The Princes' Islands are the Adalar district of İstanbul, nine islands off the south-eastern part of the province, and you reach them by ferry. Most of what there is to see is pinewood, shore and two museums. On Büyükada, the biggest island, are the Museum of the Princes' Islands and two nature parks, Büyükada and Dilburnu, with a beach, picnic ground and paths for walking and cycling; on Heybeliada, the Değirmenburnu nature park covers the island's northern tip; and on Burgaz, the writer Sait Faik Abasıyanık's house is a museum of his life. Each of these five places has its own guide on this site.
Getting there and getting about
Boats on the Adalar–Yalova lines leave on a timetable from five piers: Sirkeci, Kabataş, Kadıköy, Bostancı and Kartal. By sea, Heybeliada is about six and a half kilometres from Kartal, ten from Bostancı and twenty from Kabataş. From the landing on Büyükada the two nature parks can be reached on foot or by hired bicycle or electric motorcycle; on Heybeliada the Değirmenburnu park offers carriage rides and bicycles by the day.
Büyükada: the museum of the islands
The Museum of the Princes' Islands opened on 10 September 2010, backed by the agency that ran İstanbul's year as European Capital of Culture, and was set up jointly by the Adalar Foundation and the district municipality. It is in the south of Büyükada at Aya Nikola, the earliest historic settlement on the island. The collection is mostly paper, picture and voice: thousands of documents from the Ottoman archives, photographs, hundreds of documentary films, recent video of island life, records from the public offices that serve the islands, oral history interviews and objects given by islanders. Its stated aim is to keep the islands' shared, many-cultured way of life alive and to make people care about it.
Büyükada: two nature parks
Both parks were declared on 11 July 2011. Büyükada Nature Park, at 4.45 hectares, is the one for a day by the sea: a beach with sunbeds, showers and cabins for changing, a pool, sports grounds, picnic places facing the water, a restaurant, a coffee house and kiosks. It is also a place to stay, with accommodation units of different sizes, and Kartal Municipality holds the lease and runs the bungalows. Under the pines grow oak, cypress, fir, cedar and mimosa, with oleander, strawberry tree and bay laurel lower down, and the park's own summary singles out the Judas tree, hackberry and bay. Wild boar, foxes, squirrels, hedgehogs and hares are recorded on the island.
Dilburnu Nature Park, at 6.88 hectares, sits on an important route for migrating birds. Stone and Calabrian pines cover the ground for some five hundred metres as it runs out to the point, with picnic spots under the trees, terraces and viewing points over the sea, playgrounds, a restaurant and a one-kilometre track that walkers and cyclists share.
Heybeliada: Değirmenburnu
Değirmenburnu takes in 12.28 hectares at the northern end of Heybeliada and became a nature park in 2011. Walking and swimming are the main pastimes, and the site has a coffee house in the open air. In and near the park stand historic buildings that can be visited: the sanatorium of Heybeliada, a windmill and the Orthodox theological school. The trees are mostly red, stone, maritime and black pine, mixed with cypress, magnolia, cedar and loquat.
The park's climate notes are useful for planning. Summers are hot and dry and winters mild and wet, with a Mediterranean touch and little gap between day and night; February holds the coldest reading on record, 4.3 degrees, and July the warmest, at about 31. Humidity stays at seventy per cent or more even in midsummer, the wind comes mostly from the north-west, with strong blows from that quarter in February and June.
Burgaz: the Sait Faik Abasıyanık Museum
On Burgaz, at 15 Çayır Street, is the house where Sait Faik Abasıyanık spent his summers with his mother, Makbule Hanım, while wintering in Şişli. After his illness began he spent most of his last ten years here. Before he died in 1954 he had been to a literary matinée at the Darüşşafaka school, came away deeply moved, and proposed to his mother that the family's property should go to it. On 8 November 1954 his mother made a will leaving most of what she owned, the rights to his books and the Burgaz house to the Darüşşafaka Society, provided the house became a museum.
It opened on 22 August 1959, and the society has looked after it since the will passed to it in 1964. Writers argued over the opening. Orhan Seyfi Orhon objected, pointing to how many important writers Turkish art had, and Aziz Nesin answered that a museum of this kind was important in itself, and that this one set a precedent. Inside are his belongings, photographs, letters and postcards. After four years of restoration, from 2009 to 2013, it was laid out anew and reopened on 11 May 2013; in 2014 four researchers founded a workshop on the writer inside the museum to sort and digitise archives and look again at his writing and his life. The museum can also be toured virtually.
