İstiklal Caddesi

İstiklal Caddesi's guide follows the Istanbul avenue's small red tram back to 1914, when the street was still called the Grande Rue de Péra in the city's European quarter, and to the Tünel funicular that has run beneath it since 1875. It traces the street's renaming to İstiklal after the Turkish Republic's founding in 1923, the tram's disappearance under a fleet of buses in 1961, and the decades of decline that followed. Listen for the bell as you walk the length of the avenue.