Kadıköy is the gateway to the Asian shoreline of the Sea of Marmara and a stronghold of secular-minded Istanbullus (writes Andrew Finkel). The main opposition party gets more votes here than anywhere else in the country.

Don’t be put off by the Bosphorus frontage – an example of the municipal authorities’ ability to squander a natural asset. The lattice of back streets leading down to the ferry station, mostly closed to traffic, contains myriad wonderful bookshops, food emporia, confectioners, fish stalls, restaurants, bars, cafés, antique shops, cinemas and theatres – including the newly restored Süreyya Opera House – making it an attractive alternative to Beyoğlu across the water. While Beyoğlu, the city-centre haunt of tourists and transients, has its charms, Kadıköy caters more to people who live nearby. The Nostaljik tramway leads from Kadıköy’s market area to Moda – a fashionable but simultaneously old-fashioned neighbourhood of pretty houses and parks, perched over the Sea of Marmara and the opening to the Bosphorus. Moda is famous for its gentle attractions: ice-cream parlours, tea gardens and comfortable meyhanes.

Kadıköy landings When Greek settlers from Megara in Attica first colonised the shores of the Bosphorus in 685bc (writes Harriet Rix), they chose the site of an ancient Phoenician port near Cape Moda, on the Asian side, to found the city of Chalcedon.

How had they failed to recognise the defensive possibilities of the Golden Horn, the supreme advantages and beauty of Seraglio Point on the opposite shore? Were they blind? Yes, according to the Oracle of Apollo, who foretold the founding of a great city across the water. So it was with Delphic wisdom that, in 667bc, the Megarian King Byzas founded Byzantion on the facing shore, “opposite the blind”. This would become Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine empire from AD326.

Vulnerable Chalcedon was indeed flattened by successive invasions of Persians, Romans, Barbarians and Arabs, but suffered worst of all during occupation by the Crusaders. In 1203 it fell in the Fourth Crusade, and from the “city of the blind” the invaders orchestrated their attacks upon a bigger prize, plainly visible across the strait. In an orgy of violence, vandalism and desecration, Constantinople was sacked in 1204, not to be recaptured until 1261.

So it was not, after all, unassailable, and would be seized by Mehmed the Conqueror in 1453, though Chalcedon was captured a full century earlier, and finally became a mere satellite under the jurisdiction of the Sublime Porte, quarried for its stone and renamed Kadıköy, “the village of the judge”. Happily, today’s invaders come in peace to explore the city’s Asian side.

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Issue 52, Spring 2015 Istanbul Unwrapped: Bosphorus Requiem
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