LONDON HAS ITS Hampstead. Budapest has its Szentendre. Paris has its Montmartre, and Athens has its Plaka. Like these cities, Istanbul also has an area where the city’s citizens meet to relax – Kuzuncuk. This is a village-like settlement on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus in the northeast corner of Üskudar.
We visited Kuzguncuk on a sunny Sunday morning, having walked along the coastal road that leads away from the centre of Üsküdar. As we walked, we watched competitors in a running event, struggling up and down the undulating road from which traffic had been temporarily excluded.
The streets of Kuzguncuk run up hill away from the shore. They are lined with small houses, many of which are picturesque with their timber cladding, small balconies, and other ornamentation. Tables and chairs of cafés, snack bars, and other eateries occupy the pavements. Many of them had customers, who were eating tasty looking breakfast platters, cakes, and other snacks.
As far as we could tell, most of the visitors to Kuzguncuk are Turks. This has not always been the case. Jewish people, who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal, began settling on the village in the 16th century. The earliest tombstone in Kuzuncuk’s Jewish cemetery is dated 1562. The Jewish inhabitants of Kuzguncuk have mostly left – many in 1948. There are two synagogues – one heavily guarded by the police, and the other one more lightly guarded – in the village. Both were locked up.
Armenians began settling in Kuzguncuk in the 18th century. We spotted one of their churches, but it was locked up the service having finished. Following disturbances in 1955, most of the Armenians and Greeks, who lived in Kuzuncuk, left. We passed a couple of Greek Orthodox churches, both locked up. One of them located next door to the heavily guarded synagogue is still in use on Sundays, but we were too late to enter it.
The centre of Kuzguncuk did not have a mosque until 1952. Then, one was built in the courtyard of the Armenian Church of Surp Krikor Lusavoriç. The Armenian community contributed funds towards the construction of this mosque.
When the Greeks, Jews, and Armenians left Kuzguncuk, many of their homes were acquired by migrants from Anatolia.
After spending an extremely pleasant couple of hours in Kuzguncuk, we climbed up the vertiginously steep lanes behind the village, and eventually reached a long main road that led gently downwards to the centre of Üsküdar. As we struggled up a lane, a lady in her garden said to us “Yavaş yavaş” (loosely translated as ‘take it slowly’).
If you wish to escape the crowds of tourists in Sultanahmet and other well-known historic parts of Fatih (the older part of Istanbul in Europe), then head for Kuzguncuk for something delightfully different.
yamey 