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Istanbul, Street by Street: 12 Books That Walk You Through the City
12
items I was born and raised in Istanbul, and these are the books that get the city right — not the postcard with the domes at sunset, but the streets people actually live on. I've sorted them by where they take place rather than by date or author, so you c...
Sections
4
Inside the walls: the Historic Peninsula
Beyoğlu: the loud half
The Bosphorus and the hills above it
The edges, and the night
Inside the walls: the Historic Peninsula
Sultanahmet, Süleymaniye, Eminönü and the Byzantine land walls — the part of Istanbul that is a thousand years deep and that most visitors only see between nine and five. These four move through it at street level rather than from a viewpoint: a murd...
A crime novel that uses the seven hills as its map — bodies turn up at monuments, and solving it means walking from Sultanahmet out to the Yedikule walls the way an archaeologist would rather than the way a tourist does. Ümit is the biggest crime wri...
A Memento For İstanbul: A Novel
Sixteenth-century Istanbul from inside the scaffolding: Mimar Sinan's apprentice, an elephant, and the actual business of getting a dome to stand up without it falling on anyone. If you've looked at the Süleymaniye from across the Golden Horn and won...
The Architect's Apprentice
Ottoman Istanbul as a fever dream — inventors, machines that shouldn't work, and a Golden Horn full of chancers, told in the register of a folk tale that has decided to become philosophy halfway through. Anar is the writer Turkish readers name when t...
The Book of Devices
A hundred and twenty pages about boys catching birds to sell in the Süleymaniye courtyard to people who buy them in order to set them free — a tradition that was already dying when Kemal wrote it and has since gone completely. It's the saddest thing ...
The Birds Have Also Gone
Beyoğlu: the loud half
Cihangir, İstiklal, Tarlabaşı, Çukurcuma — apartment buildings, class, and the thing Istanbul does where two completely different cities share one staircase. Read this section if you're staying anywhere near Taksim, because all three books are about ...
Ten flats in one crumbling Cihangir apartment block and a smell nobody can locate. It's funny, which people don't expect from a novel about class in Istanbul, and it gets the exact texture of Beyoğlu right — the rubbish, the street dogs, the neighbou...
The Flea Palace
Four men in an underground cell telling each other stories about the city over their heads — a Decameron in which Istanbul is the thing everyone is trying to remember correctly. The whole book sits in the gap between the city you walk through and the...
Istanbul, Istanbul
The only book on this list you can walk into. Çukurcuma is a real street, the museum is a real house on it, and there is a ticket printed inside the novel that gets you in free — you read about an object for four hundred pages and then go and look at...
The Museum of Innocence
The Bosphorus and the hills above it
Water, wooden houses falling down, and the particular Istanbul sadness that has a word of its own. These three are the slow ones — not much happens in any of them, and that is the point: they're about looking at the city rather than moving through it...
The masterpiece. One day in Istanbul stretched across an entire novel — Kandilli, Emirgân, the currents at Bebek, the second-hand book market — with Turkish classical music running underneath it and the East-and-West question that every writer of tha...
A Mind at Peace
If you read one book before your first trip, make it this one. Pamuk's memoir of growing up in Nişantaşı among the wreckage of an empire nobody in the family would discuss, and the book that taught the rest of the world the word hüzün — the collectiv...
Istanbul: Memories and the City (The Illustrated Edition)
Short stories about fishermen, ferry passengers and men sitting in coffeehouses doing absolutely nothing — Sait Faik is the writer Turkish people quote without realising they're quoting anyone. Most of these are set on Burgazada, where his house is n...
A Useless Man: Selected Stories by Sait Faik Abasıyanık
The edges, and the night
Where the city actually grew over the last fifty years: hills that were shanty towns in 1970 and are towers now, and the people who walked up them carrying things. This section explains contemporary Istanbul better than any guidebook will, and the li...
People build a neighbourhood on a rubbish tip outside the city, the wind knocks it down, they build it again. Tekin grew up in exactly this kind of place and wrote it as folklore rather than social realism, which is why it has lasted — it reads like ...
Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills
If you take one book, take this one. Forty-three years of Mevlüt walking the streets at night selling boza, from 1969 to 2012, while the hills he climbs turn from shanty towns into towers — Tarlabaşı, Kasımpaşa, Kuştepe, Duatepe. Other characters kee...
A Strangeness in My Mind