Bebek owes its calm to a quirk of the current: where the Bosphorus rounds a bend here, the water slows into a sheltered cove, and boats have anchored in it for centuries. The name means "baby," and the neighbourhood grew from a fishing settlement into a summer retreat for Ottoman elites, who lined the shore with waterside mansions called yalıs. On the hill above, Robert College — whose hilltop campus later became Boğaziçi University — drew a cosmopolitan crowd from the 1860s on, giving Bebek its lasting reputation for money, books, and easy manners.
Today 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. The waterline mosque sits almost in the sea; a century-old shop still makes almond paste by hand a few doors down. Come at dusk, when the far Asian shore lights up and the cove goes glassy.