Istanbul

Beyoğlu & İstiklal

4 galleries · 5 museums · 0 places

About this district

İstiklal Caddesi runs a straight kilometre and a half from Taksim down to the Tünel, and a few million people walk it on a good weekend. Most of them never look up. If they did, they would see that the art is stacked above the shopfronts — in blocks like the Mısır Apartmanı, an Art Nouveau building halfway down, galleries occupy the upper floors one per landing, reached by a lift off a crowded pavement. This is the busiest street in Turkey and one of its densest gallery corridors at the same time, and the two facts sit on top of each other without touching. The art is vertical here. You step off the street and the noise drops away.

Galleries

Museums

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.