Prank of Bardakçı Baba

The Prank of Bardakçı Baba ("master glass maker" in Turkish) consisted of the creation of a fake tomb of a Sufi mystic who never existed, in Istanbul's Fulya quarter.

In the early 1970s, a group of young students at the Faculty of Dentistry of the Marmara University in Istanbul, located in the Fulya quarter of Beşiktaş district, had turned a grove next to the school into a meeting place, where they would gather in the evenings to study and drink wine among the trees.

[2] In the 2000s, the area was developed, and the mound, near which the worship department had put up a poster explaining the necessity of praying directly Allâh and not human intermediaries, came to be located on the site of a luxury shopping centre.

[2] At that point, in 2002, one of the participants in the hoax came out into the open, recounting the prank,[3] and explained that the skull was one of those used for practice, describing the plastic crowns and palate made by the students.

At the same time, Istanbul's cemetery department and the Mufti of Beşiktaş made an investigation and discovered that no mention of the Muslim holy man existed in the official records.