Tekke

Mavi Boncuk | Here is a picture (courtesy of Engin K. of Atlanta, GA) from the 60's taken at the 'tekke' an impromptu place for smoking cigarettes behind a single story dormitory of Kadikoy Maarif Koleji [1]. The question is this. how the students managed to call the place 'tekke', the euphemism for the drug dens of mangas[2]? I was never there since i did not smoke at all and apart from the few occasions when I needed to find someone right away and that person belonged to the denizens of this tekke, I stayed away. i remember a few raids but the school generally turned a blind eye.

[1] Called Anadolu Lisesi now. I hope they get their old name back one day. I truly hate the renaming fetishism (or was it fascism?) that is so prevalent in Turkey.

[2] Manges (Greek: Μάγκες [ˈma(ɲ)ɟes], sing.: Mangas - Greek: Μάγκας [ˈma(ŋ)ɡas]) is the name of a social group in the Belle Époque era's[1] counterculture of Greece (especially of the great urban centers: Athens, Pireus, and Thessaloniki) and was influenced by oriental elements that came with the immigration of 2 million Greek refugees from Asia Minor. Mangas was a label for men belonging to the middle class, behaving in a particularly arrogant/presumptuous way, and dressing with a very typical vesture composed of a woolen hat (kavouraki - καβουράκι), a jacket (they usually wore only one of its sleeves), a tight belt (used as a knife case), stripe pants, and pointy shoes. Other features of their appearance were their long moustache, their bead chaplets (κομπολόγια, sing. κομπολόι), and their idiosyncratic manneristic limp-walking (κουτσό βάδισμα). Manges are also notable for being closely associated to the history of Rebetiko and the hashish dens called 'tekke: from sufu tekke a lodge for dervishes. The three most probable etymologies of the word Mangas are the following: From the Turkish manga "small military troop" via Albanian. Latin manica (from the same root as Modern Greek μανίκι "sleeve", that is) "hand-related" (cf. the sound change from the Latin manicus to the Spanish mango "handle"). According to a more marginal proposal, its origin is from the Latin mango, -onis "dealer, trader".