News
Six stories. One extraordinary city.
Historical perspectives on Istanbul’s landmarks and the football grounds woven into its neighbourhoods.
Historical Landmarks
Galata Tower: The City Above the Streets
Genoese origins, changing roles and a lasting place in Istanbul’s skyline.
Historical Landmarks
Hagia Sophia: Layers of History Beneath One Dome
A building whose architecture spans centuries of religious and imperial change.
Football Stadiums
Beşiktaş Stadium: Football Beside the Bosphorus
The waterfront setting and İnönü heritage of football at Dolmabahçe.
Historical Landmarks · Historic peninsula series
The Blue Mosque: An Imperial Conversation
Across Sultanahmet Square, an Ottoman monument answers an older skyline.
Series image: Hagia Sophia, opposite the Blue Mosque.
Football Stadiums
Fenerbahçe: A Ground Rooted in Kadıköy
On the Asian side, a stadium’s enduring address connects club and neighbourhood.
Football Stadiums
Galatasaray: A New Home, a Continuing Identity
From Mecidiyeköy to Seyrantepe, a stadium move charts the city’s expansion.
City Dispatches
Three short reads on architecture, belonging and Istanbul’s changing geography.
The Blue Mosque: An Imperial Conversation
The Sultan Ahmed Mosque, widely known as the Blue Mosque, was built between 1609 and 1616 under Sultan Ahmed I. Its position opposite Hagia Sophia placed a new Ottoman imperial foundation beside one of the city’s most consequential Byzantine monuments.
Architect Sedefkâr Mehmed Ağa composed a sequence of domes and semi-domes around a central prayer space. Six minarets distinguish its exterior, while the blue tones of its İznik tiles helped give the mosque its familiar English name.
Seen across Sultanahmet Square, the two monuments reveal different chapters of the same city. The mosque is not simply a scenic counterpart to Hagia Sophia: it remains a place of worship, with an architectural language rooted in the Ottoman tradition.
Fenerbahçe: A Ground Rooted in Kadıköy
Fenerbahçe’s stadium occupies a long-established football site in Kadıköy, on Istanbul’s Asian side. Known for its association with former club president Şükrü Saracoğlu, the ground places the club within an everyday urban landscape rather than apart from it.
Successive rebuilding projects transformed the stands, but the location remained. That continuity matters: streets, local businesses and the routes supporters take to the ground form part of a club’s geography, even as the structure itself changes.
The stadium offers a different perspective on Istanbul’s football map from the waterfront at Dolmabahçe. Here, the story is one of neighbourhood roots and an enduring address, showing how a football ground can act as a landmark without belonging to the historic peninsula.
Galatasaray: A New Home, a Continuing Identity
Galatasaray moved from the Ali Sami Yen Stadium in Mecidiyeköy to a new stadium in Seyrantepe in 2011. The relocation replaced a tightly embedded urban ground with a larger modern venue farther north.
The move also reflected Istanbul’s changing scale. Football’s geography expanded alongside the city, bringing new transport journeys and a different relationship between stadium and surroundings. A club’s home could change while its inherited associations travelled with its supporters.
The distinction between the two sites is important. The old Ali Sami Yen ground belongs to the club’s history in Mecidiyeköy; the present stadium belongs to Seyrantepe. Together they show how sporting identity can connect places that are physically separate, preserving memory without freezing the city in time.