Taksim Square sits at the top of İstiklal Avenue, and the monument at its centre is the meeting point for people coming to spend time on the avenue and in the streets around it. The square owes its name to water. In the Ottoman period a maksem, a small stone building for dividing up water, was put up here so that the supply stored on the spot could be shared out among the surrounding neighbourhoods, and 'taksim etmek' is Turkish for that act of distributing. Under Sultan Mahmud I, in 1732–1733, a line of conduits and aqueducts brought water from the springs of the Belgrad forest to this point. The maksem, which once carried a Qur'anic verse on its front, is dry now but still stands right behind the monument, and a little further towards Harbiye a wall hides the reservoir built at the same time, known as the Taksim Hazinesi.
For a long time there was no square at all, only a narrow strip lined with old houses at the edge of open ground. It was widened into a square in 1928, the year the Republic Monument was set up in the middle of a round plaza. The Italian sculptor Pietro Canonica spent two and a half years on it, working in stone and bronze; it rises 11 metres, its base faced with pink Trentino and green Suza marble. One face stands for the Republic and the other for the War of Independence. On the northern side Mustafa Kemal is shown with İsmet İnönü and Fevzi Çakmak among the people, together with two Soviet generals, Kliment Voroşilov and Mihail Frunze.
The buildings around the edge tell the square's later story. The artillery barracks that once stood at the start of the road to Harbiye were cleared away in the city works that followed 1939, and Gezi Park was laid out in their place. The Atatürk Cultural Centre rose on the site of a nineteenth-century house built for a director of the electricity administration; the stone church of Aya Triada, dated 1887, looks down on the square; and the Taksim Mosque, opened for worship in 2021, stands on the plot behind the old water cistern.
Since the monument was unveiled, the square has been the city's stage for national-day ceremonies and wreath-laying, and from the 1960s onwards for large rallies as well. At the 1 May rally of 1977, shots fired from several points around the crowd set off a panic in which 34 people died, and in the summer of 2013 the protests that began in Gezi Park, against plans to rebuild the old artillery barracks there, spread from İstanbul to cities across Türkiye.
Getting there
Taksim is a station on the M2 metro line, in service since 2000, and the historic tram runs from the square down İstiklal Avenue to Tünel. The square is also a road junction: Cumhuriyet Caddesi leads to Harbiye, Nişantaşı and Şişli, Gümüşsuyu Caddesi drops to Dolmabahçe and on to Beşiktaş or Kabataş, and Sıraselviler Caddesi heads towards Cihangir.
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).
