Istanbul

Maslak

0 galleries · 1 museum · 0 places

About this district

Maslak is the next business district up the corridor from Levent — more towers, more corporate campuses, the university at its edge — and tucked improbably among the skyscrapers is one of the most important private art institutions in Turkey. The Elgiz Museum sits beneath a plaza here, and its signature is the roof: a 1,500-square-metre open-air terrace where sculpture is shown against a backdrop of the financial district's glass towers. Contemporary art on a rooftop, in the middle of the office blocks. It is an unlikely place to find serious work, and that is exactly its character.

Galleries

No published galleries in this district yet.

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.