In old Turkish yülü meant shaving, yölgüç was a razor, yölügen a barber, yülemek to shave, and yülük a person who had shaved. But later, if the terminology is anything to go by, foreign influences came to dominate in the sphere of shaving and hair dressing. Two Turkish terms for barber, berber and perkârn, derived from the Italian barbierre and the French perruquier respectively, while kuaför for a ladies' hairdresser comes from the French coiffieur, and tıraş, meaning shave, from the Persian terâş, to scrape or make smooth. If all the information, documents and pictures relating to the barbers of Istanbul from the second century AD until the mid-20th century were to be gathered together it would make an extraordinary historical archive. Legend has it that the butcher Hesperos was Byzantium's first barber thanks to his dexterity with the kuika ergaleia (razor), which was why the city's barbers were known as the 'drudges of Hesperos'. Most Byzantine barbers set up their stalls in churchyards, as so much of their trade consisted of shaving the heads of monks

Their fee was set by law at 2 dinars a head. The first barbers shops were opened by the drudges of Hesperos and perfumers around the churches of Haghia Sophia and Haghia Eirene. Now we leap forward several hundred years into 16th century Ottoman times, when the advent of coffee took Istanbul by storm. Corners known as mostra in coffee houses where barbers plied their trade must have been a later development, however, because no barbers took part in the guild procession of 1582, of which a detailed account survives. By the 17th century, when barbers had become a fixture of coffee houses under the same licence, they found themselves out in the street whenever the authorities closed the coffee houses down, as happened during the reign of Murad IV (1623-1640). These unlicensed barbers either installed themselves in Turkish baths, or pursued an itinerant trade. In the 1630s Evliya Çelebi watched a guild parade in which barbers dressed in silk aprons passed by in shops constructed on decorated floats.

The barber began by lathering the custom'sgc beard in a bowl of soapy water, then sharpened his razor on his leather strop, and resting the custom'sdc head on his knees shaved him. Finally he rinsed off the soap by pouring water from a pan suspended from a hook. As well as shaving these old-fashioned barbers also extracted teeth, performed circumcisions, and let blood by cupping and leeching. In the second half of the 19th century rivals appeared in the form of European-style barbr'sr shops equipped with barbr'sp chairs and wall mirrors, pictures, canaries in cages and other paraphernalia. To distinguish their fashionable establishments, they adopted the French term perruquier. In districts like Beyoglu, Sirkeci, Cagaoglu and Beyazit signs sprang up for such perruquiers - perkârq in Turkish: New Perukâr, New Age Perukâr, Istanbul Perukâr and so on. But the couplets which these modern barbers hung on their walls to advertise their services revealed that traditions die hard, as these examples show: