Istanbul

Bağdat Caddesi

0 galleries · 0 museums · 0 places

About this district

Bağdat Caddesi runs fourteen kilometres along the Marmara shore, and for a good stretch of it — Suadiye, Caddebostan, Bostancı — it is the Asian side's answer to İstiklal, a wide, tree-lined boulevard of flagship stores, cafés and apartment blocks for the well-off. It is glossy where Kadıköy is scruffy. The art here reflects that: a scatter of commercial galleries along and just off the avenue, serving the collectors who live in the neighbourhoods around it. This is not a walkable cluster you take in an hour — it is a long boulevard you move along, gallery to gallery, between the shopfronts.

Galleries

No published galleries in this district yet.

Museums

No published museums in this district yet.

Places

No published places in this district yet.

An open, columned tomb pavilion with a padlocked iron gate standing on one side and no walls around it, so the locked gate can simply be walked around.
Editorial

Nasreddin: The Trickster Everyone Claims

A padlocked gate with no walls, two rival graves, and stories told among two dozen peoples: how the wise fool of the Islamic world became a shape every culture fills with itself.

In Akşehir, a tomb said to hold Nasreddin Hodja stands in an open pavilion behind a heavy padlocked gate — with no wall on either side. It is the perfect monument to a man who may not be in it. The stories told under his name belong to more than one tradition and more than one century: Turkish, Persian, Arab, Central Asian, Uyghur. Reformist satirists, Soviet novelists, Chinese animators and UNESCO have each tried to give him a fixed home.