Istanbul

Eyüpsultan

0 galleries · 2 museums · 0 places

About this district

At the top of the Golden Horn, where the two streams feed into it, Eyüp is one of Istanbul's holiest places — built around the tomb of Ayyub al-Ansari, a companion of the Prophet, and the great mosque beside it. It is devout, busy with pilgrims, and old. But the same upper Horn holds two very different draws: santralistanbul, the city's first power station turned art-and-energy museum, and the cable car up to the Pierre Loti Hill, named for the French novelist who sat in its café looking down the whole length of the water. Faith, industry and a view, stacked at the head of the Horn.

Galleries

No published galleries in this district yet.

Museums

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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.