Three villages on the Bosphorus shore, three stories behind their names. One of them is a road crew.
The Bosphorus is about 30 km long and about 700 metres wide at its narrowest. Along it survive about 620 yalıs, wooden waterside houses from the 18th to 20th centuries, used mostly as second homes; the word is Greek, yialí, "seashore". Most are private: you see them from the water.
So look at the villages.
Arnavutköy means "Albanian village". In 1468 Mehmed II brought Albanians to the city for paving work and settled them here. A 1912 yearbook counted 7,482 residents, most of them Rûm Christians, alongside Muslims, Armenians and Jews. The waterfront keeps wooden houses from the late 1800s and early 1900s, many Art Nouveau. In 2022: 3,574 people.
Bebek. Why "baby"? Nobody agrees. A short form of "pupil of the Bosphorus"; a nickname of Mustafa Çelebi, put in charge here after 1453; or simply "pretty as a baby". Bebek has a mansion built in 1899–1901 for Emina Ilhamy, mother of Egypt's last Khedive, and the 1751 Kavafyan mansion, one of Istanbul's oldest wooden buildings, decaying.
Ortaköy, "middle village", has the Neo-Baroque mosque beside the Bosphorus Bridge's European pylon. Sultan Abdülmecid commissioned it from an Armenian father and son, Garabet and Nigoğayos Balyan; it went up in 1854–56.
A base? Hardly anyone asks. In our 947-post Reddit set Bebek appears in 3 posts, Arnavutköy in 3, Ortaköy in 2. Come for a day.
See the villages from the water first. Ferries from Üsküdar and Kadıköy call at Ortaköy, Arnavutköy and Bebek, though Şehir Hatları stops at Arnavutköy infrequently; check the timetable (the winter one runs to 27 June 2027). Then walk the shore from Arnavutköy to Bebek, ideally on a weekday morning.
