Arts, Culture & History

Gallery spaces can too often reflect a highbrow approach to art which can be off-putting to the more casual art enthusiast. This is where BLOK...

As a dweller of Nişantaşı, I am lucky enough to be located in one of the centers of the Istanbul arts and cultural scene....

Guest Post by Sheldon Heyes. This post first appeared on Sheldon Heyes' website, Istanbul in Ink.  What do you get when a Brazilian diplomat, a Syrian...

After observing several overturned coffee cups with increasing curiosity during my first few months here, it became apparent that one does not simply sip...

I remember walking down the large avenues and neatly perpendicular streets of Washington, D.C. not too long ago, longing for old buildings and crooked...

There's nothing like a great concert, especially when life is stressful. The catharsis of listening to a live band and perhaps even dancing has...

“Light is more important than the lantern, The poem more important than the notebook” ― Syrian poet, Nizar Qabbani To the general public, Syria has become...

It wasn't so long ago that we promoted the first iteration of World Café, a language learning project organized by local university teachers. After...

Back in the day, mothers with unwed sons would often be on the look out for a good single girl to wed their sons...

Vendors and commuters criss-cross in front of the gates of the dock. My friend and I use the akbil dangles with the circular buttons...

Someone recently described Istanbul to me as a city where you can "have the best day of your life, followed by the worst day”,...

Nowadays Istanbul is known for its mosques, but prior to 1453, Constantinople was a completely Christian city replete with churches. Many of them exist to this day:...

Yeşilçam, which translates to “Green Pine”, is a shorthand for Turkey's old film industry. The name comes from Yeşilçam Street, an area of Beyoğlu...

When I first lived in Istanbul for 6 months in 2013, some of my most memorable days were spent simply wandering the old city...

İstiklal Caddesi is home to many eateries, stores and coffee shops. Although chains such as Shake Shack have been cropping up, the promenade manages...

In the final month of 2019, the first Coronavirus case was recorded in Wuhan, China. The pandemic has since spread nearly all over the...

How does one explain Barış Manço?  He is kind of like the Turkish John Denver, but with the notoriety of John Lennon and a...

C. M. Kosemen is an artist and independent researcher born in Ankara, Turkey in 1984. He studied at Cornell University, Istanbul’s Sabancı University and...

The Venice International Film Festival’s VR program “Venice VR Expanded 2020” has come to Istanbul For the first time in its 125 year history, La...

The 90s was a unique period all over the world and the same goes for Turkey. In Turkey, alongside its distinctive music genres and...

For a long time there has been a culture struggling to make itself known, to have its voice heard. Often relegated to the sidelines,...

A darbuka drum is a Middle Eastern instrument whose structure varies depending on location. They all have a conical shape with a nearly circular...

Now if you have watched Dan Brown’s Inferno, the movie with Tom Hanks, and have been a diligent tourist in Istanbul, you’d recognize the...

Like many of history’s greatest culinary discoveries, that of coffee stemmed from a noisy, restless goat and his attendant farmer’s desire for an undisturbed...