Kadıköy & Moda

Cross to the Asian shore and the tone shifts. Kadıköy is younger, looser, less polished than Beyoğlu — a district of bars, record shops, bookstores and a market that runs all day, and increasingly the place the independent art scene actually lives. The walls carry it first: Yeldeğirmeni, the neighbourhood behind the ferry terminal, turned itself into an open-air mural district, and the street art spills outward from there. Down toward Moda, the galleries and project spaces cluster in converted flats and shopfronts — smaller, artist-run, closer to the ground than anything across the water. In Hasanpaşa, a nineteenth-century gasworks has become Müze Gazhane, its industrial sheds now exhibition halls. The scene here grew from the bottom up.