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Çukurcuma is downhill and off the map — the streets that fall away from İstiklal toward Tophane, too steep and too tangled for the crowds to follow. What fills them is antiques. Old furniture, chandeliers, film posters, the accumulated objects of a century of Istanbul households, spilling out of shop after shop down the slope. And in the middle of it, in a wooden corner house, Orhan Pamuk built the Museum of Innocence — 83 vitrines, one for each chapter of his novel, filled with the everyday objects of a 1970s Istanbul love affair. A museum made out of a book, set in the neighbourhood the book is about. Cihangir, the ridge above, is the café-and-writer quarter that leans into it.
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The twenty-first edition welcomes seventeen new exhibitors while navigating regional economic headwinds
A look at how the Istanbul fair balances local momentum with international growth against a backdrop of macroeconomic volatility.
Aerial surveys and optical distortions reshape how we perceive landscape and history
Borusan Contemporary presents Olivo Barbieri's first Turkish solo show, examining how elevated perspectives and manipulated focus transform familiar terrains into abstract compositions.
How the pomegranate became one of the most confidently named motifs in Islamic ornament — and one of the least confidently identified — across a thousand years of tile, silk and stucco, with meanings we mostly attached later.
A slab of sixth-century plaster in the Met shows a fruit you recognise at a glance: a pomegranate, and surely it means paradise. Hold that certainty up to the light and it dissolves. Across a thousand years of tile, silk and stucco, the pomegranate is the shape we name most confidently and identify least — blurring into the artichoke and the palmette, its meanings attached by later viewers, its very name partly a nineteenth-century invention
A demon catalogue in the conqueror's library, a sixteenth-century text where kingship is an office held seventy thousand times, and the columns a sultan dragged across three provinces to prove he held it.
Mehmed II kept a Greek catalogue of demons in his library at Topkapı. Seventy years later a sultan named for a prophet was rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem and hauling Roman columns out of Egypt and the Lebanon into a mosque above the Golden Horn. In between, Ottoman writers turned Solomon from a warning into a job — and the empire applied for it in stone.
