Modern Face

A city that keeps its industry and changes its mind

The pattern behind this chapter is worth naming, because once you see it you see it everywhere. A nineteenth-century brewery is now Bomontiada, with a concert hall and a photography museum in the vats' old halls. A gasworks that lit the Asian side for a hundred and thirty years is now Müze Gazhane. Fuel silos on the upper Bosphorus are now Çubuklu Silolar. A naval shipyard is becoming Tersane Istanbul, and the working cruise port at our end of the water is now Galataport.

None of these were built to be visited. Istanbul did not clear its industrial ground and start again. It kept the shells and changed what happens inside them, which is why the modern city here feels older and stranger than modern usually does.

Start at the waterfront

Two of the six are on our doorstep. Galataport runs along the shore from Karaköy, and its best trick is invisible: the cruise terminal is underground, so the quay that was fenced off for a century is now simply a place you can walk. On that same stretch is Istanbul Modern, Turkey's first modern art museum, rebuilt by Renzo Piano, with a reflecting roof that puts the Bosphorus into the building.

You can do both on foot from the hotel in an afternoon, and they set up everything else in the chapter. Take them first.

Making a day of it

The other four need transport and reward being paired rather than queued. Bomontiada and Müze Gazhane both sit inland, one in Şişli and one on the Asian side in Kadıköy. Both are places you stay for an evening rather than tour for an hour, with something on most nights.

Çubuklu Silolar and Tersane Istanbul are further up the Bosphorus and newer to the list; go for the buildings and the water as much as the programme. Whichever you pick, the eating is part of it. The same neighbourhoods carry this chapter and the food chapters, and one usually turns into the other by about seven in the evening.