Asian Shore
When the ancient Greek Byzas asked an oracle where he should found his city, the oracle reputedly said ‘opposite the blind’, referring to the Chalcedonians who settled on the Asian side of the Bosphorus in the 7th century BC, ignoring the obvious advantages of the European shore. Perhaps they just wanted a quieter life. A 20-minute boat-trip from the teeming attractions of the European to the Asian shore indeed offers visitors a taste of Turkish life at a calmer pace, as well as the chance to boast that they have crossed between continents to find it.
It is only in the last two decades that the collection of villages on the Asian side of the Bosphorus have found themselves caught up in the mushroom-like growth of the city and recast as suburbs. The two main areas are Üsküdar to the north, which faces Beyoglu across the water, and, south, Kadiköy, opposite the Old City. Primarily residential, the districts don’t attract too many tourists. That doesn’t stop locals flocking to the local bazaar in Kadiköy, by the Mustafa Iskele Mosque, or to what is one of the city’s best street markets on nearby Kusdili Sokak (Tuesday – food and clothes, Sunday – flea-market). Also close is Çiya, a wonderfully unpretentious restaurant given the quality of its Anatolian cooking and in itself a destination worth the ferry trip.
Wandering up the shore to Üsküdar takes you past the Kız Kulesi – Maiden’s Tower – an immensely popular landmark despite its lack or historical or architectural significance. Located just offshore on its own rocky outcrop and accessible by boat it is nonetheless a good place for a coffee and a pleasant spot from which to look at the Bosphorus. Round the bend is the beautiful S¸emsi Pasa Mosque, one of the smallest, by star Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan.
You may wish to travel further afield as, after the intensity of the European parts of Istanbul, a trip to the Asian shore often awakes impulses to escape and explore. One route northwards takes in the Asian Bosphorus villages, of which Kanlıca is one of the most charming, famous since the 17th century for its thick yoghurts and home to one the city’s finest fish restaurants, Körfez.
In the other direction, the Kızıl Adalar – the Princes’ Islands – lie off the south coast of Kadiköy. A collection of tranquil islands where superfluous Byzantine princes were once exiled (the more efficient Ottomans tended simply to strangle theirs), they have long attracted ethnically diverse settlers, bourgeois pleasure seekers from the city and assorted exiles, including, for a while, Leon Trotsky. But those with more extreme wanderlust need only venture into the idiosyncratically Teutonic form of Haydarpasa station in Kadiköy, a gift from Kaiser Wilhelm, where they can catch trains for as far east as Tehran.
Beyoglu
Beyoglu has always been the racier, modern and outré counterpart to the fading, stately and traditional grandeur of Sultanahmet. The area of Galata, just over the Goldern Horn, was even in the days of Byzantium the home of foreign workers and merchants. On Galata Bridge the celebrated 19th-century Italian travel writer Edmondo de Amicis observed the parade of people who made up the Ottoman world – Albanians, Armenians, Africans, Jews, Tartars and Turks – and called them ‘a changing mosaic of races and religions, that is composed and scattered continually with a rapidity that the eye can scarcely follow’.
In late Ottoman times the area of Pera, north of Galata, took shape, where ambitious Europeans set up hotels, notably the Pera Palace, and embassies such as Charles Barry’s neoclassical British Consulate. It was here that electricity, telephony and the general trappings of modernity crash-landed into the hidebound Ottoman world. Their allure proved irresistible and in the mid-19th century the sultans implicitly acknowledged the shift of power, abandoned the Topkapı and built a succession of palaces along the nearby Bosphorus shore. Beyoglu’s great artery, the Grand Rue de Pera (renamed Istiklal Caddesi in the early days of the Turkish Republic), was then a parade of European culture and manners, while in the backstreets a more louche and bohemian atmosphere reigned, fuelled by a concoction of artists, dancers, prostitutes, pimps, writers and spies. When people wax lyrical about the cosmopolitan charms of old Constantinople, it is late-19th-century and early to mid-20th-century Pera that is in the forefront of their minds, with the melancholy relics of Old Stamboul forming a picturesque backdrop.
The area retained that character till the 1950s, when an upsurge in Turkish nationalism convinced most minorities to leave. That’s now distant history and although Beyoglu will never again be home to such a kaleidoscope of nations, it has reclaimed its buzz. Istiklal Caddesi is high-street hideousness writ large, the beautiful 19th-century façades of its buildings hidden by hoardings and neon lights. Off its length, however, run streets that are home to innumerable and wonderful cafés, bars, restaurants, music venues and clubs, many open till the early hours of the morning.
Azmalımescit, westwards off the bottom end of Istiklal, is a particular hotspot that has benefited from artist-led gentrification, with some of the best restaurants in town sitting beside a selection of cool bars and the city’s top dance and music club, Babylon, round the corner. Similarly the neighbouring areas of Çukurcuma and Cihangir, on the other side of Istiklal, are riding high on a property price boom, thanks to the creative types who have brought them credibility. Here the bars and restaurants are particularly fashionable, nodal points of an exclusive local social scene.
Further north up Istiklal, Çiçek Pasajı, one of the many attractive passages that run off the main thoroughfare, is filled with smart waiters dying to tempt you into their admittedly charmingly appointed restaurants. Better, however, to avoid their touristy slickness and turn the corner to experience the rough and ready attractions of the fish market and its adjacent stretch of meyhanes (taverns), Nevizade Sokak, both overflowing with the exuberant energy of street life.
At its northern conclusion Istiklal finally empties out into the large and largely unappealing expanse of Taksim Square, a suitably symbolic separation, perhaps, between the many joys of Beyoglu and the business district beyond.
Istanbul City
For much of human history it has been the greatest city on earth. Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul – the names by which the city has been known during its 28 centuries of existence are alone enough to conjure such a wealth of legends and stories as to stupefy the most curious. In that time it played various cameo roles in the great sweeps of ancient history before moving centre stage as the capital of, successively, two of the world’s most powerful empires. Between Constantine’s redefinition of the city in AD 330 as the New Rome and the final wreck of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, 97 Latin and Byzantine emperors and empresses and 30 Ottoman sultans ruled their lands from within its walls.
Rumours of the city’s splendours, which exhausted the superlatives of the most flowery of high Ottoman poets (‘Stambul, peerless of cities, thou jewel beyond compare’) have always attracted outsiders. Some came without invitation – the city was seriously besieged 22 times by assorted Greeks, Romans, Franks, Persians, Avars, Slavs, Arabs and Turks. Others, drawn to its centre from the vast imperial peripheries, settled to create the world’s first truly cosmopolitan city. For adventurous Europeans from Lord Byron to Pierre Loti, meanwhile, the place was a summation of the exotic attractions of the Orient. For them, like Venice, it was a city to be approached by water from which vantage could be seen, if the timing was right, an otherworldly silhouette of minarets and domes set against a chromatic sunset.
Though the flow of visitors never ceased, the last century was not kind to Istanbul, and the City of Cities faded a little from the world’s collective memory. But now there are serious signs of revival. The city has quadrupled in size over the last few decades as Anatolians have migrated westward in search of betterment in the big city. Of more interest to the visitor, however, will be the hip, contemporary edge that a new generation of young, wealthy Istanbulus have conjured. Slick restaurants replete with asymmetric lighting displays and cool serving staff serve up new-fangled fusions such as beef carpaccios on a bed of pak choi while round the corner home-grown classics such as hunkar begendi are made with ingrained expertise in eateries that flourished while the sultans still ruled. Meanwhile dance acts from Stockholm or Berlin play to heaving crowds in clubs next door to venues playing Turkish folk.
In what is a hallmark of the greatest cities, Istanbul offers a vibrant present set within a captivating past and visitors are advised to neglect neither.
A few last words by way of introduction – get (mildly) lost (walking). In such a large and, at times, chaotic city, a guidebook, such as this one, should prove invaluable. But if you’re unfamiliar with the city, clear a day, head for the middle of the Old City Sultanahmet, put away your maps and guidebooks and wander. After one such walk, though history does not record whether he got lost or not, Lord Byron wrote: ‘I have seen the ruins of Athens, of Ephesus, and Delphi. I have traversed great part of Turkey, and many other parts of Europe, and some of Asia; but I never beheld a work of nature or art, which yielded an impression like the prospect on each side from the Seven Towers to the end of the Golden Horn.’
Nisantasi
North and northeast of Beyoglu lie the lands of Istanbul’s haute bourgeoisie and the playgrounds of the super-rich. The inland area of Nisantası comprises smart streets of modern apartment blocks, fashion boutiques, good restaurants and people-watching cafés. It doesn’t attract too many visitors, who tend to have homegrown versions of the Bosphorus Shore, but it’s worth seeing to form a holistic impression of the city, which isn’t just about fading historical relics. The Beyman Brasserie in the Beyman department store on Abdi Ipekci Caddesi, a leafier and more genteel take on Bond Street, is an excellent point from which to get the measure of the area. From there you can saunter in and out of the usual slew of designer operations – Gucci, Vuitton, Burberry and so on – before refreshing yourself at top restaurants such as Loft or Borsa. In short, Nisantası is a showcase for sleek, modern Istanbul.
The Bosphorus, stretching 14 miles from the Sea of Marmara to the mouth of the Black Sea, is rather more timeless. Its name is mythical: Zeus seduced Io, and so his wife, Hera, took revenge by turning Io into a heifer incessantly tormented by a gadfly. To escape the midge she swam the straits, hence ‘Bosphorus’ – ‘ford of the ox’. Its treacherous currents, which run north–south and vice-versa (driven by differing water pressures if you must know), are immortalized in the legend of Jason and the Argonauts who famously navigated the channel’s vicious, clashing rocks. But anyone who takes a recommended Bosphorus cruise (see Culture) will marvel more at the Greek gift for exaggeration than the danger, since the rocks quite clearly do not move.
More recently the Bosphorus has been the fantastical playground of the city’s elite. It was here that the sultans moved after abandoning the Topkapı, building first the rather tasteless rococo pile that is the Dolmabahçe, the Çıragan Palace, the Beylerbeyi Palace (on the Asian shore) and, finally, Yıldız Palace, which sits on a hillside of lovely woods, ponds and streams, just over the road from the Çıragan. Their wealthy subjects meanwhile studded the shoreline all the way up to the Black Sea with their yalıs (wooden summer mansions), still some of the world’s most desirable properties.
Despite, presumably, possessing neither palace nor yalı, you can enjoy the Bosphorus at any of the excellent cafés, clubs and restaurants as you journey northwards along its shore. The area of Oratköy, with its Italian-style piazza, is a trendy hotspot, just past the kilometre-long Atatürk bridge. Kuruçesme is home to super-clubs Rainer, Sortie and Angelique, as well the trendy Assk Café and Italian restaurant Mia Mensa. Further along, Bebek, the loveliest of the Bosphorus villages, as they were before being encompassed by Greater Istanbul, boasts the renowned fish restaurant Poseidon, a fabulous bar at the back of the stylish Bebek Hotel, and Meshur Bebek Badem Ezmesci purveyors of what may be the finest badem ezmesci (marzipan) in the world.
Round the next bend stand icons of antiquity and modernity: the imposing Ottoman castle, Rumeli Hisarı (and on the opposite shore its twin Anadolu Hisarı), and the Fatih Mehmet Bridge, a world-beating suspension bridge linking Europe to Asia. Funnily enough, it’s sited exactly where King Darius of Persia built a pontoon bridge in 512 BC so he could attack the Scythians. Just another place where the city’s present is in play with its past.
Sultanahmet
This is the ancient city, a spit of land bounded by water to the north, south and east, and to the west by the walls built by Theodosius II in the 5th century. Now a ruined and largely forgotten series of punctuation marks in the city’s landscape, they protected the Byzantines for a thousand years until, in 1453, Mehmet the Conqueror breached the walls and claimed it as the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
There are few places in the world where the relics of history are more concentrated or more astonishing than within this circumscribed area. Accordingly a tourist trail centuries old connects its great mosques, museums, bazaars and palaces. Disdain for conventional sightseeing aside, they are a must.
Most are to be found in the Sultanahmet area, the eastern portion of the old city. Supremely famous, and lying at its heart, is the Hagia Sophia, Church of Divine Wisdom, for a millennium the largest building on earth. Its vast, apparently miraculously unsupported dome and spacious interior profoundly impressed Ottoman architects who answered with the Sultanahmet Mosque (also known as the Blue Mosque), its immediate neighbour, and the great Süleymaniye Mosque, which lies a kilometre away to the northwest. Together the three buildings dominate the spectacular skyline. Less vertical, but no less impressive, the Topkapı, palace of sultans for some 400 years and byword for the mystique and baroque splendour of Oriental majesty, sits on a promontory overlooking the confluence of the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus. Its secrets and treasures are now offered up for global consumption. Delicately ornamented helmets and shields, and jewel-encrusted daggers and chests full of gemstones fill spotlit cases in the Treasury, while a reasonably priced ticket grants admission to the Harem, where once only few could enter without fearing death.
Added to this are museums of archaeology, mosaics and Islamic arts, the ruins of the Hippodrome, obelisks and columns, cisterns and aqueducts, jewel-like churches and elegant mosques, all combining to create a fantasy-like world, steeped in the past.
Successfully puncturing those dreamlike reveries, however, are the usual tourism-spawned irritations of naff cafés, tourist-tat touts and sleazy salesmen that infest the Sultanahmet area and that other great tourist magnet that lies to its west, the Kapalı Carshi, or Grand Bazaar. But this is an essential Istanbul experience, and visitors can be comforted in the knowledge that locals as well tourists throng its myriad streets in search of a bargain or two.
The effects of the tourist trade also mean that, perversely, unlike the rest of Istanbul, there are only a handful of good restaurants in the area and even fewer drinking or partying spots, confirming the old city as primarily a zone of cultural attractions. But when they are this splendid only the churlish would complain.
