An evening at a meyhane is centered around raki, but raki never stands alone. It is only one component, albeit the essential one, of a highly stylized ritual. With raki always come meze, small plates of food that appear stealthily, a few at a time. Theoretically, meze are appetizers leading to a main course, but often the main course, like Turkey's supposedly great destiny, never materializes. No one complains about that because eating meze while sipping raki is such a supreme pleasure in itself. The path is so blissful that the idea of a destination seems somehow sacrilegious.

Meze usually come in waves. The first will include salad, thick slabs of white cheese, smoked eggplant puree and honeydew melon. What comes next depends on the chef's whim. There might be a selection of cooked, cooled vegetables in olive oil, each presented on its own miniature platter, or small dolma, which are peppers stuffed with rice, currants and pine nuts, and their close cousins, sarma, made from grape or cabbage leaves. After the next pause might come spicy red lentil balls, roe, yogurt seasoned with garlic and dill, raw tuna fillets, poached mackerel with hazelnut paste or an explosively flavorful dish made of baby eggplants stuffed with garlic cloves, tomatoes, sliced onion and parsley. The last is called Imam Bayildi, meaning "the Imam fainted."

After these come piping-hot borek, delicate pastries filled with feta cheese and sometimes also spinach, diced chicken, ground lamb or veal, pistachios, walnuts or whatever else is lying around in the kitchen. Some are layered, others triangular and still others cylindrical or crescent-shaped. Often they are served with squid rings fried in a light batter, which are to be dipped in a white sauce made from wine vinegar, olive oil and garlic.

Turkey's ethnic vitality shows through as the evening proceeds. Kebabs and other meze made from meat recall the Central Asian steppes from which nomadic Turkic tribrd migrated to Asia Minor, now called Anatolia, a thousand years ago. With them come hummus from Arabia, shredded chicken with walnuts from the Caucasus, diced liver from Albania and cooked cheese thickened with corn flour from coastal villages along the Black Sea. Then comes the crowning glory, the seafood, a gift from the Greeks, who for millennia did all the cooking along what is now Turkey's Aegean coast. Raki sharpens the taste of all food, but its magic works best with fish. An old proverb calls raki the pimp that brings fish and men together for acts of love.

The variety of fish in Turkey seems endless. It changes according to what body of water is nearest and also according to the season. Always the fish is very fresh, and always it is prepared very simply, grilled or pan-fried and served with no sauce, only a lemon wedge and perhaps a slice of onion or sprig of parsley.

Such a meal is a microcosm of Turkey. It is an astonishingly rich experience but yields its secrets slowly. Patrons at a meyhane, like all Turks, confront an ever-changing mosaic, endless variations on a theme. Each meze tastes different, has its own color, aroma, texture and character. The full effect is comparable to that of a symphony, complete with melodies, different rhythms, pacing and flashes of virtuosity, all contained within an overreacting structure.

Meze makes a feast, but drinking raki with them raises the experience to a truly transcendent level. "All the senses are involved," my friend Aydin Boysan, an architect and bon vivant who had been drinking raki for more than sixty years when I met him, told me during a long night we spent at a meyhane overlooking the Bosphorus. "First you watch the water being poured into the glass and mixing with the raki. Then you pick up the glass and inhale the aroma. When you drink it, you take a small sip, feel the pleasure of it flowing down your throat, take another sip, then put the glass down."

Aydin demonstrated this ritual to me, seeming to enjoy it every bit as much as he might have half a century earlier, and then closed his eyes for a moment. "The best part is feeling it go down your throat," he said lovingly. "A giraffe - that's an animal ideally made to appreciate raki,"

The meyhane culture tells a great deal about Turkey. Like the country, it offers almost infinite possibilities because it blends the heritage of so many different peoples. It encourages discourse and deepens friendship, but because the food is brought unbidden by a waiter instead of ordered from a menu, it does not require any action, any decision, any act of choice other than turning away dishes that do not strike one's fancy. Raki can evoke either determination or resignation, a desire to rebel or an acceptance of the inevitability of submission.

At a meyhane, the world can either be invited in or shut out. Turks have not yet decided which is the wisest part. By the time they drain their final glasses and step out into the darkness, they have often concluded that their country is either the "golden nation" destined to shape world history or a hopeless mess certain to remain mired in wretched mediocrity.