The history of Cihangir, Istanbul

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:01]During the Ottoman siege of Constantinople, the defending [music] Byzantines hung a giant chain across the Golden Horn to keep out enemy navies.

[00:00:10]Mehmet the Conqueror's response was to pull his whole fleet [music] 3 km along what is now Bosphorus and Golden Sea to Kasım Paşa, bypassing the chain and helping him conquer the city. [music] During the maneuver, Mehmet himself led Friday prayers in a nearby forest that was thereafter known [music] as Çukurcuma, or roughly Friday Valley. The life of Mehmet the Conqueror's [music] great-grandson, Suleiman the Magnificent, was scarred by tragedy and often memorialized by his court architect, Mimar Sinan.

[00:00:42]Suleiman's favorite son was Prince Cihangir, who was more interested in wandering the forests of Pera [music] than he was in politics. But Prince Cihangir had been born a hunchback and died at the age of 21.

[00:00:55]A grieving Suleiman commissioned Sinan to build another [music] mosque on Prince Cihangir's favorite hilltop, where he laid Cihangir and his brother Mehmet to rest. The hill would henceforth be known as Cihangir and the valley [music] below it as Çukurcuma.

[00:01:09]By the 1600s, Pera was urbanizing as Galata outgrew its walls and its former residents moved uphill along a street that would become İstiklal Caddesi, the empire's [music] official diplomatic district. Cihangir suddenly found itself at the center of one of the world's biggest and [music] fastest-growing cities, but was allowed to keep its green spaces and historical buildings.

[00:01:31]At [music] the time, Cihangir was largely Christian and Greek. When the liberalizing Tanzimat reforms removed restrictions on the size of non-Muslim religious buildings in the 1800s, the Greek residents of Cihangir cleared the cemetery at the top of the hill and built a new church, the Aya Triada Church, the first domed [music] church to be built in the city since Byzantine times. But, following World War I and the Turkish War of Independence, much of Istanbul's Greek population emigrated.

[00:02:01]>> [music] >> In the 1940s, the government nationalized non-Muslim businesses through the Varlık Vergisi, >> [music] >> and in 1955, local Greeks were attacked and the Aya Triada Church was looted [music] and burned. Most of the Christians moved away and the area became majority Muslim for the first time.

[00:02:19]But this [music] seems to strengthen the resolve of those who remained, who were soon joined by dissident Turkish authors, writers, [music] and filmmakers. They would form the backbone of the prolific Yeşilçam film industry in next-door Taksim, [music] which made Turkey the world's fourth-biggest movie producer in the 1960s, [music] as covered in our North Taksim video.

[00:02:39]Cihangir thus became the Beverly Hills of Turkey, complete with resident celebrities, fancy bars, and chic [music] restaurants. In 2012, The Guardian included Cihangir and Çukurcuma in its list of the five best neighborhoods in the world, sending house prices spiraling.