Orosdi Back Today Redux

On a recent trip I photographed the same corner of Ömer Efendi Han . At ground level there is a retail store for the Ministry of Culture and Istanbul branch offices above. The corner is occupied by a well known chain lokanta/lunch resto. Orisdi Back[1] Stores became a limited company in 1895 and partnered with Hermann Back de Surany[2]  and continued until 1943 as ''Etablissements Orosdi-Back'' Taken over by the Turkish Sümerbank in 1940 and the building housed a Sümerbank store for many years.

Pictured Hermann Beck de Surany (bottom right, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of its establishments) 

[1] The Back family was an Austro-Hungarian Jewish family, whose prosperity is linked to trading, and its association with Orosdi family.

Adolf Orosdi in-law of Maurice BACK is an officer of the national question in 1848. Orosdi Hungarian, Jewish, abandoned his German-sounding surname SCHNABEL, to adopt a Hungarian name. After the failed nationalist, he was forced to emigrate and take refuge in 1850 in Constantinople (Istanbul, Turkey), where he conducted business, initially modest, in the district of Galata.
The family business expanded rapidly across the Ottoman Empire, combining the efforts of Joseph Herman BACK (the son of Mauritius) and Philip and Leon Orosdi (the son of Adolf Orosdi) under the name "Orosdi-Back". 

Family ties are further strengthened after the marriage of Herman BACK (1846-1925) and Mathilde Orosdi (1859-1916), daughter of Adolf, May 15, 1879 in Paris.


The expansion of their business leads BACK cousins and Orosdi to spend Wholesale to Retail and so they are a real commercial channel in the Middle East: following the opening of the headquarters Paris in 1888, they opened department stores in Bucharest, Salonica, Izmir, Tunis, Alexandria, Tanta and Cairo, which rival those of Europe. In 1893, the BACK and cousins Orosdi open a first store in Vienna. In 1895, the Orosdi-Back institutions constituted the limited company, Hermann Back de Surany.

[2] Philippe Back’s love was not shop keeping. It was, instead, the mystery and remains of the ancient civilisations that Orosdi-Back stores found themselves being built on. Philippe Back’s special interest was ancient Egypt and in 1905 he financed an excavation of two sites in Egypt by a Hungarian archeological team. The success of the excavation resulted in Philippe Back being ennobled by the Austro-Hungarian Emperor as a result of which the newly created Baron Back requested a new name as well as a coat of arms. The new name referenced the Back’s ancestral Hungarian hometown of Surany. Thus, Baron Philippe Back de Surany was born and the rest of the family, including Hermann, adopted the De Surany suffix. Incidentally, the Back family had converted to the Catholic faith and this fact, together with their new title, ensured their ongoing acceptance in the higher circles of French society.

See: Hermann Back de Surany(1850-1925)
and A Tale of Two Cotys and the Ramses Perfumery

Mavi Boncuk | It was there, at the busiest intersection of old town business and trade center, Orisdi Back had their Parisian influenced grand department store in a building named Ömer Effendi Han named after their first  small local sounding clothing store, Ömer Efendi'nin Giyim Mağazası. Two narrow bays were added to the original building at a later day in the same style.







Located at Sirkeci Büyük Postane Cad. No:74. the huge building that once housed the Sümer Bank (renamed Sümer Han) and some departments of Culture Ministry in Istanbul, has been cleaned up and turned into the Sümerhan Lokantası, with a Parisian-style bistro downstairs and a very popular “esnaf lokantası” (tradesmen cafe) upstairs.