The Karakoy waterfront is the strip between the Galata Bridge and the Tophane shore, and it has become the place Istanbul goes out in the evening. Fish restaurants under the bridge give way to cocktail bars, coffee roasters and rooftop terraces as you move east. The character changes with the hour. In the afternoon it […]

Eminonu is where Istanbul gets on the water. Ferries leave from here for Kadikoy, Uskudar, the Princes’ Islands and up the Bosphorus, and they are ordinary public transport rather than tourist boats — which is exactly why they are worth taking. The crossing to Kadikoy costs the same as a metro ride and lasts twenty […]

Sirkeci Station was built in 1890 as the eastern terminus of the Orient Express, and the building has changed less than the journey it once served. The main hall keeps its stained glass, its clock and its long wooden benches; trains no longer arrive from Paris, but the platforms are still in use for suburban […]

Hodjapasha occupies a hamam built in the fifteenth century, converted into a performance space without much being removed. The domed hall has no stage in the usual sense: the audience sits in a circle around the floor, close enough to hear the musicians breathe. Two programmes run in rotation. One is the sema, the whirling […]

Cagaloglu Hamami opened in 1741 and has been working continuously ever since, which makes it one of the last classical Ottoman baths still operating for its original purpose. It was built as a charitable foundation, with the income supporting a library founded by Sultan Mahmud I. The men’s and women’s sections are separate and both […]

Zorlu Performing Arts Center opened in 2013 in Besiktas and is the largest venue of its kind in Turkey. The main hall seats around two thousand two hundred and was built with a stage deep enough to take touring musicals in their full staging. Programming covers musicals, ballet, opera, orchestral concerts and international touring acts, […]

Tower Pub sits on a rooftop in Sirkeci with a view that takes in the Galata Tower across the water, the mouth of the Golden Horn and, on the other side, the domes of the old city. It is a pub rather than a cocktail bar: draught beer, a straightforward kitchen, football on the screens […]

Escape rooms arrived in Istanbul about a decade ago and Escape Club is among the longer-running operators. Teams are locked into a themed room and have sixty minutes to work through a chain of puzzles to get out. Several rooms run in parallel, with themes ranging from Ottoman-era mysteries to more conventional thriller settings. Groups […]