Soğukçeşme Sokağı: The Lane Between Palace and Hagia Sophia
Why is it significant?
Climb the cobbled lane slowly. On your left runs the high stone wall of Topkapı Palace; on your right a row of wooden houses painted in pale yellow, pink, green and blue, with bay windows leaning over the street. Ahead, over the rooftops, the buttresses of Hagia Sophia appear.
Key Facts
| Place | Soğukçeşme Sokağı: The Lane Between Palace and Hagia Sophia |
|---|---|
| Address | Cankurtaran, Soğukçeşme Sokağı, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.00960, 28.98000 |
| Part of Walk | Sultans' Gates: Topkapı, Gülhane & the Sublime Porte in Istanbul |
| Generated | Generated |
Climb the cobbled lane slowly. On your left runs the high stone wall of Topkapı Palace; on your right a row of wooden houses painted in pale yellow, pink, green and blue, with bay windows leaning over the street. Ahead, over the rooftops, the buttresses of Hagia Sophia appear.
Soğukçeşme Sokağı means the Street of the Cold Fountain, after an Ottoman fountain that still stands at its lower end. For centuries it was an ordinary residential lane where people lived right up against the palace wall. By the twentieth century its old houses were crumbling and some were gone.
In the mid-1980s the Turkish Touring and Automobile Club, led by the writer and preservationist Çelik Gülersoy, rebuilt the lane as a row of guesthouses in the old style. Some called it a stage set, others called it a rescue, and the argument about how to restore Istanbul's wooden houses has never really ended. The club also restored an old Byzantine cistern below the street, a reminder that even here there is another city underneath.
Stand still for a moment and listen. On one side of you is the wall behind which sultans, viziers, eunuchs and princes lived and plotted for four centuries. On the other, a church built by an emperor a thousand years before them. Between the two, in this narrow gap, ordinary people hung their washing and raised their children.
At the top of the lane you come out again by Bab-ı Hümayun and the fountain where this walk began. You have crossed the palace's public court, followed its gardens to the sea, passed the station that brought Europe to the sultan's door, and stood at the gate from which the empire was ruled. All of it fits on one hill... and from this hill, for almost five hundred years, an empire on three continents was governed.