Taksim Square in Beyoğlu, located in the modern part of Istanbul, is not only considered the heart of modern Istanbul, it’s also a very busy public transportation hub and popular meeting point.

There are two versions available: a YouTube version (smaller in size) and a WVM version (bigger in size). The length of both movies is the same: 4:00 min.

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Taksim Square (Taksim Meydanı) is considered as the heart of modern Istanbul and symbol of the secular Republic because of the Cumhuriyet Anıtı (Republic Monument) that stands in the middle of the plaza. As a main transportation hub and with numerous hotels, restaurants and pubs surrounding the area, it’s a popular destination for both tourists and locals alike.

History of Taksim Square

Taksim is Arabic for ‘division’ or ‘distribution’. Originally Taksim Square was a water distribution center. In 1732 Sultan Mahmud I ordered the creation of a stone reservoir to collect the water coming from the Belgrade Forest, so it could be distributed to other parts of the city. This stone reservoir can still be seen at the beginning of Istiklal Caddesi.

Taksim Square Today

The Turkish word meydan is translated into English as ‘square’, but actually means ‘large open area’. And that’s really what Taksim Square is: a large open area consisting of two main parts, marked on the Map with Tourist Attractions in the Modern Part of Istanbul.

First there is the rectangle shaped area, which serves as a busy hub. No longer for water though, but for public transportation. Not only is it the main transfer point for the municipal bus system, it’s also the starting point of the Istanbul metro with which you can go as far as Atatürk Oto Sanayii or connect to the Kabataş tramway or seaport. And just 100 meters from Taksim Square, you’ll find the Havaş airport shuttle busses and various dolmuş departure points.

Secondly, there is the triangle shaped area with its garden and the Cumhuriyet Anıtı (Republic Monument) standing in the middle of it. This monument, created by the Italian sculptor Pietro Canonica and unveiled in 1928, features Atatürk, his assistant and successor Ismet İnönü, and other revolutionary leaders. The plaza is also the terminus for the nostalgic tram that runs on Istiklal Caddesi, connecting you to Tünel.

Surrounding Taksim Square and Meeting Points

Taksim Square is surrounded by various landmarks. The prominent building at the far end of the rectangle is the Atatürk Cultural Centre (Atatürk Kültür Merkezi or simply AKM). Another famous landmark is the Marmara Hotel. Next to the square is an elevated green zone called Taksim Park, through which you can reach the Ceylan International Hotel and the Hyatt Regency.

Also noteworthy is McDonalds. It was the very first McDonalds restaurant to open its doors in Turkey, generating long queues at the time with grandfathers, all dressed-up, taking there grandchildren for a bite in the new tasty hamburger that hit the town. While at the subject of junk food, the various snack bars and junk food restaurants at the entrance of Istiklal Caddesi are also considered landmarks in the eyes of the locals. Not for their nouvelle cuisine obviously, but for a quick bite while staggering home after a great night out.

Taksim Square is also a popular meeting point. No need to stress out to be very specific about the exact location or building. Popular meeting points are the Republic Monument, and in front of Burger King or the French Embassy at the beginning of Istiklal Caddesi.

Police Presence, Demonstrations and Public Events

Don’t be intimidated by the round-the-clock police presence on Taksim Square. Being one of the busiest areas in town, people often want to (ab)use its visibility for the benefit of their cause by demonstrating on the square.

However, following many violent demonstrations, with the Taksim Square massacre of May 1st 1977 being the bloodiest and deadliest, all forms of group protests are banned from the square. Therefore, the police are at all times omnipresent on the square. Mostly moderate, but on some occasions you can see riot-police and armored vehicles gearing up to counter-attack any demonstration suspicion. Take my advice and leave the scene as soon as you notice any form of demonstration and skip Taksim Square altogether on May 1st.

That being said, excluded from the demonstration ban are gatherings for public events such as New Year’s eve, Republic Day celebrations or watching important football matches on giant screens set up for the occasion.

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In order to visit the Dolmabahçe Palace (Dolmabahçe Sarayı) you must take one or both of the guided tours. The Selamlık tour takes you through the quarters reserved for men, while the Harem tour shows you the apartments of the sultan’s family.
Only a limited amount of people are allowed into each section per day, so make sure to check out the opening hours. If you only want to go on one tour, visit the Selamlık.

The entrance of the palace is located close to the clock tower, which was only added in 1895. You’ll find the ticket sales booth a bit further at the left. If you have some time to spare, you may want to wait for the change of the guard, which takes place every hour in summertime.

Once you entered the complex, enjoy the well-maintained gardens surrounding the palace as well as the magnificent Bosphorus views. Just before entering the palace itself, please note the working flower clock and beautiful Imperial Gate at the left. Once used by the sultan and his ministers, it’s every Tuesday afternoon the stage for a performance of the Mehter or Janissary Band.

Just outside the palace, a small sign will tell you when the next tour starts, Selamlık or Harem and whether it’s in Turkish or English. Normally these guided tours start every 25 minutes, but in busy periods they may raise the frequency. The tour itself progresses through the palace at a pretty high pace. Make sure you stay close to the guide if you want to hear what he or she has to say.

Selamlık Tour

The tour starts in the main entrance (medhal) hall where you’ll get some general instructions. Please notice the English chandelier with its sixty arms and the two large Turkish porcelain vases. The guide will then lead you through the secretariat’s room, the entrance hall and the exhibit hall, with all various precious gold, silver, porcelain and crystal items on display. But it’s after passing the palace’s mosque (mescit) and the resting room that things really start to get interesting.

You take the staircase, referred to as the crystal staircase because of its balustrade in Baccarat crystal, to the palace’s second floor. Prepare for an eye-popping experience when you enter the ambassador (süfera) hall, undoubtedly one of the most important rooms in the palace which used to host formal receptions and meetings. I still don’t know what was more impressive: the 88 square meter Iranian Tebriz carpet, the pair of bearskins (one a gift from the Russian Tsar Nicholas II, the other ordered to preserve symmetry), the silver clock from Egypt providing the correct time, date, air pressure and temperature, or the 2000 kg chandelier with matching crystal three meter high mirrors.

Impressed? Do try to keep up while the tour continues, because you ain’t seen nothing yet. You run out of superlatives while passing rooms like the privy chamber, offering some of the most beautiful parquet in the entire palace. Or the study room with its Steinway piano dating back to 1911. Not to mention the magnificent hamam and all the portraits and paintings you see along the way. (see the Dolmabahçe Palace video)

But all this is a mere prelude to the grand finale: the muyade hall. It covers approximately 2.000 square meters, is 36 meters high and has a dome with a diameter of 25 meters. The Hereke carpet on the floor is 124 m². But the masterpiece is without a doubt the English chandelier, built in 1853, holding 664 bulbs and weighing 4,5 tons. According to the guide, it’s still the world’s largest chandelier. (see picture gallery of Dolmabahçe Palace)

The room, capable of holding 2500 guests, was used to host all state ceremonies and receptions. It was also in this room that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk first spoke to the people of Istanbul as the President of the Turkish Republic. Following his death on November 10, 1938, Atatürk’s body was placed in a casket and remained in this room from 16 to 18 November. The room was opened for the public to express their condolences.

Harem Tour

Although it doesn’t have the same wow-factor as the Selamlık, the Harem is still worth touring. The apartments of the sultan and his family are, compared to the rest of the rooms in the Dolmabahçe Palace, less spacious.

The Harem consists of a series of salons, galleries and hamams and a post-circumcision resting hall. Especially noteworthy are the suite of the Valide Sultan (the sultan’s mother), the blue and pink salons, the bedroom of Sultan Abdül Aziz with the custom made bed to carry the 150 kg amateur wrestler, as well as the study and bedroom used by Atatürk.

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Dolmabahçe Palace (Dolmabahçe Sarayı), Turkey’s largest mono-block palace, was commissioned by Sultan Abdül Mecit in 1843.
Built to belie the military and financial decline of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul’s first European-style palace was an opulent one, excessive in size and filled with gold and crystal.

Dolmabahçe Palace (Dolmabahçe Sarayı)
Location
Dolmabahçe Caddesi, Beşiktaş (opposite the İnönü (Beşiktaş) football stadium).
Tel: +90 212 236 90 00
on Map with Tourist Attractions in the Modern Part of Istanbul
Open
Daily between 09.00 and 16.00. Closed on Monday, Thursday and January 1st. On the first day of religious holidays, the museum is closed all day.
Ticket Sales
Selamlık: TL 15, Harem: TL 10, Combined ticket: TL 20.
An extra TL 6 is charged if you want to use your photo-camera, TL 15 for a film or video camera. Credit cards are accepted.
Please note: daily only 1500 people are allowed inside each section!

Dolmabahçe Means Filled Garden

The area where the Dolmabahçe Palace now stands used to be a small bay of the Bosphorus. From the 18th century onwards, the bay was gradually filled to become an imperial garden by the Bosphorus. People referred to it as Dolmabahçe, literally meaning filled (dolma) garden (bahçe).
Since the sultans loved the site a lot, plenty of mansions (köşk) and pavilions (kasır) were built on that spot during the 18th and 19th centuries. Gradually this collection grew into a complex called the Beşiktaş Waterfront Palace, demolished by order of Sultan Abdül Mecit to make way for the Dolmabahçe Palace. He decided to move from Topkapi Palace to Dolmabahçe Palace since it would be able to provide ‘modern’ luxuries that Topkapi Palace lacked.

Extravagant Palace

The true reason behind the construction of Dolmabahçe Palace was to cover up that the Ottoman Empire was in decline. Therefore, the new palace had to be lavishly decorated to impress the world. It also had to break with the Ottoman tradition of constructing a series of pavilions, so he ordered the leading Ottoman architect Garabet Baylan and his son Nigoğayos to build a mono-block Ottoman-European palace. The construction began in 1843 and was finished in 1856.

The result is a two-floor palace, covering an area of 45.000 m², containing 285 rooms, 44 halls, 68 toilets and 6 baths (hamam). The design is a mixture of Baroque, Rococo, Neo-Classic and traditional Ottoman art and culture. Fourteen tons of gold were used to gild the ceilings. It also has the largest collection of Bohemian and Baccarat crystal chandeliers in the world. The price tag for all this: a staggering five million Ottoman gold coins, the current equivalent of 35 tons of gold. (See the Dolmabahçe Picture Gallery and video of Dolmabahçe Palace)

Six Sultans and Atatürk

Starting with the move of the administrative center of the Ottoman Empire from Topkapi Palace in 1856, until the abolishment of the caliphate in 1924, the Dolmabahçe Palace was home to six sultans. There was however a 20-year interval from 1889 to 1909 in which the Yıldız Palace was used.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, used the palace as a presidential house in the summer and enacted some of his most important works here, e.g. the introduction of the new alphabet. Troubled by health problems, he spent his last years in the palace until he died at 09.05 on November 10, 1938. In his honor, all the clocks in the palace are stopped at that exact time. The room in which he died is part of one of the palace tours.

Click here to read about the guided tours in Dolmabahçe Palace.

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Atatürk

Had it not been for Mustafa Kemal, there might not be Turkey today. Most Turks rejected the terms of the peace agreement and rallied behind him in a war of independence from 1912 to 1922, banishing the Greeks and deposing the sultan.

Mustafa Kemal founded the Turkish Republic on 29 October 1923 and took the name Atatürk, which means ‘Father of the Turks’. The sultanate was abolished and the capital moved inland to Ankara, while Atatürk set about modernizing the country, abolishing the power of Islamic Holy Law, replacing the Arabic script with the Latin alphabet, banning polygamy and even introducing votes and equality for woman. Western-style dress replaced the fez, the veil and the turban. Turkey had finally arrived in the 20th century.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Istanbul played a second fiddle to Ankara. But the city’s natural resources, location and appeal, combined with a string of financial incentives to business, a wave of investment engulfed the city and the Marmara area, bringing thousands of migrant workers.

As a leader Atatürk was the personification of good-time Turkey. A man of immense energy, he drank and gambled all night, napped for a couple of hours and then got up to conduct the country’s affairs. He may have moved the capital to Ankara, but his heart was in Istanbul.

Atatürk died at 09:50 on 10 November 1938. His casket was placed in the throne room of Dolmabahçe Palace, where hundreds of thousands came to view the body. He was succeeded by Ismet Inönü, who had masterminded the Turkish forces in the war against Greece, but Atatürk has hardly been allowed to die and his image is still to be seen all over Istanbul today.

World War II

At the renewed outbreak of war in Europe, Turkey opted to remain neutral. Battle did go on in Istanbul, however, as the city became the espionage capital of World War II. No less than 17 different intelligence agencies operated there and half the population seemed to be making a living trading information. Packed with refugees from all over Europe, Istanbul was also something of a safe haven for Jews escaping the Nazis.

Turkey finally entered the war on the Allied side in February 1945 in order to secure a seat at the United Nations when it was founded later that year. During the Cold War Turkey also sided with the West. Under pressure from its new allies, Turkey introduced parliamentary democracy.

Turkey since World War II

The 20th century was hardly the period of calm Atatürk had envisioned. The Democratic Party won the first democratic elections in 1950 under Adnan Menderes, but throughout the decade the country fell into economic decline, to the extend that the army intervened and a new constitution was drawn up.

By 1965, the True Path Party was in power under the ultra-liberal, nationalistic Süleyman Demirel, but the army had to step in once again in 1970 for a further three years. Bülent Ecevit came to power in 1974 and led Turkey into the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, occupying the northern third of the island and causing a seemingly irreparable rift with Greece.

Yet another military coup took place in 1980, suspending all the political parties and also arresting their leaders. Turgut Özal, the leader of the centre-right Motherland Party, was elected prime minister of Turkey in 1983, and subsequently replaced in 1989 by his colleague Yildirim Akbulut.

The 1990’s were a series of political muscle chairs. Süleyman Demirel of the centre-right True Path Party was elected prime minister in 1991, where he stayed until 1993, by which the inflation was running at a whopping 70 per cent. In 1993, Demirel became president and Tansu Çiller became Turkey’s first female prime minister.

In the local elections of March 1994, the people of Istanbul voted in the 40-year-old Tayyip Erdoğan, making him the city’s first Islamist mayor in republican history. Erdoğan used his record as mayor of Istanbul – where even his opponents grudgingly admitted he improved services – as a platform to enter national politics. AKP, under the leadership of Erdoğan, received 34% of the votes in the 2002 general elections. He became prime minister in March 2003.

The year 1998 saw countrywide celebrations of the 75th anniversary of the Turkish Republic. However, just one year later a colossal earthquake struck north-western Turkey with devastating consequences, tragically killing thousands.

But the city continues to grow, not just outwards but upwards. Over the last 20 years a series of high-rise office blocks and luxury hotels have transformed the city’s skyline. Many have been built by large corporations that have grown rich on the back of Özal’s free-marker reforms.

In the meantime, the city has also regained much of its assertiveness and pride, becoming a regular venue for international conferences and sports events. Ambition off the field has been accompanied by success on it, particularly in football. In 2000 Galatasaray, one of the top three Istanbul teams, won the UEFA Cup. Meanwhile the Turkish national team, which invariably plays its home matches in Istanbul rather than Ankara, finished third in the 2002 World Cup. In 2003 Sertab Erener won the Eurovision Song Festival for Turkey with ‘Every Way That I Can’.

As Turkey edges closer to full membership of the EU, efforts are under way to transform Istanbul into a cosmopolitan European city. A long-awaited metro system has finally opened and more infrastructure improvements are currently being carried out, among which a tunnel under the Bosphorus to link the European and Asian shores and rail lines.

In 2007 AKP again emerged victorious (47%) in advanced elections after a crisis over the elections of the new president. Abdullah Gül is the current President of Turkey.

Although no one doubts that the city, for all its bewitching beauty, still faces major problems, a corner does seem to have been turned. For many years, the city slumbered in a kind of post-war gloom – but now the lights are all back on.

With thanks to TimeOut Istanbul

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Ottomans at the Gate

The Seljuks had become a force to be reckoned with, growing from a small principality in Anatolia to a powerful army, known as the Ottomans. They ruled over the Balkans, the area all around Constantinople and much of the remainder of the Byzantine Empire.

The fall of Constantinople can be attributed directly to the brilliance of Mehmet II, the Conqueror. In 1451, Mehmet prepared two magnificent fortresses on the Bosphorus for his invasion. Anadolu Hisarı on the Asian side was strengthened, while a second fortress, Rumeli Hisarı, on the European side, was constructed in just a few months. Together, the two fortresses guarded the narrowest section of the Bosphorus.

Mehmet meanwhile brought in master craftsmen from Europe to build huge cannons, and in May 1453 started to build up his forces around the walls of Constantinople. The Byzantines had installed massive chain links across the Golden Horn, so Mehmet took them by surprise.
He bombarded the city walls by night and stealthily transported his ships overland, from a cove behind Galata where the Dolmabahçe Palace now stands, on rollers up the hill and down into the Golden Horn behind the chains. The emperor Constantine XI died fighting on the walls.

Ottoman Rule

Mehmet entered the city on 29 May and immediately went to pray in the Hagia Sophia, which was cleansed and declared a mosque. Many other churches were turned into mosques, although those areas which had not resisted the Ottoman forces were spared. Constantinople was renamed Istanbul, which stems from the Greek ‘Istanopolis’ or ‘to the city’, and declared it the capital of the Ottoman Empire.

Mehmet began the process of transforming Istanbul into a fabulously wealthy capital. He repaired the city walls and built a new mosque, the Fatih Camii, as well as Topkapi Palace and the Grand Bazaar. New districts of the city were established and seaside mansions constructed.

Under Süleyman the Magnificent (1522 – 1566), the Ottoman Empire was at its peak, extending from Vienna to the Arab peninsula and as far south as Sudan. Süleyman’s greatest landmark is perhaps the exquisite Süleymaniye Mosque, built in 1556.

Decline of the Ottoman Empire

After Süleyman’s death, the empire began to decline, falling behind Europe in technological innovation and under threat from Tsarist Russia in the north. The crack Janissary Corps, a much-feared army of former Christians who had been forcibly converted to Islam, rose up against Sultan Mahmut II in 1826 and was slaughtered en masse in Sultanahmet.

This, combined with a series of weak rulers, meant the empire lost more and more land, and gradually Greece, Bulgaria, the Balkans and Egypt won their independence. Istanbul nonetheless retained a kind of faded glory, with some of the magnificent 19th-century buildings, such as the Dolmabahçe Palace and the Yildiz Palace, still popular today.

World War I

The Ottomans entered World War I on the side of the German and Austro-Hungarian forces, a decision that was to prove a fatal mistake. The single bright spot in the whole of the war was the successful defense in 1915 of the Gallipoli Peninsula by a hitherto unknown colonel, Mustafa Kemal.

By the end of the war the Ottoman Empire was in ruins, its armies totally defeated, and Istanbul occupied by an Allied army. The sultan was in the power of the Allies, forced to sign a humiliating peace agreement that reduced the empire to a rump comprising Istanbul and part of Anatolia, while the Italians invaded Antalya and the Greek army marched towards Ankara.

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