Yeldeğirmeni takes its name from the windmills that once ground grain on this hillside above the Kadıköy shore, though not one survives today. In 2012 a street-art festival, born of a wider push to revive the quarter, began handing its blank side walls to Turkish and international artists, who painted them building-high. The neighbourhood was already one of Kadıköy's oldest: a dense grid of early apartment houses raised for railway and port workers, where Greek, Armenian, Jewish and Muslim families lived side by side, leaving behind a synagogue, a Catholic church and Art Nouveau doorways.
Today you walk it without a map, looking up. A giant figure fills one wall, robotic creatures crawl across another, a painted face watches the street from several storeys up — the murals surface between laundry lines and corner grocers, never behind glass. Cafés, secondhand bookshops and record stores fill the ground floors, and the lanes stay quiet enough to hear a cat before you see it. Some walls fade or get painted over, so the collection shifts year to year — part of its character. You come to drift and let the next corner surprise you.