İstiklal Avenue runs for 1.4 kilometres along the ridge of Beyoğlu, from Taksim Square at its top to Tünel at its lower end, and it is closed to cars from one end to the other. The whole district takes its name from the old quarter of Beyoğlu that grew around this street and the lanes branching off it. Under the Ottomans it was the Cadde-i Kebir, the 'great street', or in the language of its many European residents the Grande Rue de Péra; it became İstiklal Caddesi after the founding of the Republic. Its middle is taken to be Galatasaray, where Yeniçarşı Caddesi cuts across beside the school and where Şadi Çalık's '50th year' sculpture of 1973 stands.
The street began as a narrow track. While Galata was still a walled colony, the ridge above it was vineyards, cemeteries and woods, and a lane ran north from the gate near the Galata Tower between scattered summer houses. As the merchants of Galata spilled out of the walls after the conquest, and the embassies of France, then of other European states, settled on the slope, that lane slowly turned into Pera's main street. Its real transformation came in the second half of the nineteenth century, after the Tanzimat reforms: paving, gas lighting, sewers, then electricity, the Tünel railway and horse-drawn and electric trams, with fashionable shops, cafés, theatres and patisseries lining the way. Its most cosmopolitan years were the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when many languages could be heard here, and after 1917 Russians who had fled the revolution filled the avenue and its side streets. In 1990 the avenue and the lanes opening onto it were closed to motor traffic, and the tram came back as a single-track line of 1.65 kilometres between Taksim and Tünel.
The buildings are the reason to walk it slowly. At Galatasaray, the great cast-iron gate of the lycée opens onto the square between marble columns carrying old-fashioned street lamps; the school began teaching as Mekteb-i Sultanî on 1 September 1868, in Turkish and French. Nearby, the Ağa Camii is the only mosque on the avenue, built in 1594 by Hüseyin Ağa of Galatasaray, renewed in cut stone in 1834, with a fine fountain from the Oluklubayır Tekkesi in its garden. The Çiçek Pasajı went up as the Cité de Pera, with 24 shops and 18 flats, on the site of the Naum Theatre, which burned in 1870; it took its present name in the 1930s, when a flower growers' cooperative moved in and flower auctions began, collapsed in 1978 and was repaired in 1988. Beside it, Sahne Sokağı, the street Pera's residents called the Balık Pazarı, sells fresh fish, meze and vegetables, with mussel and kokoreç sellers at its mouth and the door of the Üç Horan church just past the entrance of the Çiçek Pasajı.
Further along are the consulates and churches of the old embassy quarter. The Russian consulate occupies a large plot and a building by Gaspare Fossati; until it was finished the embassy sat in what is now called the Narmanlı Yurdu, the building with heavy piers on the avenue, which later housed booksellers, antique dealers and artists' studios and was a haunt of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. The Swedish palace dates from 1869, and the French consulate from 1898 in its present stone form; the latter was set aside for plague patients in 1760. St. Antoine, the Italian Catholic church by Giulio Mongeri, was completed on 15 February 1912 in the neo-Gothic manner and draws large crowds for Christmas services. Santa Maria Draperis, first built in 1584 and rebuilt after repeated fires, greets visitors with a figure of the Virgin Mary standing in a pearl shell held by two angels. Raimondo d'Aronco's Botter building of 1900, made for J. Botter, the Dutch tailor of Abdülhamid II, is regarded as the most important art nouveau building in İstanbul, and near the Taksim end Yeşilçam Sokağı gave Turkish cinema its nickname, because most film companies had their offices on it before 1980.
Getting there
The avenue starts at Taksim Square, a station on the M2 metro line, and the historic tram links Taksim with Tünel at the other end. From Tünel, Galip Dede and Yüksek Kaldırım streets lead downhill to Karaköy.
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).
