Levent

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.