Istanbul

Nişantaşı, Teşvikiye & Şişli

9 galleries · 0 museums · 0 places

About this district

Nişantaşı is where Istanbul dresses up. The uptown grid — Abdi İpekçi, Teşvikiye, Vali Konağı — is the city's luxury-retail heart, international fashion houses and pastry shops and doctors' practices in handsome nineteenth-century apartment blocks, and the art here has always worn the same tailoring. Boutique-scaled galleries tuck into the side streets and upper floors around Teşvikiye and Şakayık, serving collectors who live within walking distance. The obelisk that gave the district its name — Nişantaşı, "the marker stone" — still stands at the crossroads. This is the polished, moneyed register of the city's art scene, and it reads as such.

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.