Istanbul

Fatih & Historic Peninsula

1 gallery · 1 museum · 0 places

About this district

This is the tip of the peninsula where the city began — Sarayburnu, where the Golden Horn meets the Sea of Marmara, and where two empires built their capitals on the same hill. Everything is here, within a few minutes' walk: Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque facing each other across a park, Topkapı Palace behind them in its gardens, the Basilica Cistern underground, the Archaeological Museums, the Grand Bazaar. It is not a gallery district and never will be. It is the densest concentration of world heritage in Istanbul — Byzantine, Ottoman and Roman fingerprints on the same stones — and the art you come for is fifteen hundred years old.

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.