Bebek is a sheltered cove on the European shore where the Bosphorus rounds a bend and the water goes calm. You walk a curved promenade past moored sailboats, their masts ticking in the wind, while ferries and tankers slide down the strait a stone's throw away. A small park runs to the water's edge, and cafés spill onto it from morning coffee to late talk. Bebek Camii sits almost in the sea beside the pier, a 1913 mosque by Mimar Kemaleddin, and hillside mansions look down on the whole crescent.
Boats have anchored in this cove for centuries. The name means baby, and the settlement grew from a fishing village into a summer retreat for Ottoman elites, who lined the shore with waterside mansions called yalıs. On the hill above, Robert College drew a cosmopolitan crowd from the 1860s on and later became Boğaziçi University, which is where Bebek's reputation for money, books and easy manners comes from. Come at dusk, when the far Asian shore lights up and the cove goes glassy.