On 13 February 2026 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan came to Boğaziçi University to open a dormitory. To receive him, the university shut its own campus. Classes went online. Students living in the dormitories were told to leave their rooms in the morning for security screening, and only…
Istanbul's waterfront neighbourhoods are often described as villages, and from a ferry they look like it: mosques by the water, wooden houses…
The Ottoman sultans moved down to the water in the 19th century. For nearly four hundred years they had ruled from Topkapı, a cluster of pavilions on…
On 7 April 2018 a Maltese-flagged bulk carrier, the Vitaspirit, lost steering while heading south through the Bosporus and drove straight into the…
On a map the Bosporus looks like a river. It runs about 31 kilometres from the Black Sea at Rumeli Feneri and Anadolu Feneri down to the Sea of…
Ships entering the Bosporus from the Sea of Marmara pass under a skyline that has hardly changed in five centuries: Topkapı Palace on the point, and…
Two railway stations face each other across the southern mouth of the Bosporus. On the European side, under the walls of Topkapı, is Sirkeci, the old…
In September 2022 a video went round Turkish social media showing a ferry passing the Maiden's Tower, Kız Kulesi, on its rock off Üsküdar. Something…
The Bosporus is at its narrowest, about 700 metres, between Aşiyan on the European shore and Kandilli on the Asian one. Two Ottoman fortresses face…
A tanker leaving Novorossiysk for the Mediterranean doesn't pass one strait. It passes a system about 370 kilometres long: the Bosporus through…
