The Galata Mevlevi Lodge was founded in 1491 and served as a dervish house for more than four centuries, until the lodges were closed in 1925. It reopened as a museum and holds the semahane, the octagonal hall where the whirling ceremony was performed. The collection covers Mevlevi life: instruments, calligraphy, prayer rugs, and the […]

Hagia Triada is the largest Greek Orthodox church in Istanbul and the first to be built with a visible dome and bell towers after the Ottoman restrictions were lifted in the nineteenth century. It opened in 1880, just off Taksim Square. The interior is unexpectedly bright: a marble iconostasis, a high dome, and a scale […]

The Pera Museum occupies a former hotel building from 1893 and holds one of the more coherent private collections in the city. Three permanent sections cover Orientalist painting, Anatolian weights and measures, and Kutahya tiles and ceramics. The best known work is Osman Hamdi Bey’s The Tortoise Trainer, painted in 1906 and among the most […]

Istiklal Avenue runs for about 1.4 kilometres from Taksim Square down to the Galata district, and on a busy weekend something close to three million people walk it. It was the Grande Rue de Pera in the nineteenth century, when the embassies of Europe stood along it; several of those buildings are still there, now […]

Cicek Pasaji opened in 1876 as the Cite de Pera, an arcade of apartments and shops modelled on the covered passages of Paris. After the revolution of 1917 the Russian families who had fled to Istanbul began selling flowers under its glass roof, and the Turkish name stuck. Today the arcade is lined with meyhanes. […]

The Genoese built the Galata Tower in 1348 and called it the Tower of Christ. It was the high point of their walled colony on this side of the Golden Horn, and at sixty-seven metres it was for a while the tallest structure in the city. Its uses since have been varied: fire watchtower, prison, […]

Dolmabahçe replaced Topkapı as the imperial residence in 1856, and the change of address was also a change of argument: after four centuries of courtyards and pavilions, the sultans moved into a single European palace stretching six hundred metres along the Bosphorus. The numbers were the point. Two hundred and eighty-five rooms, forty-four halls, and […]

The Sultan Ahmed Mosque, known to almost everyone as the Blue Mosque, was completed in 1616 for a sultan who was still in his twenties. Its six minarets caused an argument at the time, since Mecca had the same number, and a seventh was eventually added there to settle it. The name comes from the […]

Sultanahmet Square is built on top of the Hippodrome, the chariot-racing arena that was the political centre of Byzantine Constantinople. The oval shape of the modern square still follows the track. Three monuments survive along the central line. The Obelisk of Theodosius is Egyptian, carved for Thutmose III around 1450 BC and brought here in […]

The Istanbul Archaeological Museums are three buildings inside the outer gardens of Topkapı Palace: the main archaeological hall, the Museum of the Ancient Orient and the Tiled Kiosk of 1472. The collection was assembled largely by Osman Hamdi Bey, painter and archaeologist, who founded the museum in 1891 and excavated the royal necropolis at Sidon. […]

The tomb of Sultan Ahmed I stands at the northern corner of the mosque he built, facing the square. He died in 1617, a year after the mosque was finished, at twenty-seven. Inside, thirty-six sarcophagi are arranged under a single dome — the sultan, his consort Kösem, and sons and grandsons including Osman II and […]

The fountain of Ahmed III was built in 1728 in front of the Imperial Gate of Topkapı Palace, and it marks a change in Ottoman taste. Instead of the plain stone of earlier fountains, it has wide eaves, painted decoration and verse carved across every face. The period it belongs to is called the Tulip […]