Yeniköy means "new village," yet people have fished this shore since Byzantine times. Resettled by Greeks early in the Ottoman centuries, it grew into a largely Greek village with Armenian, Jewish and Turkish neighbours. In the nineteenth century wealthy families and foreign summer missions built elegant wooden and stone yalıs along the water, turning the village into a coveted summer address. The most famous survivor is the Sait Halim Pasha Yalı, known to everyone here as the Lion Mansion for the two marble lions crouched on its quay.
Today the shore opens into a wide square shaded by old plane trees, where ferries pull in, fishermen sell their catch, and tables of grilled fish spill toward the current. You hear gulls, the wash of passing tankers and, on Sundays, church bells; behind the square, steep lanes climb past the Greek Orthodox church of Panagia Koumariotissa, a synagogue and rows of old timber houses. The grandest mansions still line the strait behind their garden walls, most in private hands. It remains a quiet, well-heeled corner where several faiths and a long, mixed history sit calmly side by side.