İstiklal Avenue

Street · BeyoğluIstanbul,Türkiye

A 1.4-kilometre pedestrian street through Istanbul's old Pera, lined with Belle Époque facades and hidden arcades, a red tram running down its middle.

İstiklal Avenue runs 1.4 kilometres downhill from Taksim Square to the Tünel funicular, and on a weekend evening a slow river of people fills its whole length. A single red tram, restored from the original line, clangs down the middle of the crowd. Belle Époque façades stand shoulder to shoulder above the shopfronts, neo-classical and Art Nouveau, left from the years when this was Pera and nineteenth-century Istanbul came here to look European. Behind those fronts hide the passages: covered arcades that slip off the street into courtyards and glass-roofed halls. The red tram is a revival: the old line stopped running in 1961 and the rails were relaid in 1990. At the bottom of the hill the Tünel funicular has been dropping to the water since 1875, the second-oldest underground railway in the world after London's. Two churches stand back from the avenue rather than on it — Santa Maria Draperis and the Armenian Üç Horan — and most people walk past their gates without seeing them. The passages behind the shopfronts differ from one another: some restored and lined with restaurants, others quiet and worn. Duck into one and the crowd noise drops to a murmur of clinking glasses.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Early morning belongs to the street itself — before the shutters rise the avenue is nearly empty; you hear your own footsteps and finally see the façades whole.
Frame the tram, not the crowd — wait for the red carriage to reach a gap in the pedestrians and shoot straight down its length; it's the one thing that reads as İstiklal at a glance.
The real taverns are down the alleys — the meyhane scene lives in the narrow lanes off Galatasaray, not on the main avenue and not in the famous Flower Passage; follow the smell of grilled fish and rakı.
Come at the blue hour — for a few minutes at dusk the neon signs and the old stone glow together, the shopfronts lit from below and the carved upper storeys still holding the last daylight.

Things to do

1
Ride the nostalgic tram
Board the single red carriage near Taksim and forget about speed — it barely outpaces the walkers. Stand at the front window and watch pedestrians part and close around it, all the way down to Tünel. It works less as transport than as a slow, moving vantage point over the whole crowd.
2
Stop at the school gates halfway down
Midway between Taksim and Tünel the shopfronts break for a long iron railing. Behind it stands Galatasaray High School, on this ground since 1481 and the oldest secondary school in Turkey; the present stone building replaced a wooden one that burned in 1907. Look through the railings at a walled garden and a school courtyard, on a street where everything else is a shopfront.
3
Read the avenue at second-floor height
Walk slowly and keep your eyes up, above the illuminated brand signs. Pick out the caryatids, the iron balconies, the faded relief crests of old consulates, and the church spires set back in their courtyards. The nineteenth century survives almost intact, just one floor above the shopping.