Istanbul

Dolapdere & Piyalepaşa

5 galleries · 1 museum · 0 places

About this district

Walk north from the noise of İstiklal and the ground drops into Dolapdere — until recently one of the last working-class neighbourhoods in central Istanbul, a hillside of auto-repair shops, informal housing and mannequin workshops. Then the galleries came, and they came big. Arter landed here in 2019, an 18,000-square-metre contemporary art museum sheathed in hand-glazed tiles, dropped into the middle of the car mechanics like a spaceship. Around it, the serious commercial galleries took warehouse-scale spaces the old neighbourhood could offer and the aptown never could. The contrast is the whole character: a Grimshaw building and a tyre shop on the same street.

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.