Princes' Islands & Adalar

An hour out into the Sea of Marmara, and the city stops. The Princes' Islands — Adalar, "the islands," to everyone in Istanbul — are nine specks off the Asian shore, four of them inhabited, and on none of them are private cars allowed. What that means when you step off the ferry is silence: bicycle bells, footsteps, the wind in the pines, the clop of the electric carts that replaced the horse-drawn phaetons when those were retired in 2020. Wooden Victorian mansions sit behind walls of bougainvillea. Cats doze on every wall. This is where Istanbul has come to escape its own summer for a century and a half, and it still works.