Armenian tea in Istanbul

We recently wrote about a pre-war ghost sign in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district, which advertised the since-then disappeared Loucrezis furniture store in three scripts: Greek, Armenian and Latin. We have now found a similar one on the other side of the Golden Horn. Just a few steps from the Spice Bazaar, at the corner of Vakif Hanı Sokaği and Sultan Hamamı Caddesi stands an eclectic palace with a pointed corner adjusted to the angle of the streets, which cuts like the bow of a ship into the small square before the arched façade of the former Deutsche Orientbank (another ghost sign!).


And this ships carries a valuable cargo. The same ad is written on the sharp corner in three scipts, three languages. In Ottoman Turkish:

چای ایساقولیان

in Armenian:

ԹԷՅ ԻՍԱԳՈԻԼԵԱՆ

and in Latin script:

THÉ ISSACOULIAN

Judging from the first two versions – see the phonetic details in the previous post – the most likely transcription of this Armenian name is Isagoulyan, rendered in the third version according to the rules of French, the most widely used Latin-script languages in turn-of-the-century Istanbul.


According to the Pervititch maps, this building was called Sadıkiye Hanı in the first half of the 20th century. Today it has no inscription, and you cannot find anything about it on the net. Today it houses a children’s clothing store. I don’t know whether Isagoulyan’s tea was merely advertised or also sold here. But it is not impossible that it was also sold, since here, around the spice bazaar were the best delis, like on the other corner the coffee-roasting Yeni Han or Kurukahveci Han.

This ghost sign is also mentioned in the Painted Signs and Mosaics site. According to its author, the Armenian script is actually in Turkish, since until the introduction of the Latin alphabet in 1928, most Turks preferred to use the phonetically handier Armenian alphabet instead of the complicated Ottoman writing. We already mentioned this in the previous post, and there, the Armenian letters in fact rendered a Turkish word. This is probably not the case here. The Armenian name is preceded by the word T’EY instead of the Turkish ÇAY. And this can only be Armenian.

It is an interesting etymological trivia that almost every language of the world uses one of two sounding versions of Chinese 茶 for tea. Those who brought it by ship from China, mostly loaded it in Fujian, like the Dutch, and they spread the local tê pronunciation in Western Europe (except for the Portuguese who loaded it in Macau, and took over the local chàh pronunciation). And those who received it overland, got it through the Silk Road with Persian mediation, who added a -yi ending to the Northern Chinese pronunciation chá. So everyone who got the tea this way, from the Russians to the Turks and Arabs, uses some version of the Persian چای châyi. The WALS map tangibly illustrates this, marking in blue the descendants of tê, and in red those of chá or châyi. And you can easily see that in the red sea around the Caucasus, Armenian is the only defiant blue dot.

There are languages that use both words for tea. Sometimes because they are spoken at the meeting point of two cultures, and sometimes because of some interesting historical twist, as in Moroccan Arabic, where black tea is called the usual šay, but fresh green tea tay, since under Sultan Hassan I, mentioned two posts earlier – when piracy was still a common industry in the country – a captive European crew was exchanged for a cargo of Fujian green tea, and the difference in taste was widely experienced.

According to the commentary of Language Log, Armenians also use both words for tea, although the dictionary only gives the tea version. The origin of chay is understandable there. But, thousands of kilometers away from the oceans, where does tea come from?