Istanbul Articles

Istanbul Articles

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ISTANBUL IS MORE AGREEABLE TAKEN WITH WATER

Sunday Telegraph, 29th June 2008

You can’t beat touring Istanbul by ferry, says Jeremy Seal, who found it had more than one advantage in a congested city.

I was on the ferry’s rear deck, enjoying a tulip-shaped glass of black tea and the shabby-sublime views when it struck me; the waterside mosques, derelict docks, tottering timber houses and trendy factory restorations weren’t all we were passing.  We were also leaving Istanbul’s notorious road traffic, visibly gridlocked along the opposite shore, far behind.  I’ll confess I hadn’t chosen the Golden Horn ferry – departures every hour – for speed so much as for the reasons traditionally associated with city ferries; those stirring views, plus ease and period atmosphere.   But with the rising chorus of car horns, it was clear I had called it doubly right in this vibrant, increasingly congested metropolis of the moment.

Many great waterside cities are home to equally great ferries, with the Star (Hong Kong), the Staten Island (New York), the Manly (Sydney) and even the Mersey (Liverpool) offering alluring outings against inspirational backdrops.  Compared to Istanbul, however, divided along one axis by the waters of the Bosphorus and along the other, on the European side, by the fabled creek I was now journeying up, they struggle to compete.  With an extensive network of routes, expanding again after years of decline, and an ongoing programme to restore the dilapidated pier stations to their former charm, Istanbul is the undisputed mecca of city ferries.  Be they the traditional type, with their period lines, mustard-coloured smokestacks and rounded riverboat-style sterns, or the more functional sea buses, Istanbul’s ferries are not so much a one-off experience as an essential, under-used aid in appreciating and accessing large swathes of the city.

Two substantial jetties, Eminonu and Karakoy, serve as ferry hubs from either side of Galata Bridge, the city’s undisputed centre point, but for a more intimate point of departure the trick is to track down the intermediate ferry stations.  Not always that easy, as I discovered before finally locating the unsigned Halic (Golden Horn) ferry station beside a nondescript shoreside car park a little way west of Eminonu.  Like several other pier buildings, this station was recently reconstructed to closely resemble the late-Ottoman pavilion-style original, with a low-pitched roof overhanging exposed timber walls and generous windows.  I paid 1.3YTL (55p) – no more now, the set fare for all single journeys, and passed through the turnstile into a delightfully retro waiting room hung with sepia images of old Stamboul and flooded with Bosphorus light.

We were soon zig-zagging between the piers on either shore of the Golden Horn, with hawkers and commuters, naval cadets, shawled grandmothers and Uzbek pilgrims boarding for the half-hour journey to Eyup.  Trays brimming with tea (20p), freshly squeezed orange juice (60p) and toasted cheese sandwiches (40p) circulated.  A colourful culinary, social and scenic experience, then, but the ferry’s added value was delivering me to city sights, like the mosque and shrine of the Prophet’s standard bearer at Eyup, which, with less imagination, I might have approached by taxi.

Within minutes of stepping ashore, I had left the industrialised waterfront behind and found myself in the holiest site of the city.  The devout gathered in the mosque courtyards and at the marble fountains before filing into the green-tiled shrine.  In the back streets, families haggled round flocks of sheep destined for sacrifice.  Clouds of pigeons rose above the plane trees as I climbed through the hillside cemetery, with its thickets of headstones topped by stone fezes and turbans.  Just below the Pierre Loti Café, named after the lovelorn French officer and novelist whose exploits scandalised 19th-century Istanbul, a newly installed cable car carried me down to the shore a brief walk from Eyup’s ferry station.

I boarded for the short hop back down the Golden Horn to Ayvansaray where I set off up the hill, side-stepping the carpets which young women armed with scrubbing brushes had laid out in the streets.  I followed my map (the free one available at the city’s tourist offices is adequate), keeping the old city walls on my right to find my way after twenty minutes to the Kariye Cami.   The line of tour buses parked outside reminded how me few visitors found their own, rewarding way to this former church, home to some of the finest Byzantine frescos in existence.

Later that day I boarded a rush-hour ferry to Cengelkoy, half-way up the Bosphorus.  This tranquil village of fish restaurants and old waterfront yalis (wooden mansions) has been home since 2005 to Sumahan on the Water.  This 21-room boutique hotel, complete with hamam (Turkish bath) and a serious library, has been impressively converted from a late-Ottoman alcohol factory.  My loft-style room, all wood, steel and brick, gave straight onto a lawn lapped by the Bosphorus, with views beneath the vast span of Istanbul’s first suspension bridge back towards the old city’s skyline of domes and minarets.  Time was when Istanbul’s most coveted addresses, rather than crowding the city centre in the recent fashion, lined the water’s edge, a welcome tradition which this cultured and stylish retreat has done much to revive. The hotel even has its own launch which runs a schedule of services, free to guests, to the piers at Kurucesme and Kabatas on the European side.

Istanbul’s ferries have long played a particular role, almost a sacred one amongst western travellers, in setting them down on the shores of Asia.  The main routes across the lower Bosphorus are to Uskudar and Kadikoy, but these functional piers are short on the romance required by such an arrival.  The destination of choice must instead be Haydarpasa where a turreted Rhineland schloss looms above the Bosphorus.  Haydarpasa is now in a sorry state having suffered a fire while closed for unspecified development.  I stepped ashore to lose myself in this atmospheric railway terminal, with departures to Damascus and Tehran and bowl-dipped razors flashing in the sunlight at the period-piece station barber shop.

I was off the next morning – along, it seemed, with most of the city’s foreign tourists – on the special Bosphorus tour (one or two departures daily, £4.80 return).  We passed the Ottoman palaces at Beylerbeyi and Kucuksu, and the crenellated forts – Rumeli and Anadolu – facing each other across the narrowest point of the strait.  We called at Kanlica, renowned for its delicious yoghurt which an enterprising hawker was soon touting in tubs on the crowded decks.  I might have stayed onboard for the usual fish lunch at the last stop, Anadolu Kavagi, before rejoining the ferry for its afternoon return journey.  Instead, I disembarked at Sariyer and made the short walk to the Sadberk Hanim Musezi for the wonderful archaeological and ethnographic collections  housed in adjoining wooden yalis.  This left me, for once, without ferry options.  So I caught a dolmus (minibus) back to the city centre.  The dolmus soon got clogged up in the traffic.

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ISTANBUL

Scenic Route Magazine, September 2013

‘Old church,’ the Turk with the comedy smile confirms.  This man in a flat cap has just come out of the bustle to attach himself to our tourist group, apparently to sharpen up his guiding skills.  He’s right as far as it goes in that the church we’re about to enter – Istanbul’s Haghia Sophia, or Basilica of the Holy Wisdom – is indeed old; almost 1500 years old, in fact.  If anything’s missing from his commentary, some might say, it’s a reverence in keeping with what is perhaps the greatest of Christianity’s historic monuments – the mother church of eastern Christendom.  Then again, who can blame any resident of Istanbul – for centuries the first city on earth, the capital of both the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires – for occasionally appearing a little blasé about his fabled surroundings?

Not that we visitors are in danger of feeling the least underwhelmed.  We’ve barely finished joshing with our would-be guide when a collective gasp announces our arrival beneath a dome almost 200 feet high set with galleries and Byzantine mosaics, and with huge Arabic-inscribed cartouches installed after the city fell to the Muslim Turks in 1453.  The guidebook’s claim that Haghia Sophia is less a mere church than an earthly mirror of the heavens no longer seems extravagant in these soaring surroundings.

It’s a humbling introduction to the waterside city which occupies the planet’s premier pitch; it doesn’t take a geography degree to appreciate that the juncture of Europe and Asia, not to mention the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, was destined to be anything but a backwater.  Instead, the banks of the legendary Bosphorus have been home for more than two thousand years to a metropolis initially known as Byzantium, then as Constantinople, but often simply as The City by those who needed no convincing that it was beyond compare.  With its churches and mosques, palaces and markets, museums and shrines, defensive walls and forts, one thing visitors to Istanbul can be sure of is that they won’t run out of sights to see.

Beginning in Sultanahmet, the imperial heart of the old city, we leave Haghia Sophia for the fabled Blue Mosque, with its six magnificent minarets, its colonnades and courtyards.  Then we wander the Hippodrome, where the Romans paraded their horses, even today one of the city’s great open spaces.  There’s even time for a look at the huge underground cistern which the Turks know poetically as the Sunken Palace, or Yerebatan Sarayı; it was through this watery Roman underworld stuck with hundreds of columns that James Bond, who recently returned to Istanbul in Skyfall, ventured in From Russia With Love.

All of which is to forget our trainee guide and the fun we briefly had with him, not to mention others who have caught our eye like the shoe shiners, postcard salesmen, the boys selling sesame rolls called simits, and the men in braided costumes carrying brass dispensers of a sour yoghurt called ayran.  The morning has barely passed before we’re recognising what else we like about Istanbul, and that’s a colourful cast of characters of the sort simply no longer experienced in the West.  It takes an afternoon trip on one of the city’s famed ferries, which doubles as a great way of gaining our bearings, to confirm our suspicion that Istanbul scores as highly for its vibrant life as for its historic sights.

From the rounded stern of our grand old ferry, smoke streaming from its yellow stack, we sit back as events unfold around us: a waiter brings us tea – the equivalent of 30p each – in tulip-shaped glasses; a boss-eyed busking violinist in tattered tails serenades us; an old lady throws bread to the seagulls crowding off the stern; men wave from tiny fishing caiques even as they threaten to tip over in our wake.   During the short crossing of the Bosphorus, the domes, minarets, towers, tenements and high-rise hotels of Europe’s shabby-sublime skyline recede at our back while we close on the turrets and barracks of Asia.

From where the ferry docks back on the European side it’s a short walk past the fishermen on Galata Bridge at the very heart of the city – what we might call the Istan Bull’s-Eye – to the Egyptian, or Spice Market (Mısır Çarşısı).  This historic arcade, though popular with tourists, remains in essence the world’s foremost deli, selling all manner of exotic foodstuffs from pastırma (cured beef) and dripping honeycombs to necklaces of dried aubergine skins, crumbly white cheeses, mulberries and pistachio nuts.  We’re now emboldened to explore a nearby mosque, Rustem Paşa, which delights us with its exquisite sixteenth-century tilework.   One local gives directions in serviceable English while another’s incomprehensible shouts are enough to warn us that we’re about to be run down by a tinker’s cart; both throw in offers of tea.  This is a bustling place, then, but one bursting with good will.

In the days ahead, there is time to take a tram along Istıklal Caddesi, the city’s foremost thoroughfare, where the latest brands jostle with period cake shops selling baklava pastries, and with antiquarian booksellers, while street hawkers offer everything from lottery tickets to fried mussels served with a squeeze of lemon juice.  When the competitive mood takes us, we dive into the vaulted labyrinths of the Covered Bazaar to haggle over carpets and backgammon sets, and even those of us who do not find what we want emerge aching with laughter, full of apple tea, and thrilled by the teeming life of the place.

There’s time, as there must be, to take in the walled institution at the heart of Ottoman Istanbul; the Topkapı Palace, home to the Sultans for more than 400 years.  Here are the shaded grounds, the pavilions, and the sheer opulence of the imperial treasury; here too the harem where the eunuchs and concubines waited on their divine master, and where the Sultans’ brothers were strangled with silken cords.   In later centuries these pretenders to the throne were not executed but kept in comfortable isolation, some passing decades on end in gilded suites known as the  ‘cage’; an exquisite cruelty, it strikes us, to confine people in such a city.  If we feel particularly sorry for these long-dead princelings, it’s that we’re free to pass through the palace gates and continue exploring the magnificent surroundings that they were not to know.

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EUROPE – MEET ASIA

Sunday Times, 20th October 2013

This month, the world’s first tube train between continents opens in Istanbul.  Jeremy Seal investigates.

After suffering the double knock-down of this summer’s protest mayhem and losing out on its Olympic 2020 bid, Istanbul is back on its feet – with the world’s first intercontinental tube train.  That’s a four-minute underground ride from Europe to Asia.  From October 29th the ‘Marmaray’ tunnel beneath the Bosphorus straits will connect downtown Sirkeci with Üsküdar, making the Turkish metropolis’s all-too-undiscovered Asia-side attractions more accessible than ever.  Combining Marmaray with existing links such as the atmospheric steamer-ferries and the rapid-transit ‘metrobus’ service via the Bosphorus Bridge means there’s never been a better time for crossing between the two continents.  Meantime, here’s our to-do list for Asian Istanbul:

 

  1. Foodie Heaven

Kadiköy’s Guneşlibahçe Sokak is Istanbul’s culinary epicentre, showcasing Turkey’s abundant seasonal produce alongside the country’s outstanding cuisine.  Stacked fruit and veg stalls, slabs heaped with Black Sea fish and kuruyemiş stalls (dried nuts, fruit and spices) stand cheek by jowl with pavement eateries.  Shop for such exotica as tulum peynir (goat’s cheese matured in, yes, a goatskin) before grabbing a table outside one of the trio of adjacent Çiya restaurants (ciya.com.tr; 217  418 5115).  The uniquely inventive dishes served at these gourmet canteens – I had kirazlı köfte (meatballs with cherries) – are peasant recipes from all over Turkey revived by uber-foodie Musa Dağdeviren.

5-minute walk from Kadiköy ferry terminal.

 

  1. Brand-name Shopping

Ottoman armies once slogged down Bağdat Caddesi (Baghdad Street) for Iraq’s distant capital; the city’s fashionista hordes have something less arduous in mind as they gorge on the seriously up-scale shopping along this tree-lined boulevard in suburbs like Suadiye and Erenköy.  Amidst the cafes, wedding stores and beauty clinics there’s Louis Vuitton and Zara, Burberry’s and M&S.  Look out for No422/A where leading Turkish store Vakko is housed in a nineteenth-century gingerbread villa.

15-minute bus ride from Kadiköy ferry terminal. 

 

  1. The Mosque

Even if you’ve overdosed on European Istanbul’s must-see mosques, be sure to make time for the inspirational Şakirin Mosque (Nuhkuyusu Caddesi 2, Selimiye).   The mosque, the first in Turkey to be designed by a woman, is a triumph of radical styling with its abundant natural light, the rain-like chandelier hanging from the main dome, and the dramatic courtyard fountain by British designer William Pye.  The mosque’s location in the wooded grounds of peaceful Karacaahmet, one of Turkey’s largest cemeteries, also makes it a fine place for escaping the city’s bustle.

10-minute bus or dolmuş (minibus) ride from Üsküdar ferry or tube train.

 

  1. The Village

North of frenetic Kadiköy and Üsküdar a string of picturesque villages line the Asian shore, with timbered villas, fin-de-siecle (if poorly served) ferry stations, fisherman’s cafes and squares shaded by plane trees.  A favourite is Kuzguncuk, with its Armenian and Greek churches, where Istanbul’s former cosmopolitanism still lingers.  On the back lanes traditional cumbalar (window bays) protrude from the first floor of dilapidated Jewish houses.  Boho-style cafes and eateries abound; family-run Kuzguncuk Balikcisi (Perihan Abla Sokak 3; 216 341 0144) has rickety gingham-covered tables out front where it serves seasonal Bosphorus fish staples like fried anchovies (£6 with salad).

5-minute bus ride from Üsküdar ferry or tube train.  Occasional rush-hour ferry service.

 

  1. The Blow-Out

For waterside dining nowhere in Istanbul competes with the newly opened Tapasuma (Kuleli Caddesi 3, Çengelköy; 216 401 1333; tapasuma.com, from £50pp with wine), even if the proximity means keeping an eye out for the ships’ wakes that have been known to break over the tree-shaded terrace.  Here’s a place for watching the Bosphorus’ legendary traffic – fishing smacks, Ukrainian freighters, even fancy launches delivering diners to the restaurant – but it’s the food which makes the biggest waves: mouth-watering tapas-sized meze dishes (the restaurant’s speciality) like courgette blossoms stuffed with seafood or lamb neck rolled with pistachio and hummus.

Free launch transfers to the European side for guests.

 

  1. The Turkish Bath

If all the food is beginning to show or if you’re suffering from a build-up of city grime, it’s time to remedy matters at the 16th-century Cinili Hamam (Çavuşdere Caddesi, Üsküdar 24; 216 553 1593 for men; 216 334 9710 for women, cinilihamam.com; from £8pp).  Built by the great Ottoman architect Sinan, the ‘Tiled Bathhouse’ has pedigree and elegance.  Dissolve in the labyrinthine marble steam rooms.   Sign up for a massage or an exfoliating scrub.  Retire swathed in towels to recline in your private cubicle over an apple tea and wonder why you don’t always feel this good.  Separate sections and opening hours for men and women.

20-minute walk or five-minute taxi from Üsküdar ferry or tube train.

 

  1. Nightlife

You couldn’t be further from pious Üsküdar in Kadiköy’s Kadife Sokak, locally known as ‘Bar Street’, where the city’s trendy tribes congregate.  Among the Soho-style mix of tattoo parlours, bric-a-brac shops and music stores you’ll find bars for every mood, often with live music: Bahane (27/2 Kadife Sokak, 216 345 5449) is a favourite with its outside space while the roof terrace at labyrinthine Lal (19 Kadife Sokak, 216 346 5625) attracts a quieter crowd.

15-minute walk from Kadiköy ferry.

 

  1. The Palace

The Ottomans did like their palaces; the giltwork, marble fountains, painted pavilions and Baccarat crystal chandeliers on show at the last one they built, waterside Beylerbeyi (Çayırbaşı Caddesi, Beylerbeyi, 212 327 2626, Tue-Wed, Fri-Sun, 9.30-5pm, £7), evokes a dynasty intent on going out with a bang.  Guided group tours in English depending on demand.

20-minute bus from Üsküdar train or ferry.  Metrobus (Bosphorus Bridge stop).  

 

  1. The Museum

For a rare glimpse through the high-security portals of Turkish militarism, there’s nothing like a visit to the Florence Nightingale Museum (Selimiye Kışlası, Selimiye, weekdays, free but by appointment; fax 216 310 7929 at least 48 hours beforehand).  The world’s most closely guarded museum lies deep within the vast Selimiye Barracks, home to Turkey’s First Army, where the Lady with the Lamp famously revolutionised care standards during the Crimean War.  The museum, a shrine for students of nursing, displays a modest collection of Nightingale artefacts and letters, though most people come for the endless echoing corridors, the charmingly correct officer escort, the extraordinary security procedures, and a final chance to use a fax machine.

5-minute taxi ride from Üsküdar traın or ferry.

 

  1. The Stay

Like the Asian side so much that you want to stay?  For sheer romance, look no further than Sumahan on the Water (43 Kuleli Caddesi, Çengelköy, 216 444 8000, from £155 per double), a late-Ottoman alcohol factory converted into a superbly stylish small hotel with incomparable views over the Bosphorus.  The only competition is from the A’jia Hotel (Cubuklu Caddesi 27, Kanlıca, 216 413 9300, ajia.com, doubles from £170), a light and airy waterside mansion further north up the Bosphorus.

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CAPTIVE GUESTS

Sunday Telegraph, 26th May, 2002

Most hotels have bars, but in Istanbul some of the smartest once had them on the windows, says Jeremy Seal

Soon after checking into Istanbul’s Four Seasons Hotel, I noticed an arrow-pierced heart dated 1935 and signed ‘Sofor Niyazi’ (the chauffeur Niyazi) shakily chiseled into a marble pillar at the end of an upstairs corridor.  Less mere graffiti than heritage doodlings, they nevertheless seemed improbable in such superior surroundings.

‘Oh, this was a prison for much of the last century,’ the bellboy explained.  The Sultanahmet prison, in the heart of the old imperial city, had apparently housed politicals in the early years of the post-Ottoman republic, finally opening as a much-admired hotel in 1996.

The Four Seasons did not shy from its prison past, even providing guests with a photocopied potted history of the building.  It struck me as a risky business, however, putting visitors up in a former nick, especially in a city which has long been notorious in this regard.  Alan Parker’s 1970s movie Midnight Express is despised here for the stock prejudices it touts; its vivid portrayal of the sordid brutalities of Istanbul prison life has certainly left a lingering stain upon the city.  Recent hunger strikes by political prisoners and the incarceration of Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan on a nearby prison island, a possible death sentence hanging over him, have not helped.

And so to a far more palatable prison evocation – quirky, enigmatic and romantic – of a lovelorn driver doing time in the 1930s.  What had Niyazi done to be banged up?  Who had he loved?  Or driven?  His confined scratchings left an impression upon me; in fact, they set the agenda for my visit.  On a balmy spring weekend, when cormorants gathered on ships’ buoys in the Golden Horn, feathers gleaming in the sunshine, and women laid out their carpets in the backstreets of Fener to scrub them clean, I could not help noticing how former prisons and places of confinement had popped up all over the city not only as refurbished hotels, but as restaurants, cafes and cultural sights too.  An improbable prison chic was at work in Istanbul.

I made for Galata that evening, a hilltop neighbourhood illuminated by low-lit bars and ateliers, Montmartre-style.  On an unlit, steeply sloping street below the 14th century Genoese tower I found the Eski Ingiliz Karakolu.  This wonderful restaurant operates in a private home which was formerly the British prison in the early 20th century.  ‘Every major power had their own prison in Constantinople,’ explained architect owner Mete Goktug as his wife prepared dishes from the distinctive Georgian and Tartar menu, ‘mostly for any of their nationals who had got into trouble’.  There was evocative graffiti here too, faded scribbles which Mete had uncovered beneath recent plaster.  ‘An unfavourable wind,’ claimed one poetically minded unfortunate, ‘has brought the ship of my life to these shores’.

The police were about the next day, sending the street hawkers on Galata Bridge hurrying off at their approach, packing up their trestles and merchandise; cigarettes and perfumes, pistachio nuts and fishing tackle.  I took a bus north to Besiktas, and walked into Yildiz Park.  In these expansive 19th century imperial grounds, attractively landscaped with trees and shrubs and capillaried with paths and bridge-spanned streams, families were picknicking.

I made the mistake of plunging deep into the bushes for a discreet pee only to discover that they were already occupied by a whole series of couples in complex clinches, caught between ardour and restraint.  I held on until I reached the top of the hill where the elaborate stucco Malta Pavilion stood.  The main restaurant, mostly given over to marble fountains adorned by swans and fish, opened onto a terrace where tea and cakes were served, with excellent views not only of the Bosphorus but also of the same couples as they emerged from the foreground bushes, straightening their clothes.  All of which distracted my waiter, but his unbroken smirk could not deflect me from the Malta Pavilion’s dark history.  After the shortest reign of all Ottoman Sultans, the deposed Murad V was briefly incarcerated in the nearby Ciragan Palace (also restored as a luxury hotel) before being brought to this gilded cage where he was immured along with his mother for 27 years until his death in 1903.

Nowhere was more notorious for royal confinement, however, than the Topkapi Palace, hub of the Ottoman world until the mid-19th century.  The palace harem, that forbidden network of cloistered apartments where the imperial family resided in sensuous isolation, was home to the kafes or cage, where pretenders to the Sultan’s throne were imprisoned.  ‘There were actually two cages,’ our guide explained; ‘one for the Crown prince who was confined to quarters alongside his father until his 15th birthday, and the other where the Sultan’s brothers were locked up once the law of imperial fratricide was abandoned in the 17th century’.  Neither option appealed, and it was good to escape into the sunshine.  I took a taxi west to the Church of St Saviour in Chora, where the Byzantine frescoes are among the most dazzling in existence, before walking down the hill to the Golden Horn.  But even here I could not escape from notions of enclosure, as the ruins of the great city walls, mediaeval Europe’s greatest fortifications, loomed high above me.

That evening, I took a ferry to Kizkulesi (Maiden’s Tower).  The landmark tower which stands in the middle of the Bosphorus was restored and opened as a restaurant in 2001.  I took a window seat with views over the water to Europe, and received a history lesson from my patient waiter.  According to legend, a maiden was confined here to protect her from a prophecy which claimed that she would die from snakebite.  More reliably, it had served as quarantine station, lighthouse and artillery emplacement in recent times.  ‘And,’ the waiter added, ‘it was also a prison for exiles from the city.’  Which I was already on the way to guessing.

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BOHO BY THE BOSPHORUS

Sunday Times, 4th May 2014

Istanbul is our favourite city, and Karaköy is its artiest new district, says Jeremy Seal

Istanbul? After the running battles and the tear gas which disfigured Turkey’s metropolis last summer, you’d be forgiven for thinking warzone.  But think again; even with the unrest, the city succeeded in attracting a record tennis million-plus foreign visitors during 2013.   And they enjoyed themselves; TripAdvisor readers recently voted Istanbul the world’s top travel destination.

After decades of decline the old imperial capital is having another heyday.  Istanbul is coursing with energy as its ambitious self-improvement programme gathers pace.  On a wash of investment dosh visionary infrastructure projects like last year’s Marmaray, a tube train linking the city’s European and Asian sides, have been unveiled.  Achingly cool galleries and cafes, seriously classy hotels, trendy bistros, museums and luxury hamams (Turkish baths) have opened behind tarted-up historic facades.  With calm restored, there’s never been a better time to visit.

What’s shifted is the visitor focus.  Neglected neighbourhoods have emerged to contend with established areas like historic Sultanahmet and boho Beyoğlu, nowhere more convincingly than Karaköy.  This dead-central quarter (call it Istanbul’s eye) was once the seedy waterfront haunt of brothels, scrap metal merchants and ships’ chandlers.  Visitors came for the girls, for the like of ball bearings or ships’ anchors, or not at all.  The anchors, costed by the kilo, are still available – look among the chandlers along Tersane Caddesi – but Karaköy’s authentic industrialism is cut these days with bags of bohemian style and appealing places to eat, drink or stay.

The transformation began in 2004 when Istanbul Modern (istanbulmodern.org), the city’s major contemporary art gallery, opened in a waterfront warehouse.  Since then Istanbul’s art scene has blossomed in Karaköy and neighbouring Galata; in a typically beguiling juxtaposition the latest branch of SALT (saltonline.org), a self-styled ‘cultural institution’ comprising exhibition space, library, archive and restaurant, recently opened in the grand former headquarters of the Imperial Ottoman Bank barely yards from the local scrap iron market.

The industrial aesthetic is also on show in the neighbourhood cafes and bars which have popped up in former metal workers’ premises on the alleys off Necatibey Caddesi; check out super-chic Karabatak (karabatak.org) for its distressed plasterwork, period bric-a-brac, bar fashioned from an old tractor and fine coffee from Austrian brand Julius Meinl.  The same warehouse styling characterises the nearby boutique Sub Hotel (subistanbul.com, doubles from £100) which, with its open-plan café-lounge and funky loft-like rooms, is as arty and congenial a base as you’ll find in the city.

Not that Karaköy doesn’t run to classic luxury.  For seriously upscale accommodation look no further than Vaults Karaköy (thehousehotel.com, doubles from £150), which opened last month in a 19th-century bank building beside SALT on Bankalar Caddesi (Banks Street).  With its colonnaded lobby, grand piano and scattered monographs, this is salon grandeur at its most cultured.  The original bank vaults have been retained for use as wine cellar, bar and (super-secure) meeting room.

Pop out for trad Turkish pampering at the recently restored 16th-century Kilic Ali Pasha Hamam (kilicalipasahamami.com, entry £30, single-sex visiting hours).  With its cathedral-like camekan (changing lounge), domed interiors and chi-chi cafe, this is Istanbul’s finest steam room.

When it comes to eating, there’s everything from the quayside stalls by Galata Bridge serving balik ekmek (grilled mackerel in a baguette; £1.50) to contemporary Turkish bistro cuisine at Didem Şenol’s much admired Lokanta Maya (lokantamaya.com, mains £10).

What’s not to like?   And with excellent public transport on your doorstep – ferries to the Asian side, the tramline to Sultanahmet, and the historic Tünel funicular for Beyoğlu and the shopping mecca that is Istiklal Caddesi – Karaköy’s also the perfect base for exploring the rest of the city.

Now, that anchor.

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