Neighbours of the Golden Horn: Fener, Balat and Istanbul's Greek, Jewish, Armenian and Bulgarian Quarters

From a sultan's hilltop mosque to the shut gate of the Patriarchate, an iron church, a ship-shaped synagogue, a holy spring and the mosaics of the Chora: Istanbul's minorities, street by street

Istanbul · 11 stops · 27 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Yavuz Selim Mosque: A Sultan's View over the Golden Horn

   Yavuz Sultan Selim, Yavuz Selim Caddesi, 34083 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Walk through the garden to the low wall behind the mosque, and the Golden Horn suddenly opens beneath you, a long silver blade laid between the hills. At the foot of this slope lies a jumble of tiled roofs, church domes and one huge red-brick building that looks like a castle. That is where this walk is going.

   First, the mosque at your back. It stands on the fifth of Istanbul's seven hills and is named after Sultan Selim the First, whom the Turks call Yavuz, the Stern. In eight years on the throne he took Syria and Egypt in 1516 and 1517 and came home as protector of Mecca and Medina, roughly doubling his empire. He died in 1520, and it was his son, Süleyman the Magnificent, who finished the mosque around 1522. Selim lies in the octagonal tomb in the garden.

   Step inside and notice how plain it is. One great dome, about twenty-four metres across, on a square hall... no cascade of half-domes, no showing off. Architects admire it for exactly that: the strongest of the early imperial mosques, built just before the great Sinan changed everything. And just behind it lies a hollow bigger than a football pitch, the open-air Byzantine cistern of Aspar from the fifth century, which for generations held not water but vegetable gardens.

   Now look down again at the quarter below. The empire Selim enlarged was never run as one people. Orthodox Christians, Armenians and Jews were organised as separate communities, each with its own religious leader, schools and courts for family matters. Historians call it the millet system. It was not equality... non-Muslims paid an extra tax and lived under rules about dress and buildings... but it let whole worlds survive side by side for centuries, and nowhere did they live closer together than in Fener and Balat.

   Greeks around their patriarch, Jews around their synagogues, Armenians and Bulgarians around their churches, all within a few minutes of each other. Most of those families are gone now, and the reasons are part of today's story. Take the lanes downhill towards the water... it is steep, so mind your knees... and look for a high wall with a closed gate in the middle and a door at the side.

2. 2. Ecumenical Patriarchate & St George's: The Gate Shut Since 1821

   Dr. Sadrazam Ali Paşa Caddesi No:35, Fener, 34083 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Stand in front of the high wall and find the main gate in the middle, firmly shut. Visitors and priests come and go through a smaller door to the side. Nobody uses the middle one. Nobody has used it for two hundred years.

   On Easter Sunday 1821, just after the liturgy, Ottoman officials hanged Patriarch Gregory the Fifth from that gate, still in his vestments. The Greek War of Independence had just broken out, and the sultan held the head of all his Orthodox subjects responsible for the revolt. The body hung there for three days and was then thrown into the water. Greek sailors recovered it and carried it to Odessa, and in 1871 it was taken to Athens, where he is venerated as a saint and martyr. The gate was closed behind him and has stayed closed ever since, a door turned into a memorial.

   The patriarchs have not always lived here. For more than a thousand years they served in Hagia Sophia, then after 1453 in other churches of the city, including the Pammakaristos you will see later on this walk. Only around 1601 did they settle in this corner of Fener, whose name comes from the Greek Phanari, a lantern or lighthouse. The Church of St George in the courtyard was rebuilt in the 1700s and looks like a parish church from outside. Inside there is a blaze of gilded, carved wood, and a fragment of a column that tradition says is the pillar at which Christ was scourged.

   In 2004 Pope John Paul the Second returned relics of two great archbishops of Constantinople, Gregory the Theologian and John Chrysostom, taken to Rome by crusaders after the sack of 1204. They rest in this church again, eight centuries after they left. The man who received them, Patriarch Bartholomew, has held the office since 1991, first among equals in the Orthodox world.

   And yet the Greek community outside these walls has shrunk to a few thousand people in the whole city. By Turkish law the patriarch must be a Turkish citizen, so the pool of possible successors is very small. How does an institution survive like that? Stubbornly. Now go down to the waterfront road and turn left along the Golden Horn, until you see a church that looks as if it were made of dark lace.

3. 3. Bulgarian St Stephen's Church: The Iron Church

   Mürselpaşa Caddesi No:85, Balat, 34087 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Step into the little park by the water and take in the church in front of you: pale walls, slender columns, a bell tower and a crown of domes topped with crosses. It looks like stone. If you get close enough to tap a column with your knuckle, though, you hear a hollow, metallic answer... because almost everything you see is cast iron.

   Why iron? The story begins with a quarrel. In the nineteenth century, the Bulgarians of the Ottoman Empire wanted services and schools in their own language, not in Greek under the Patriarchate up the road. In 1870 the sultan granted them their own church, the Bulgarian Exarchate, and two years later the Patriarchate declared it schismatic. The Bulgarians of Istanbul already worshipped in a wooden church on this plot by the shore, and they wanted something grander. The usual explanation for the iron is the ground itself: soft land by the Golden Horn, poorly suited to heavy masonry.

   So they ordered a prefabricated church. It was designed by the Armenian architect Hovsep Aznavur, and its parts were cast in Vienna by the Waagner company, numbered, shipped down the Danube and across the Black Sea, and bolted together on this spot. It was consecrated in 1898. Even the ornaments, capitals and columns are metal, painted to look like stone and marble. Very few iron churches exist anywhere in the world, and this is the one people cross the city to see.

   Iron and salty air are not good friends. By the 2000s the church was badly corroded and had to close for years of restoration, carried out jointly by Turkey and Bulgaria. It reopened in January 2018, with the leaders of both countries at the ceremony. Look for the fresh paint and the careful repairs on the old metal.

   Notice the irony. A church built to stand apart from the Greek patriarch, a short stroll from his door, and today both communities are small islands of memory in the same neighbourhood. Now cross the road and climb inland, up the steep lanes. Above the rooftops you will see a red-brick fortress with a dome... head for it.

4. 4. The Red Castle & St Mary of the Mongols

   Tevkii Cafer Mektebi Sokak, Fener, 34087 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Catch your breath on the slope and look up at the enormous red-brick building with towers and a dome on top, the kind of thing that should be guarding a border, not teaching Greek grammar. Locals call it the Red Castle. It is the Phanar Greek Orthodox College, and it is a school.

   The school traces its history back to 1454, a year after the conquest, when the patriarchate reopened a school for the Orthodox community. That makes it one of the oldest Greek schools still working anywhere. Princes, patriarchs, translators and ministers of the Ottoman Greek world sat in its classrooms. The building in front of you was finished in 1883 to a design by the architect Konstantinos Dimadis. Today it has only a few dozen pupils, and the corridors built for hundreds echo.

   Now look just below the school at the small church with an uneven dome behind its wall. In 1265 the Byzantine emperor Michael the Eighth sent his daughter Maria to marry the Mongol ruler of Persia, Hulagu. Hulagu died before she arrived, so she married his son Abaqa instead. After some seventeen years at the Mongol court, widowed, she came home and refounded this convent, where she lived as a nun. That is why it is called St Mary of the Mongols.

   And here is the remarkable part. This is the only Byzantine church in Istanbul that has never been converted into a mosque. The story goes that Mehmed the Conqueror granted it to the family of Christodoulos, the Greek architect of his own mosque, and that when officials later tried to take it, the community produced the sultan's decree. Its Turkish name, Kanlı Kilise, means the Bloody Church, after the fighting said to have raged on this slope in 1453.

   In the early 1950s the Greeks of Istanbul still numbered many tens of thousands. Then came the pogrom of September 1955, when mobs attacked Greek homes, shops and churches across the city, and in 1964 the expulsion of Greek citizens. The empty desks of the Red Castle are where that history ends up. From here, follow the lane west along the hillside towards a Byzantine church that wears a minaret.

5. 5. Fethiye Mosque & the Pammakaristos Mosaics

   Fethiye Kapısı Sokak, Balat, 34087 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

   In front of you stands a Byzantine church wearing a minaret: walls of brick and stone laid in stripes, rows of small arched windows, domes like upturned bowls. This is the Fethiye Mosque, which for most of its life was the Church of the Pammakaristos, the All-Blessed Mother of God.

   It was built as a monastery church in the Byzantine centuries, and around 1310 it gained an exquisite side chapel, commissioned by Maria, the widow of the general Michael Glabas Tarchaneiotes, to hold his tomb. Then came 1453. Hagia Sophia became a mosque, and the patriarch moved first to the Church of the Holy Apostles and then, in 1456, here. For more than a century, this building was the heart of the Orthodox world.

   In 1587 the patriarch had to leave, and in 1591 Sultan Murad the Third turned the church into a mosque. He named it Fethiye, the Mosque of Conquest, to celebrate his campaigns in Georgia and Azerbaijan. Inner walls and arcades were knocked through to make one wide prayer hall. The patriarchate wandered between churches for a few years before settling at St George's in Fener, where you stood earlier.

   But the side chapel survived, and it has long been kept as a museum. Step inside and look up into its small dome: Christ Pantokrator, ringed by twelve prophets, glinting gold after seven hundred years. In the apse, Christ Hyperagathos, the Supremely Good, flanked by the Virgin and John the Baptist. Together with Hagia Sophia and the Chora, where this walk ends, it is one of the richest treasuries of late Byzantine mosaic in the city, and often you will have it almost to yourself.

   One building, two faiths, one wall between them. Before you leave, walk round the outside and look closely at the brickwork, where the Byzantine masons laid bricks in little patterns and bands, like a signature. Then head downhill, north-east, into Balat, where the houses start putting on their colours.

6. 6. Kiremit Caddesi: Balat's Coloured Houses

   Kiremit Caddesi, Balat, 34087 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

   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.

7. 7. Ahrida Synagogue: The Ship in the Prayer Hall

   Kürkçü Çeşmesi Sokak No:9, Balat, 34087 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

   From the street you would never guess. A high wall, a plain gate, perhaps a guard, maybe a cat dozing on the step. Behind it stands Ahrida, the oldest synagogue in Istanbul.

   The name is the clue. Ahrida is how the Jews of the city pronounced Ohrid, a lake town in today's North Macedonia. Greek-speaking Romaniote Jews from there founded the synagogue in the fifteenth century, before or around the Ottoman conquest. Then, in 1492, Spain expelled its Jews, and Sultan Bayezid the Second welcomed many of them into his empire. The Sephardim arrived with their Ladino language, their songs and their recipes, and over time they absorbed the older congregations, this one included.

   Inside, in the middle of the hall, stands the teva, the platform from which the Torah is read, and it is shaped like the bow of a ship. Some say it recalls Noah's Ark; others say it remembers the ships that carried the exiles from Spain. Either way, you climb into a boat to read the scroll, which is a rather beautiful image for a community that arrived by sea.

   And one more story. In the seventeenth century a self-proclaimed messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, set Jewish communities from Yemen to Amsterdam on fire with hope, and tradition says he once preached from this very teva. In 1666 he was brought before the sultan's court and converted to Islam, to the despair of his followers. Whether he really stood here, nobody can prove... but the story is told with relish.

   The synagogue was restored in 1992, for the five hundredth anniversary of the Sephardic arrival. Balat once had many synagogues; only a handful survive, and the families who filled them now live in other districts or other countries. Continue along the lane past the little Yanbol Synagogue, named after a town in Bulgaria, and a few steps on you will find an Armenian church built over a holy spring.

8. 8. Surp Hreşdagabet: The Armenian Church of the Holy Archangels

   Kamış Sokak, Balat, 34087 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Slip through the gate on this narrow lane and you are suddenly in a courtyard that feels like a village: a church, a few trees, a bench, a cat or two, and the noise of Balat strangely far away. This is Surp Hreşdagabet, the Church of the Holy Archangels.

   It is one of the oldest Armenian churches in Istanbul. The site held a Byzantine Greek church before it passed to the Armenian community in the seventeenth century, and the building you see is a nineteenth-century rebuilding after the fires that kept sweeping these lanes. Armenians had lived in the city since Byzantine times, and tradition dates their patriarchate here to 1461, when Mehmed the Conqueror gave the community its own religious head, just as he had done for the Greeks.

   The treasure of this church lies underneath it. Below the church runs an ayazma, a holy spring, believed to heal. What surprises visitors is who comes for it: Armenians and Greeks, but also Muslim neighbours, who light a candle, take a sip of the water and make a wish, especially on feast days. In this city, faith has always had porous borders... a saint's spring does not ask for your passport.

   This community carries a heavy history too. On the 24th of April 1915, Ottoman authorities arrested hundreds of Armenian writers, doctors, clergy and politicians in Istanbul and deported them to the interior; most never came back. Armenians around the world remember that date every year as the beginning of the deportations and massacres of 1915. The Armenians of Istanbul today are a community of some tens of thousands, still the largest Christian community in Turkey, with their own schools, newspapers and patriarch.

   And yet the candles here are still lit, and the spring still runs. Now leave the courtyard and follow Ayvansaray Caddesi north-west, parallel to the water, for about ten minutes, to the place where the land walls come down to the Golden Horn. There, in a quiet garden, is a tiny church that once guarded the most precious relic of Constantinople.

9. 9. Blachernae: The Church of the Virgin's Robe

   Ayvansaray, 34087 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Step through the gate into a quiet garden with trees and a small, low church at the back, almost like a village chapel. Yet this patch of ground was once one of the holiest places in the entire Byzantine world: Blachernae, the shrine of the Mother of God.

   Around the middle of the fifth century, Empress Pulcheria began a great church here, over a sacred spring just inside the city walls, and it was completed under Emperor Leo the First. It became home to the robe of the Virgin, a relic said to have been brought from Palestine. Later the emperors built a palace on the hill right above, and under the Komnenos dynasty, Blachernae became the real centre of power in Constantinople.

   In 626, while Emperor Heraclius was away fighting the Persians, an army of Avars and Slavs besieged the city. Tradition says the patriarch carried the Virgin's robe and her icon along the walls, the Slavic boats in the Golden Horn were destroyed right off this shore, and the city was saved. The Akathist, the great Orthodox hymn of thanksgiving to the Virgin, is linked by tradition to that deliverance, and it is still sung in Orthodox churches around the world.

   The great church burned in 1434, just nineteen years before Constantinople fell. What you see now is a modest church built in 1867 over the same spring. Look for the ayazma itself, a basin of holy water from which Orthodox visitors still drink and fill small bottles to take home. Fifteen centuries of prayer, and it all comes down to one thin trickle of water.

   The emperors' palace has not quite vanished, either. Outside, the land walls start their long climb away from the water. Follow them uphill... it is a steady climb, take your time... to the brick-and-marble façade of the last surviving Byzantine palace in the city.

10. 10. Tekfur Palace: The Palace of the Porphyrogenitus

    Şişhane Caddesi, Ayvansaray, 34087 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

    There it is, set right against the city walls: a three-storey façade of red brick and white marble laid in chequerboards and stripes, a row of arched windows on the top floor, the ghost of a balcony. This is Tekfur Palace, the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus, the best-preserved Byzantine palace in Istanbul.

    It was built in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century as part of the Blachernae palace complex, when the emperors preferred living up here by the land walls to the crumbling Great Palace by the sea. Porphyrogenitus means born in the purple, the title of children born to a reigning emperor in the purple chamber of the palace. Its Turkish name comes from tekfur, the word the Ottomans used for Byzantine rulers and lords. In 1453 the final assault raged along these same walls.

    And then the palace began a long, strange afterlife. At one point, it is said, it housed the sultan's menagerie, with an elephant and a giraffe. In the early eighteenth century the grand vizier Nevşehirli İbrahim Pasha set up a tile workshop here to revive the lost glory of İznik, and the blue-and-white Tekfur Palace tiles still decorate mosques around the city. Later it served as a poorhouse for Jewish families, and then as a bottle factory.

    By the late twentieth century the palace was a roofless shell, with houses and workshops pressed against it. A long restoration followed, and in 2019 it reopened as a museum, telling its whole story from Byzantine court to Ottoman kiln. Stand back from the façade and imagine the windows lit for a court feast, with the whole Golden Horn glittering below.

    One building, and almost every chapter of this city has passed through it: emperors, sultans, potters, the poor and the glassblowers. Now walk south, away from the walls and slightly downhill, through the lanes of Edirnekapı, to a small square with a cluster of domes. Inside them waits one of the greatest picture-books ever made.

11. 11. Kariye Mosque: The Chora and Its Mosaics

    Kariye Camii Sokak No:18, Derviş Ali, 34087 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

    Come into the little square and take in the building before you: a huddle of domes and brick walls, a slim minaret, wooden houses and cafés all around. This is the Kariye Mosque, once the Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora.

    Chora means in the countryside, because the first monastery here stood outside Constantine's walls, among the fields, before the later Theodosian walls swept it into the city. Between around 1315 and 1321, Theodore Metochites, the most powerful and learned statesman of his day, rebuilt and decorated it. He covered it with mosaics and frescoes telling the lives of the Virgin and of Christ, one of the most complete picture cycles of late Byzantine art anywhere.

    Above the door into the nave, Metochites himself kneels in a mosaic, wearing an enormous hat, offering a model of the church to Christ. And in the side chapel, the fresco of the Anastasis: Christ bursting the gates of hell and pulling Adam and Eve out of their tombs by the wrists, as if they weighed nothing at all. Seven hundred years old, and it still moves like a film.

    Metochites fell from power in 1328, lost his fortune and was allowed back here as a monk, where he died among his own pictures in 1332. Around 1511 the church became a mosque, and its images were covered rather than destroyed. In the twentieth century it became a museum, and restorers of the Byzantine Institute of America uncovered the mosaics in the 1940s and 1950s. In 2020 a presidential decree made it a mosque again, and it reopened for prayer in May 2024. Visitors still come, now alongside worshippers.

    So the walk ends with the question it began with: who does a building belong to? From Yavuz Selim's dome to the Patriarchate's shut gate, from an iron church to a ship-shaped synagogue and a spring under an Armenian altar, this corner of Istanbul has always been a city of many neighbours. Find a seat in one of the cafés, order a tea, and listen to the call to prayer drift over the Byzantine domes.