Çiçek Pasajı opened in 1876 as the Cité de Péra, a lavish shopping arcade built by an Ottoman Greek banker — and earned its "flower passage" name only decades later, when White Russian émigrées, some of them exiled noblewomen, sold blooms under its glass roof. It is the most storied of the covered passages threading off İstiklal Avenue, spine of what was once Pera, Istanbul's European quarter. Around it, Levantine, Greek and Armenian merchants raised a whole family of arcades and lined them with jewelers, booksellers and boutiques.
Today Çiçek Pasajı is a hall of marble, mirrors and wrought-iron balconies, its taverns spilling small tables beneath a vaulted skylight where fasıl music and clinking glasses carry late into the night. Step into the quieter passages nearby and you find secondhand book stalls, tiny record shops, and the peeling grandeur of the Avrupa Pasajı, its walls set with mirrors and rows of small statues. The crowds thin; footsteps echo. Each arcade keeps a different fragment of a cosmopolitan city that has mostly faded from the street outside, held here in stone and light.