Istanbul

Princes' Islands & Adalar

0 galleries · 0 museums · 0 places

About this district

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.

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Sixth-century Sasanian moulded stucco panel showing a repeating pomegranate-in-palmette design, excavated near Ctesiphon, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Editorial

The Fruit We Are Sure We Recognize

How the pomegranate became one of the most confidently named motifs in Islamic ornament — and one of the least confidently identified — across a thousand years of tile, silk and stucco, with meanings we mostly attached later.

A slab of sixth-century plaster in the Met shows a fruit you recognise at a glance: a pomegranate, and surely it means paradise. Hold that certainty up to the light and it dissolves. Across a thousand years of tile, silk and stucco, the pomegranate is the shape we name most confidently and identify least — blurring into the artichoke and the palmette, its meanings attached by later viewers, its very name partly a nineteenth-century invention

A massive granite column shaft under a stone arch, seen from below, with the dome springing above it.
Editorial

Seventy Thousand Solomons: The Empire That Performed a Legend

A demon catalogue in the conqueror's library, a sixteenth-century text where kingship is an office held seventy thousand times, and the columns a sultan dragged across three provinces to prove he held it.

Mehmed II kept a Greek catalogue of demons in his library at Topkapı. Seventy years later a sultan named for a prophet was rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem and hauling Roman columns out of Egypt and the Lebanon into a mosque above the Golden Horn. In between, Ottoman writers turned Solomon from a warning into a job — and the empire applied for it in stone.