Why Çukurcuma Is the Right Place to Stay in Istanbul

In 2012, The Guardian named Çukurcuma one of the 100 best neighbourhoods in the world to live in. The list was put together not by ranking attractions but by asking what it actually feels like to be somewhere — the texture of daily life, the way a place holds itself in the morning before it has an audience.

More than a decade later, Çukurcuma has not revised its answer to that question.

The case against everywhere else

Sultanahmet is the first place people book. It is close to the Hagia Sophia, which is genuinely worth the entire journey, and the Blue Mosque, and the Grand Bazaar. It is also a neighbourhood that has largely reoriented itself around people who are visiting it rather than living in it. The restaurants know this. The prices know this. The feeling of the streets in the evening, when the coach parties have returned to their hotels and the souvenir shops have lowered their shutters, knows this.

Taksim is different in character but similar in result. The square itself has been reconstructed into something functional rather than atmospheric. İstiklal Caddesi, which runs from it, is one of Istanbul’s great streets and also one of its loudest. Staying in Taksim means sleeping above a city that does not get quiet until well past the point where most people want it to.

Karaköy has made the transition from working waterfront to design district with impressive speed. It has excellent restaurants and a density of independent coffee shops that would be notable in any city. It has also, in the way of neighbourhoods that are discovered quickly, started to look a little like itself — the aesthetic of exposed concrete and reclaimed wood, the menus written in two languages, the sense that something was here before and has been respectfully set aside.

What Çukurcuma is instead

Çukurcuma is uphill from all of this. Literally: it sits on the slope above Cihangir and Tophane, a residential neighbourhood of apartment buildings and antique shops and cats — the cats deserve their own essay, and have received one elsewhere on this site — and the kind of cafés that have not changed their furniture in twenty years because the furniture is still good.

The antique dealers on Faikpaşa Caddesi have been here since before most of the city’s design districts existed. They sell Ottoman coffee sets, Art Deco mirrors, carpets of uncertain provenance, objects that take time to understand. The trade is unhurried. Saturday morning on Faikpaşa runs at the pace of a place that knows it does not need to perform.

Two minutes away, Cihangir opens out — a neighbourhood of writers and artists and residents who chose this part of the city for reasons that have not changed. There are breakfast spots here that require waiting for on a Sunday, which is the correct indicator of quality. The Bosphorus view from the neighbourhood’s tea gardens is the one that Istanbul residents take visitors to see, as opposed to the one on the tourist maps.

The Museum of Innocence is here. Orhan Pamuk’s novelistic museum, built around the fictional love story of Kemal and Füsun, housed in a red building on Dalgıç Caddesi. It is one of the most specific and affecting museums in the city and easy to walk to before the crowds arrive.

Fifteen minutes downhill: the Bosphorus waterfront at Tophane. Twenty minutes along the waterfront: Beşiktaş, and from there, wherever the city needs to be.

The neighbourhood that The Guardian recognised

What The Guardian saw in Çukurcuma in 2012 was not a neighbourhood on the way up. It was a neighbourhood that had already arrived at something — a mix of the working and the creative, the traditional and the genuinely curious, the kind of density that produces both antique shops and independent bakeries within fifty metres of each other. That combination has proved durable.

The cobblestone streets have not been replaced. The apartment buildings still have residents in them. The neighbourhood still argues about parking. This is, in the context of what happens to neighbourhoods that get noticed, a considerable achievement.

Hammamhane is the only boutique hotel inside Çukurcuma — not on its edges, not adjacent to it, but on Çukurcuma Caddesi itself, thirty rooms in a building that belongs to the neighbourhood rather than observing it from a reception desk. Guests do not visit Çukurcuma from Hammamhane. They stay in it.