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia and a network of picturesque shopping streets, is normally the bustling centre of Istanbul’s tourist industry.
For the past year, however, the area has been growing progressively quieter as a series of bombings in Turkey’s largest city have scared visitors off and sent business into decline. Even before the attempted coup, hotels were closing and restaurants struggled to stay afloat.
The upheaval of recent days has finished off the sector, Caglayan believes. “At the beginning, after a bombing, it would pick up again after 10 days. It’s not picking up any more. We’re afraid. It’s normal for people to decide not to come.”
Caglayan’s shop sells rugs ranging in price from €100 to tens of thousands of euros. For the past few months, he has sold just one a week; so far this month he has yet to sell one.
“This business is here for 20 years,” says Fuat Abi, who works in the shop. “It’s not easy to leave just like that. You lose all your contacts. So people are trying to survive if they can.”
It’s a familiar story across Istanbul, where the collapse in tourism has left hotels virtually empty and ground the industry to a standstill at what is normally one of its peak seasons.
A similar trend has taken hold across Turkey, where an exodus of western tourists was compounded by Russian economic sanctions, including a ban on charter flights, in protest over the shooting down of a jet last November.
The incident caused visits by Russian tourists – the second- largest group of holiday-makers in Turkey, after Germans – to fall by 92 per cent. The two countries recently reconciled, though it will take time for the flow of tourists to recover.
In May, tourist arrivals plunged 35 per cent cent from the same month last year, and the tumult of this week is likely to accelerate the trend.
As tourism accounts for 8 per cent of the national workforce, the slump poses a serious threat to the Turkish economy. Last month, economists forecast that tourism revenue would drop by about $8 billion in 2016, equivalent to 1 per cent of GDP.
At Culinary Backstreets, whose acclaimed tours of Istanbul’s food scene are usually in heavy demand, the botched coup was “the last straw”, says tour guide Ugur Ildiz.
“It has pretty much killed off tourism, for us at least,” he says. “It has crashed down to the ground. This month in previous years, I was working six days a week, sometimes doing two tours a day. Right now there’s not a single one.
“All the existing bookings were cancelled and no new bookings are being made, so we’re just sitting around at the moment.”
In some ways, however, the turmoil has increased the rewards for those who do choose to visit Istanbul. Hotels have slashed rates, public transport is free, and there are no queues at the biggest attractions.
"Our relatives were telling us we were mad to come," says French woman Christine Fauquembergue, who is just beginning a backpacking holiday around Turkey with her husband Jérome and their children Emma and Lucas.
They are delighted they did. “We’ve had an extraordinary welcome. It’s great. We’ve just been to Topkapi Palace and there wasn’t even a queue. Normally you have to wait an hour or two.”
We are speaking just few metres from the spot where 14 foreigners were killed in a January suicide attack claimed by Islamic State. Jérome acknowledges the risk, “but there is no greater risk here than in France”.
Istanbul highlight Grant and Paula Bowden were just about to board their plane at home in New Zealand when they heard that an attempted uprising had broken out. But they had been planning their four-week holiday in Turkey and Greece for almost a year, and Istanbul was one of the highlights.
“We said, ‘we’ll poke our nose out of the airport [in Istanbul], and if there are bullets flying then we’ll stay inside,” says Paula.
They are struck by how few tourists they have seen, but they have fallen for a city they feel they have to themselves.
Security concerns haven’t impinged on their holiday at all, Grant agrees.
“How many million people are there in this country? The percentage chance of getting caught up in something is very low. I just work on the law of averages.”
