Baloz

Baloz: a type of Galata dance club patronized by sailors and port workers. The name probably derived from the "ballo italiano" italian ballo/baloz (from Latin: balare/to dance). In contrast to all male Galata Taverns -mostly basement or ground floor- baloz was an upper floor affair for dance and music and women were found as well working as a "konsomatris/ En.hostess,escort /Fr.consommatrice ". Today's "b-girl" woman employed by a bar to act as a companion to male customers.

Baloz became popular during the times of the Ottoman Sultan Abdulaziz (1830-1876) who visited Western Europe in 1867, being the first Ottoman sultan to do so, and he was made a "Knight of the Garter" by Queen Victoria. Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph (appointment annulled 1915) and the Russian Tzar Alexander II also received the same title in 1867.

Further Source: Perhaps the most important late eighteenth-century technical manual was Gennaro Magri's Trattato teorico-prattico di ballo, published in Naples in 1779. By the end of the eighteenth century, the differentiation between theatrical and social dance was nearly complete; professional dancers were performing increasingly complex steps while social dancers were concentrating on the growing genre of group dances.