The Golden Horn, Haliç in Turkish, is the long, narrow arm of the sea that curls into the European side of İstanbul from the mouth of the Bosphorus, keeping the historic peninsula apart from the heights of Beyoğlu. Long, narrow and shaped like a horn, it has been called Altın Boynuz, the golden horn, since antiquity. Haliç itself comes from halic, the Arabic geographical term for an inlet formed where the sea has drowned part of a river bed, and in İstanbul it became a proper name, then the name of a whole stretch of waterside neighbourhoods. The Kâğıthane and Alibey streams flow into its head.
As a natural harbour it was the naval centre of the Byzantine Empire, guarded by sea walls along its shore and, at its mouth, by a great chain stretched across to the Galata side, first mentioned during the siege of 717. Attackers got past the chain three times: in the tenth century Viking crews dragged their longships overland around Galata and slid them back into the water, only to be beaten off with Greek fire; in 1204, during the crusade, Venetian ships rammed the chain and broke it; and in 1453 Mehmed II had his ships hauled over the land behind Galata on greased logs and launched into the Horn. After the conquest, Greeks, Georgians, Jews, Italian merchants and other non-Muslim communities settled along its shore at Fener and Balat.
Parks run along both shores, and its beauty and history have made it a draw for visitors. The municipality's own list of sights here runs from Unkapanı and the Valens Su Kemeri, the aqueduct of Valens, through Zeyrek with the Molla Zeyrek Cami and Zeyrekhane, to Fener, with the Fener Rum Patrikanesi, the house of Dimitri Kandemir, the Kadın Eserleri Kütüphanesi and the Fener ferry landing, and on to Balat, with the Sveti Stefan church, known as the iron church, the Ahirda synagogue, the Surp Hreşdogabed church, the Ferruh Kethüda mosque and the Balat pier. Among the bridges that cross it are the Galata Bridge at its mouth, the Atatürk Bridge at Unkapanı, first built under Mahmud II in 1836, replaced in 1875 and given its present form in 1936, and the Haliç Bridge, which opened on 10 September 1974.
Until the 1980s the Golden Horn was a dumping ground for industrial waste. A clean-up began under the mayor of that time, Bedrettin Dalan, and after many years of work the water was much cleaner in the 2000s; a project to keep sea water from the Bosphorus flowing into the Kâğıthane stream, so that the Horn is steadily refreshed, was completed in 2012.
When to go
- Climate
- Across İstanbul as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 6.8 °C in January to 24.7 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (99 mm) and lightest in July (22 mm). Long-term means for 1950-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
