Istanbul

Galata & Şişhane

2 galleries · 0 museums · 0 places

About this district

Above Karaköy the ground climbs steeply to the Galata Tower, a fourteenth-century Genoese watchtower that still fixes the skyline from every angle. The streets around it are the opposite of İstiklal's straight rush — a knot of stepped lanes and nineteenth-century apartment buildings, and along Serdar-ı Ekrem Caddesi in particular, a run of ateliers, design studios and small galleries tucked behind ornate façades. SALT Galata sits at the foot of the hill in a monumental former Ottoman bank, all stone and vaulted ceilings. The Camondo Stairs curl down toward the water nearby. This is art at walking pace, found by looking down side streets.

Galleries

Museums

No published museums in this district yet.

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.