Outside a teahouse in Istanbul, April 25, 2025. UMIT BEKTAS / REUTERS
The couple is in their mid-30s, their life is neither easy nor always pleasant, but both know they cannot complain in today’s Turkey, where making ends meet gets harder every day. Hakan and Hülay (who preferred not to disclose their last names) are 35 and 37 years old, respectively. He has worked for about ten years at Migros, a major Turkish supermarket chain. She is a full-time sales assistant at a music workshop.
Each of them earned a little more than twice the minimum wage, which barely reached 17,002 Turkish lira, or around €520 per month. With seniority and overtime, together they managed to bring in 75,000 lira, about €1,600. “That’s very decent by Turkish standards, especially now that the economy is slowing down, but we still struggle to get by,” Hakan explained. “Istanbul is a money pit – prices have become crazy, every year our situation gets more and more precarious.” According to the Istanbul Planning Agency (IPA), the cost of living in the Bosphorus metropolis rose by 49% annually.
Married with no kids – “mainly for financial reasons,” they both admitted – they have lived together for about a decade in Sariyer, the northernmost district of the city. This is also the greenest neighborhood on the European side and among the safest in terms of earthquake risk. Mostly upper-middle-class families live here. Almost everyone knows each other. In some areas, Sariyer feels like a large village set apart, clogged with luxury cars and increasingly gentrified.
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