Turning On The Juice In Turkey

Happiness can be served in a glass; Turkey’s street-favourite fruity concoctions are proof.

- Bhavya Dore

On the train back from Selçuk to Izmir we begin to debate. “I really need some,” my friend Kamini says. She brings up the map on her phone, tracing a potential route with her index finger. “Well, if we get off at the station, take this metro, and then walk till there we could get to the Kemeralti Bazaar.” I open the paper map in front of me. It looks like the route could take ages. “But it would be totally worth it,” I say. It’s almost evening and we have just spent hours on our feet perusing Roman ruins on a 37° day. Our bodies are slumped on the train seats, our esophagi dry, our minds focused on that one thing. We haven’t had our full daily fix yet.

In Turkey there is something that is cheap, easily available on the streets and provides a neural symphony of euphoria. Crack cocaine. I joke. I mean juice. Or as the Turkish seem to call it: vitamin.

You have probably heard plenty about Turkey by now, a partly-Mediterranean country of monuments, mosques, ruins and hüzün —that Pamukian, lingering melancholia. You may have heard of raki, Turkish coffee, and those wonderfully flavoursome cups of çay (chai). But you have probably not heard about the juice.