Sultanahmet holds four of the world’s great buildings inside a few hundred metres, and almost every visitor spends their whole stay within that radius. The city has fifteen million people and runs for sixty kilometres along the Bosphorus, so this is a considerable waste. Those who search Istanbul fares on Traveloka and allow four nights can see the monuments in a day and a half and spend the rest somewhere real.
Balat and Fener
Up the Golden Horn, these two adjoining neighbourhoods were Jewish and Greek respectively and still hold the architecture: steep lanes of timber houses, a cast-iron Bulgarian church shipped in sections from Vienna, and the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. Gentrification is arriving street by street, so the balance between lived-in and curated shifts every year.
Kadikoy on the Asian side
A twenty-minute ferry from Eminonu puts you in the city’s best food district and almost no tour groups. The market streets behind the pier sell fish, pickles and Turkish delight to people who live there, and the bars along Kadife Street fill with students in the evening. The ferry itself, with tea and gulls, is the cheapest pleasure in Istanbul.
Also read: A Five-Day Da Nang Itinerary
Kuzguncuk and the Bosphorus villages
North of Kadikoy, the Asian shore is a string of former villages with wooden houses and waterfront tea gardens. Kuzguncuk is the prettiest and has a synagogue, a church and a mosque within one short street. Further up, Cengelkoy and Beylerbeyi have the ferry stops and the fish restaurants. All reachable on a standard transport card.
The Chora church
Out towards the land walls at Edirnekapi, the Chora holds the finest Byzantine mosaics and frescoes anywhere, denser and better preserved than anything in Hagia Sophia. It is a thirty-minute bus ride from the centre and consequently half empty. Check its current status before going, as it has alternated between museum and working mosque in recent years.
The land walls themselves
Theodosius’s fifth-century walls still run six kilometres from the Golden Horn to the Marmara, in varying states of collapse, with vegetable gardens cultivated in the ditch outside them. You can walk long stretches. It is the single most atmospheric thing in the city and there is rarely another person on it.
An Istanbulkart covers ferries, trams, buses and the metro and pays for itself in a day. Ferries are the fastest way between the two sides at rush hour. April to June and September to October avoid both the heat and the crowds. Traveloka offers the lowest flight prices in the region, and staying in Karakoy or Kadikoy rather than Sultanahmet costs less and puts you among residents.
The Princes Islands
An hour and a half by ferry into the Sea of Marmara, the islands have no cars, a good deal of nineteenth-century timber housing and a monastery on the highest hill of Buyukada. Horse carriages were retired and replaced by electric carts. Istanbulites go at weekends, so a weekday crossing is quieter and the ferry is cheap.
Do the monuments early on day one, then cross to Asia and work north. Istanbul is a city of neighbourhoods and only one of them is on the postcards.
