Istanbul

Pera & Tepebaşı

0 galleries · 1 museum · 0 places

About this district

Cross to the western edge of Beyoğlu and the crowds thin. Tepebaşı sits one street back from İstiklal, along Meşrutiyet Caddesi, looking out over the Golden Horn from the high side — and it carries the museums. Pera Museum occupies the old Bristol Hotel, a restored nineteenth-century building holding Orientalist painting on one floor and international contemporary shows on another. Along the same avenue, commercial galleries have taken the calmer frontages — the ones that wanted an İstiklal address without İstiklal's noise. The scale is intimate. The pace is different.

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.