Across the Golden Horn: Hidden Galata and Pera, Istanbul

From the fishermen on the Galata Bridge to an underground mosque, a Gothic church turned minaret, the Kamondo Steps, the Genoese tower, the whirling dervishes, the world's second-oldest underground line and the grand hotels of old Pera

Istanbul · 12 stops · 27 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Galata Bridge: Fishermen over the Golden Horn

   Galata Köprüsü, Karaköy, 34420 Beyoğlu/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Stop in the middle of the bridge and lean on the railing between two fishermen. Their rods hang over the water like a fringe, buckets of tiny silvery fish stand at their feet, and behind you the domes and minarets of the old city pile up on their hills.

   The water below is the Golden Horn, the long natural harbour that made this city possible. For most of history there was no bridge here at all. People crossed in rowing boats called caiques, and the boatmen were a powerful guild. The first bridge across this stretch opened in 1845, made of wood and floating on pontoons. The bridge you are standing on is the fifth, opened in 1994. Its predecessor, a floating iron bridge of 1912, was badly damaged by fire in 1992, and its sections were towed away up the Horn.

   Now for a bridge that was never built. In 1502, Leonardo da Vinci wrote to Sultan Bayezid II offering to span the Golden Horn with a single elegant arch. His sketch survives in one of his notebooks. The sultan never took up the offer, and the idea slept for five centuries, until in 2001 a small footbridge on Leonardo's design was built... in Norway, of all places.

   Look across to the far shore. That hillside, crowned by a round stone tower, was once another city. Galata was a walled colony of Genoese merchants, with its own laws, its own churches and its own podestà, living face to face with Byzantine Constantinople across this water. Later it became Pera, the quarter of embassies, banks, hotels and cafés, where Ottoman İstanbul learned to speak French.

   That is where we are going: up the hill, through the back doors of that other city. It is a steep walk, so take it slowly. Walk to the Karaköy end of the bridge, cross at the lights, and turn right along the waterfront street. In a couple of minutes you will find a low doorway that leads down, not up, into one of the strangest mosques in the city.

2. 2. Yeraltı Camii: The Underground Mosque

   Kemankeş Karamustafa Paşa, Kemankeş Caddesi, Karaköy, Beyoğlu/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Go down the few steps and let your eyes adjust. The ceiling is so low you could almost touch it, and the room is a forest of thick, squat pillars holding up heavy brick vaults. Carpets cover the floor, a few lamps glow, and the street noise has vanished.

   This is the Yeraltı Camii, the Underground Mosque. These vaults are generally thought to be the basement of the Byzantine Castle of Galata, the fortress that guarded the northern end of the most famous barrier in the city: a great iron chain, stretched across the mouth of the Golden Horn on floating timbers, to keep enemy fleets out of the harbour.

   The chain worked, mostly. In 1204 the knights of the Fourth Crusade stormed this castle and broke it, and the city fell to them. In 1453 the chain held, and Mehmed II solved the problem in another way: his men dragged dozens of ships overland, on greased logs, across the hills behind Galata, and launched them into the Golden Horn behind the chain. Imagine the defenders waking up to see warships where no ships could be.

   Now walk to the tombs at the side, behind their green cloths. Legend says that here lie two Arab warriors, Abu Sufyan and Amiri Wahbi, who fell during the early Arab sieges of Constantinople in the seventh and eighth centuries. The story goes that a holy man saw their resting place in a dream, and in the eighteenth century the dark vaults were cleaned out and turned into a mosque around them.

   So in one cellar you have a crusader conquest, an Ottoman conquest, and a legend from the first Arab fleets. Not bad for a room most people walk past on the way to a coffee. Come back out into the light, walk back past the end of the bridge, and keep going west through the busy hardware lanes of Karaköy. Look up for a tall square tower that looks as if it has strayed in from Italy.

3. 3. Arap Camii: The Gothic Church that Became a Mosque

   Arap Cami, Galata Mahkemesi Sokağı, 34420 Beyoğlu/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Stand in the courtyard and look up at the minaret. Something is off. It is square, made of stone, with narrow pointed windows and a pointed roof instead of a balcony and a spire. That is because it was built as a church bell tower.

   Around 1325, Dominican friars in Genoese Galata built a large church here, dedicated to Saint Paul and later known as San Domenico. It is the only medieval Gothic church building surviving in Istanbul, a little piece of Genoa or Siena dropped among the workshops of Karaköy. After the Ottoman conquest, Mehmed II converted it into a mosque.

   Then came its name. In 1492 the Catholic monarchs completed the conquest of Granada, and in the decades that followed, Muslims and Jews were driven out of Spain. Many found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, and the mosque was given to the Muslim refugees from Andalusia. Locals called them Arabs, and the building has been the Arap Camii, the Arab Mosque, ever since.

   There is an older legend, too. Some say a mosque was founded on this spot by the Arab commander Maslama during the great siege of Constantinople in 717 and 718, and that the church simply took its place. There is no evidence for it, but it is the kind of story that a city with this many layers loves to tell.

   The building keeps its secrets well. During restoration work early in the twentieth century, gravestones of Genoese families were found beneath the floor, carved with coats of arms and Latin inscriptions. Inside, beneath a wooden roof, the long hall still has the proportions of a friars' church. Now walk back east a few steps to the wide street of old banks, Bankalar Caddesi, and look for a pair of curving staircases climbing the hill like a ribbon.

4. 4. The Kamondo Steps & Bankalar Caddesi

   Bankalar Caddesi, Karaköy, 34420 Beyoğlu/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Stand at the bottom of the staircase and follow it with your eyes as it climbs the slope in two curving flights, crossing and folding back on itself like a piece of ribbon, with little terraces where the curves meet. It is a staircase, nothing more... and it is one of the most photographed places in the city.

   Behind you runs Bankalar Caddesi, the Street of Banks. In the late nineteenth century this was the Wall Street of the Ottoman Empire. The grand stone building nearby, with its two faces, was the headquarters of the Ottoman Bank, designed by Alexandre Vallaury and opened in 1892. Bankers, brokers and money changers worked shoulder to shoulder here, Greek, Armenian, Jewish, Levantine and Turkish.

   The greatest of them was Abraham Salomon Camondo, head of a Sephardic Jewish banking family, sometimes called the Rothschild of the East. He helped finance the Ottoman state, founded modern schools for his community, and built whole blocks of Galata. The steps were built at his family's expense, probably in the 1870s. The story goes that he wanted his children to have a safe way down the hill... or that he simply wanted a quicker way from his house to his bank. Take your pick.

   The family's ending is a sad one. The Camondos moved to Paris, where a grandson, Nissim, was killed as a pilot in 1917, and in the Second World War the last of the line, Béatrice de Camondo, was deported with her children and murdered at Auschwitz. Abraham Salomon himself, who died in Paris in 1873, was brought back to be buried in İstanbul, in the old Jewish cemetery at Hasköy on the Golden Horn.

   Climb slowly and notice the shapes the shadows make. In 1964 the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed these steps, and the picture made them famous far beyond Turkey. At the top, turn right, and the round stone tower is suddenly straight ahead, looming over the narrow street.

5. 5. Galata Tower: The Genoese Tower of Christ

   Bereketzade, Galata Kulesi, 34421 Beyoğlu/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Walk into the little square and turn slowly around the base of the tower. The stone walls are several metres thick, the windows are narrow slits, and the pointed cone on top seems to float above the rooftops of Galata.

   The Genoese built it in 1348 and called it the Tower of Christ. It was the highest point of the walls of their colony, a self-governing trading town that the Byzantine emperors had granted them in the thirteenth century. Galata had its own walls, its own podestà sent from Genoa, and a fleet that sometimes fought the emperor whose city lay across the water. Allies, rivals, neighbours... it was complicated.

   In 1453, while Constantinople fell, Galata surrendered by treaty, and the Genoese kept their homes and churches in exchange for loyalty to the sultan. The Ottomans used the tower for many things over the centuries: a lookout, a store, at times a prison, and above all a fire watchtower, from which guards scanned the wooden city and raised the alarm. The pointed cap you see today dates from a restoration in the 1960s.

   And then there is the flight. According to the seventeenth-century traveller Evliya Çelebi, a scholar called Hezarfen Ahmed Çelebi strapped on eagle-like wings, jumped from this tower, and glided all the way across the Bosphorus to Üsküdar. The sultan, the story goes, rewarded him with a purse of gold, then sent him into exile, because a man who could fly was too dangerous to keep around. Historians doubt every part of it. Istanbul loves it anyway.

   Look at the cafés around the square and the old houses leaning together. This was the heart of a Latin Catholic town for nearly two hundred years before the conquest, and its alleys still follow the medieval plan. Now leave the square by the street running uphill to the north-east, Serdar-ı Ekrem, and look out for a steep-roofed Gothic church that seems to have been lifted out of an English village.

6. 6. The Crimean Memorial Church

   Serdar-ı Ekrem Sokağı, Beyoğlu/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Find the gate in the wall, step into the small overgrown garden, and you could be in an English village. Pale stone, a steep roof, pointed windows, buttresses... all of it squeezed between the apartment blocks of a Galata back street.

   This is the Crimean Memorial Church, also called Christ Church, and it was built between 1858 and 1868 in memory of the British soldiers who died in the Crimean War. In that war, from 1853 to 1856, Britain and France fought alongside the Ottoman Empire against Russia. The land for the church was a gift from Sultan Abdülmecid, a gesture between allies.

   The architect was George Edmund Street, one of the leading Gothic Revival architects of Victorian Britain, who later designed the Royal Courts of Justice in London. So in a lane of Ottoman Galata you are looking at the same hand that shaped one of London's great Gothic buildings. The style was a statement: this is our church, built the way we build at home.

   The Crimean War touched this city deeply. Across the Bosphorus, in the huge Selimiye Barracks in Üsküdar, Florence Nightingale and her nurses fought cholera, dysentery and chaos in the military hospital, and the reforms she pushed for changed nursing forever. Thousands of soldiers never went home, and many of them are buried in the British cemetery on the Asian shore.

   For years after the British community shrank, the church fell into neglect, damp and half-forgotten, before restoration brought it back into use. Today it is one of those places that even many İstanbul locals have never noticed, which is exactly what makes it worth the detour. Now cut back west through the narrow lanes to Galip Dede Caddesi, the steep street of music shops, and look for a gateway into a garden of tilted gravestones. Behind it, the dervishes once turned.

7. 7. Galata Mevlevi Lodge: The Whirling Dervishes

   Şahkulu, Galip Dede Caddesi No:15, 34421 Beyoğlu/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Step through the gate and the steep, noisy street is gone. In front of you lies a quiet garden of gravestones, many of them topped with tall stone hats shaped like a felt cap. That cap, the sikke, is the sign of the Mevlevi dervishes, and this was their home in Galata.

   The Galata Mevlevihanesi was founded in 1491, the first Mevlevi lodge in İstanbul. The order follows the teaching of Celaleddin Rumi, the thirteenth-century poet of Konya, and its prayer is the sema, the turning ceremony that the West calls whirling. The dervish turns with the right palm open to the sky and the left palm turned down to the earth: receiving from above, passing it on below.

   Go into the semahane, the octagonal wooden hall, rebuilt in the late eighteenth century. Musicians sat in the gallery with reed flutes and drums, and the dervishes turned on the polished floor beneath. Sultan Selim III, himself a composer, was close to the order. In the lodge lies the poet Şeyh Galip, sheikh of this lodge, who died in 1799, and whose long poem Beauty and Love is a classic of Ottoman literature. The steep street outside, Galip Dede, carries his name.

   Now look among the graves for a stone with a strange story. Here lies Humbaracı Ahmed Pasha, born in France as Claude Alexandre, Count de Bonneval. He was a general who quarrelled with half the courts of Europe, came to the Ottomans, converted to Islam, and reorganised the sultan's corps of bombardiers. He died in 1747, a French count in a dervish cemetery.

   In 1925 the young Republic closed all the dervish lodges, and the music stopped here for decades. The building reopened as a museum, and the sema itself is now recognised by UNESCO as part of the cultural heritage of humanity. When you are ready, climb the last part of Galip Dede to the top, where the street opens onto a small square, a red tram, and a hole in the ground that has been carrying people up this hill since 1875.

8. 8. Tünel, İstiklal Avenue & the Nostalgic Tram

   Tünel Meydanı, İstiklal Caddesi, 34433 Beyoğlu/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Stand in the little square at the bottom of İstiklal and wait for the bell. A small red-and-cream tram comes rattling round the turn, the driver clangs at the crowd, and right beside you, under a modest station building, a train you cannot see is climbing up through the hill.

   That hidden train is the Tünel. It opened in 1875, which makes it the second-oldest underground railway in the world, after the London Underground. It is a funicular, two cars pulled up and down a single tunnel of about five hundred and seventy metres, climbing some sixty metres from Karaköy to here. A French engineer, Eugène-Henri Gavand, is said to have had the idea after watching thousands of people toil up the steep stairs of Galata every day.

   The story goes that in the first days passengers did not trust it, so it carried animals and freight before people would ride. Today the trip takes a couple of minutes, and nobody gives it a second thought.

   Now look up the avenue. This is İstiklal Caddesi, once the Grande Rue de Péra, the main street of a district where embassies, Levantine merchants, Greek and Armenian shopkeepers, cinemas, patisseries and arcades lived side by side. It was renamed İstiklal, Independence, after the founding of the Republic. The great buildings behind the gates were embassies when this was the Ottoman capital, and most are consulates today. The little tram returned in 1990, as a nostalgic line running to Taksim.

   Remember too the darkest night of this street. On 6 and 7 September 1955, rioting mobs attacked homes, shops, schools and churches of the Greek community across the city, and Armenian and Jewish property too. İstiklal was among the worst hit. The Greek community of İstanbul never recovered its numbers. Now leave the avenue for a moment: take the street to your left to Meşrutiyet Caddesi, where an old hotel has become a museum with one very famous painting.

9. 9. Pera Museum: The Tortoise Trainer

   Asmalı Mescit, Meşrutiyet Caddesi No:65, Tepebaşı, Beyoğlu/İstanbul, Türkiye

   Stop in front of the pale, ornate façade on Meşrutiyet Caddesi. It was built in the 1890s as the Bristol Hotel, one of the smart addresses of Pera, and since 2005 it has been the Pera Museum, with a collection of Orientalist paintings, Anatolian weights and measures, and Kütahya tiles and ceramics.

   But most people come for one picture. An old man in a long red robe and a turban stands in a shadowy, tiled room. On his back hangs a reed flute, at his waist a pair of small drums, and at his feet five tortoises are munching leaves. He is trying to train them. They are not paying the slightest attention.

   It is The Tortoise Trainer, painted in 1906 by Osman Hamdi Bey, and the old man is a self-portrait. Osman Hamdi was a remarkable figure: a painter trained in Paris, but also the archaeologist who directed and transformed the Imperial Museum, today's Istanbul Archaeology Museums, and the first Ottoman school of fine arts, in 1882. In 1887, at Sidon in today's Lebanon, his team uncovered the royal tombs that held the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus.

   So what is he really doing with those tortoises? Many people read the painting as a quiet joke about reform: an intellectual trying to teach new tricks to a state that moves at its own slow pace. Others see a gentle comment on patience, or on the artist himself. The painting does not tell you, which is why it has been argued over for a century. It is probably the most beloved painting in Turkey, and its image is printed on everything from posters to cups.

   Do not miss the details: the light falling from the high window, the tiles on the wall, the glow of the robe. When you come out, walk a few steps down the street, past the corner, to a hotel built in 1892 for passengers of the most famous train in the world.

10. 10. Pera Palace Hotel: The Orient Express Hotel

    Evliya Çelebi, Meşrutiyet Caddesi No:52, Tepebaşı, Beyoğlu/İstanbul, Türkiye

    Look at the grand stone hotel on the corner, with its tall windows and the name written proudly across the top. Imagine a carriage pulling up here in the 1890s, porters running out for the trunks, and a lady in a travelling cloak stepping down after three days on the train from Paris.

    The Pera Palace was built in 1892 to give the passengers of the Orient Express somewhere to stay worthy of the journey. The train had begun running from Paris to Constantinople only a few years before, ending at Sirkeci station across the water, and travellers were carried up to Pera to sleep. The architect was Alexandre Vallaury, the same man who designed the Ottoman Bank you passed on Bankalar Caddesi.

    It was a palace of modern wonders: electric light, hot running water, and an electric lift, at a time when most of İstanbul still lived by oil lamps. Through its doors came diplomats, spies, writers and stars. Agatha Christie stayed here, and a room is kept in her memory. Atatürk stayed here too, and his room has been preserved as a small museum.

    Christie gives the hotel its favourite legend. The story goes that she wrote part of Murder on the Orient Express in her room here, and that decades later a medium in Hollywood claimed her spirit revealed a key hidden under the floorboards. Nobody can prove a word of it, and the hotel has never minded.

    The real drama was darker. In March 1941, as the Second World War spread across the Balkans, a bomb hidden in the luggage of the British diplomatic mission arriving from Sofia exploded in the lobby, killing several people. Neutral İstanbul was a nest of intrigue in those years, and this hotel was at its centre. Now walk back along Meşrutiyet, past the museum, and turn right onto İstiklal. Behind a gateway between two apartment blocks, a red brick church waits.

11. 11. St Anthony of Padua: The Red Brick Basilica

    Tomtom, İstiklal Caddesi No:171, 34433 Beyoğlu/İstanbul, Türkiye

    Turn in through the gateway between the two apartment blocks, and the crowds of İstiklal fall away behind you. In front of you rises a church of warm red brick, with pointed arches and slender columns, like something lifted from a canal in Venice.

    This is the Church of St Anthony of Padua, the largest Catholic church in İstanbul. It was built between 1906 and 1912 for the Italian and Levantine Catholic community of Pera, designed by the architect Giulio Mongeri. Notice the clever arrangement: the two apartment blocks on the avenue belong to the church, and their rents helped pay for it, in the same way that the shops under the old mosques paid for the prayer halls above them.

    Now find the statue in the courtyard. It shows Angelo Roncalli, who lived in İstanbul from 1935 to 1944 as the Vatican's apostolic delegate to Turkey, and preached in this church. He learned some Turkish, made friends across the city, and during the war is remembered for helping Jewish refugees. In 1958 he became Pope John XXIII, and İstanbul still remembers him fondly as the Turkish-loving pope.

    Step inside, quietly. On almost any day you will see people of different faiths lighting candles here, Christians and Muslims side by side, and especially on Tuesdays, the day traditionally devoted to Saint Anthony, the patron of lost things. In a city with this much history, there is a lot to look for.

    Pera once had many communities and many churches like this one, and the avenue outside was where they met. Their numbers have shrunk dramatically over the last century, which makes the buildings that remain all the more precious. Come back out onto İstiklal and turn right, up the avenue. In a few minutes the street opens into a small square, where a great iron gate faces a glass-roofed passage. That is the end of the walk.

12. 12. Çiçek Pasajı & the Gate of Galatasaray

    Hüseyinağa, İstiklal Caddesi, Galatasaray, Beyoğlu/İstanbul, Türkiye

    Stand in the small square at Galatasaray and look at the two faces it shows you. On one side, the tall gilded iron gate of a school, with its old trees behind. On the other, a grand stone façade with an arched entrance into a glass-roofed passage, its tables and lamps spilling out.

    The passage is the Çiçek Pasajı, the Flower Passage, built in 1876 as the Cité de Péra, a block of shops and apartments on the site of a theatre that had burned down. Its name came later. After the Russian Revolution, refugees from the old empire poured into İstanbul, and it is said that impoverished émigré women sold flowers here, among them, according to legend, aristocrats with grand names. The flower sellers are gone. The name stayed. Inside, under the glass roof, the old taverns serve meze and rakı to a soundtrack of clinking glasses.

    It almost did not survive. In 1978 part of the building collapsed, and it took a decade of restoration before the passage reopened in 1988. Look up at the façade, and you will see how much of Pera's grand nineteenth-century ambition was saved by that work.

    Now turn to the gate. Galatasaray High School traces its origins to 1481, when Sultan Bayezid II founded a palace school here to train boys for the service of the empire. In 1868 it was refounded as the Mekteb-i Sultani, the Imperial School, teaching in French, and for generations it shaped the diplomats, writers and politicians of Turkey. In 1905 a group of its students founded a football club, and named it after their school. Today half the country cheers for it.

    So here the walk ends, in a square where a medieval palace school, a Parisian-style passage and a football legend all meet. You came up from the fishermen on the bridge, through the vaults of a crusader-era castle, a Gothic church, a dervish garden and a grand hotel. Sit down, order a tea or a rakı, and let Pera carry on around you.