Istanbul

Üsküdar

1 gallery · 0 museums · 0 places

About this district

Üsküdar is the conservative, devout, deeply old face of the Asian shore — a skyline of Sinan mosques rising straight from the ferry landing, with the Maiden's Tower marooned on its rock just offshore. This is heritage country more than gallery country, and the editorial should say so. The art that is here runs to the specialised and the traditional: a museum of printmaking, the calligraphy and craft that the imperial mosques still teach by their surfaces. Above the district, the vast Çamlıca mosque crowns one of the highest hills in the city. The pace is slow. The subject is centuries deep.

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.