The two domes on the shore road look like a postcard about tolerance. The real story is newer, and more complicated.
Before 1952, Kuzguncuk had no mosque in the village centre. The nearest was the small wooden Üryanizade mosque on the shore toward Beylerbeyi.
The mosque locals still call Yeni Cami went up that year on what had been land of the Surp Krikor Lusavoriç Armenian Church, and Armenian and Jewish neighbours helped pay for it. People will tell you the two domes were built to the same height so that neither faith would rank higher. An oral historian of the neighbourhood notes that the minaret stands taller than the church's steeple, and reads the land "gift" as one made under the pressures of the time. Both versions belong to this corner.
The church is older than either telling: wood in 1835, stone in 1861.
