Kiremit Caddesi: Balat's Coloured Houses

Why is it significant?

Welcome to the street that launched a thousand photographs. Walk slowly along Kiremit Caddesi and watch the houses: narrow, tall, a little crooked, painted raspberry, ochre, mint and sky blue, their upper floors pushing out over the pavement.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Welcome to the street that launched a thousand photographs. Walk slowly along Kiremit Caddesi and watch the houses: narrow, tall, a little crooked, painted raspberry, ochre, mint and sky blue, their upper floors pushing out over the pavement.

Those overhanging bays are called cumba, and they were never just decoration. In a crowded quarter, a bay gave you an extra slice of room upstairs, a view down the street in both directions and, for the women of the house, a way to watch street life without being watched. Most of these houses date from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rebuilt in brick or timber after fire after fire, because in old Istanbul fire was the great town planner.

Balat was for centuries the main Jewish quarter of the city, with Fener as its Greek neighbour and Armenians living among both. The name probably comes from the Greek palation, palace, after the imperial palace of Blachernae up the hill. In the twentieth century the old families left... Jewish families for Galata and the new districts, or for Israel after 1948; Greeks after 1955 and 1964. Migrants from the Black Sea coast and Anatolia moved into the empty rooms, and the quarter grew poor and damp, flooded now and then by a Golden Horn that had become an open sewer.

Then came two rescues. The Golden Horn was cleaned up from the 1980s onwards, and in the 2000s a programme supported by the European Union restored around a hundred houses in Fener and Balat. Television series came to film, then the photographers arrived, and the colours of a once-poor quarter became a backdrop for wedding shoots. Some neighbours love it, some are tired of it, and you may hear both opinions from the same doorstep.

Look for the small things: a date carved over a door, an old marble threshold worn into a dip, iron shutters on the ground floors where shops once were. Keep walking north-west through the lanes until you reach a quiet street with a plain high wall and a guarded door. Behind it hides the oldest synagogue in Istanbul.