From Pera to the Bosphorus

You begin in Galata, on the slope above the Golden Horn, where the lanes are steep, stepped and crowded with cafés and the tower fills the small square. This was a Genoese colony from 1273 until the Ottoman conquest in 1453: Byzantium handed the ground to Genoa in 1267 and told the merchants not to fortify it, and they built walls anyway, then kept enlarging them. Those walls stood until the nineteenth century, when most were pulled down to let the city grow; a short fragment survives close to the tower. From here the walk climbs toward Pera. The stop itself is unmistakable: a round stone tower with a conical cap, taller than everything around it.

Uphill now, a few minutes on Şahkapısı Sokağı and then Galip Dede Caddesi. This is where Istanbul buys its instruments: windows full of ouds, long-necked saz and hand drums, and on a weekday you hear someone trying one out before you see the shop. It was not always so. Nineteenth-century photographs of this street show booksellers, coffeehouses, patisseries, antique dealers and stamp sellers; the music shops took over from the antique and stamp trade only within living memory. The climb continues steadily between tall old apartment houses. The arrival comes before the little square at the top: a modest gateway in a stone wall opens off the street, and behind it lies a walled garden of old Ottoman tombstones.

Past the Tünel Geçidi Sokağı passage and along Meşrutiyet Caddesi you are in Tepebaşı, the ridge where nineteenth-century Pera put its grand hotels and embassies to catch the view over the Golden Horn. The Pera Palace Hotel stands here, begun in 1892 and opened with a ball in 1895 to house passengers arriving on the Orient Express; the British consulate occupies a walled compound a little further on. Meşrutiyet carries heavy traffic, so keep to the pavement by the hotels. The museum is the tall, pale stone building with its name over the door, just beyond the hotel.

Through Avrupa Pasajı to Sahne Sokağı, a few minutes. The arcade was finished in 1874, after the great Beyoğlu fire of 1870 had cleared the ground, and Istanbul calls it Aynalı Pasaj, the mirrored arcade: gas lamps once burned in front of mirrors along its walls and doubled the light. Today small shops line it under a glass roof, and beyond its far end the noise changes within a few paces. You have reached the avenue when the crowd thickens, the pavement turns to a single wide pedestrian street and the rails of the tram run under your feet.

Sahne Sokağı is Beyoğlu's fish market: stalls of fresh fish on ice, fruit and vegetables and souvenir shops packed into one short lane that smells of the sea and frying. Off this lane a doorway leads to the Üç Horan Armenian church, opened for worship in 1838 on ground the parish had held since the early 1500s; across the avenue stands the gate of the Galatasaray Lycée, refounded in 1868 on the French model with lessons in French. Two minutes is all this takes. The arcade announces itself: a tall ornate entrance opens beside the market lane, and inside is a long glass-roofed hall of restaurant tables.

The lanes between the market and the square are Beyoğlu's night-time quarter, and the way up threads through them, uphill through the meyhane lanes for about a quarter of an hour. Tables spill out of every doorway, by evening crowded with glasses of rakı and small plates of meze, and the lanes hum with talk and music. Yeşilçam Sokağı is a short and unremarkable street that gave the Turkish film industry its name: between the 1950s and the 1970s the studios, directors and stars were based here, and Turkish cinema is still called Yeşilçam. The square is a sudden open field of paving: the Republic Monument stands in the middle, the new mosque's twin minarets on one side and the glass front of the Atatürk Cultural Centre on the other.

Along Cumhuriyet Caddesi and then Taşkışla Caddesi, a quarter of an hour with the ground falling away toward the Bosphorus. The long stone building you pass is Taşkışla, the stone barracks, built between 1846 and 1852 by the English architect William James Smith and turned into a garrison in 1860 to guard the new palace on the shore below; Paul Bonatz and Emin Onat restored it between 1943 and 1950 for Istanbul Technical University, whose architecture faculty it houses today. Beyond it the hotel towers of the ridge give way to trees. Where the pavement gives out, a green valley of lawns and tall trees opens below you, running down toward the water.

The longest leg, about twenty-five minutes, down through the valley to the shore road. On Kadırgalar Caddesi, the street of the galleys, the football stadium above the road is Beşiktaş's ground, and beside the palace stands the Dolmabahçe Mosque, raised between 1853 and 1855 for the sultan's mother, Bezmiâlem Valide Sultan, to a design by Garabet Balyan. The light opens as the water appears: ferries, the Asian hills, ships moving up the strait. The palace is the long white marble front stretched along the quay, with an ornate clock tower standing before its gate.

A short stretch along the water on Beşiktaş Caddesi, under ten minutes, into Beşiktaş itself. The name belongs to a working ferry quarter: commuters pour off the boats from Üsküdar and Kadıköy, and the market lanes behind the pier are lined with simit sellers and fish restaurants. This was where the Ottoman fleet assembled, and the admiral Barbaros Hayreddin, the Barbarossa of European legend, was buried here by the shore in a tomb Mimar Sinan built in 1541. His statue, bearded and cloaked, stands in the small park at the water's edge, and the museum is the long modern hall of glass and concrete immediately beside it.

Beşiktaş Caddesi runs on for a quarter of an hour, a busy shore road where the Bosphorus stays mostly out of sight: high walls close off the old imperial estates on the water side, and the hill rises steeply behind the buildings opposite. Beşiktaş itself is named for stones. One telling makes it beş taş, five stones, the mooring pillars Barbaros Hayreddin set in the water here for his ships; another traces it to a Byzantine church called Kounopetra, the stone cradle, that stood in Beşiktaş. Traffic hums beside you the whole way. Then carved gates break the wall, and behind their railings the long marble front of the palace, now a hotel, stands between you and the water.

Çırağan Caddesi first, then a path that climbs steeply off the shore road, ten minutes or so. Its name comes from the palace, and the palace's from the lampion festivities of the Tulip Era, when the Ottoman court lit its gardens with lanterns; in the seventeenth century this ground was the Kazancıoğlu Gardens, reserved for the sultan. Walls hem you in, the estate wall on the water side and the hill rising behind. Once you leave the road for the path the traffic noise fades fast, and among the trees the Çadır and Malta pavilions work as cafés today. The gates in the wall mark the arrival: woodland rises beyond them, and behind you the Bosphorus glints through the branches.

Back down to Çırağan Caddesi and along it, about a quarter of an hour, past another palace. The Feriye Palace, commissioned by Sultan Abdülaziz in 1871 from the architect Sarkis Balyan, is now shared by Galatasaray University and a high school, so you may share the pavement with students. Ortaköy means middle village, and it still feels like one: the shore road bends, Ortaköy Salhanesi Sokağı and Vapur İskelesi Sokağı drop toward the water, and the streets narrow into café tables and stalls. The lanes open onto a waterside plaza, and the great suspension bridge fills the sky above the rooftops.

A minute along İskele Sokağı, which takes its name from the ferry pier. Ortaköy has long drawn outsiders: the British writer Emilia Hornby rented a house here and described its life in a book of 1863, and in the 1930s the German architect Bruno Taut, in exile from Berlin, built himself a house on the hillside above that mixed Japanese and European ideas. Fishermen stand on the quay, and the ferries come and go beside you. This is where the walk ends, with the city's European shore behind you and Asia across the strait. The mosque sits at the very edge of the water, two slender minarets and a dome with the bridge arching over them.