A raven, a dervish or a prison window?

Ask three people where the name comes from and you'll get three answers.

• A holy man. One answer is Kuzgun Baba, said to have lived here in the time of Mehmed II.
• An older name. Another is Kosinitza, worn down over the centuries.
• A word. The dictionary offers a third: a kuzguncuk is the small barred window in a prison door.

Guidebooks often add a Byzantine name, Chrysokeramos, "golden tile", after a church with a gilded roof. Scholars place that church further up the Bosphorus, at Çubuklu or Çengelköy [H that it is disputed]. One historian of the neighbourhood reads the dervish legend as a Muslim origin story given to a village that, for most of its history, was mostly Jewish, Armenian and Greek.