Istanbul

Levent

1 gallery · 1 museum · 0 places

About this district

Levent is vertical Istanbul — the financial district, a cluster of the city's tallest towers where the banks and corporate headquarters sit, threaded by the metro and anchored by the Kanyon and Metrocity malls. It is the modern skyline you see from every hill across the water: the Sabancı Center, the Sapphire, glass and steel where the rest of the city is stone and tile. There is no historic quarter here and no gallery row. What Levent offers the visitor interested in art is, for now, architecture and scale rather than exhibitions — the twenty-first-century city, built upward.

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.