“Imperial Village”
The main reason to come to the Golden Horn suburb of Hasköy is to visit the Rahmi M Koç Museum, Turkey’s first industrial heritage museum. A visit could take best part of a day if you include time for lunch but if there’s any time left over afterwards there are a few other minor monuments worth looking out for as you head back towards the town centre.
Hasköy used to be one of İstanbul’s most important Jewish neighbourhoods and is still home to a large Jewish cemetery containing around 20,000 graves with inscriptions in languages as varied as Ladino, Hebrew and Greek. The most famous person buried here is Abraham Kamondo (1781-1873), patriarch of an important 19th-century banking family who stamped their mark on many buildings in the Galata and Karaköy areas as well as leaving a beautiful waterfront palace at Kasımpaşa which was later occupied by the Ottoman navy.
Rahmi M. Koç Museum
The Rahmi M. Koç Museum (closed Mondays, admission TL500, students half-price) is housed inside a surprisingly beautiful old anchor-making factory and in the cluster of buildings around an old shipyard at Hasköy. Come here to sigh over glistening old Chevrolets and Jaguars from the days before we all started worrying about the environment and to inspect all types of transport from some of the city’s original tram carriages to the railway compartment in which Sultan Abdülaziz traveled to Paris in 1867. It all adds up to a great day out for youngsters.
Around Hasköy
If you start walking back towards the town centre from the museum you will come almost immediately to sections of the old and elegant Galata Bridge jutting out into the Golden Horn from a small park.
Shortly afterwards you come to a small Millet Kütüphanesi (National Library) created out of what was originally the brick-built Esgher Synagogue. The first mention of this synagogue was in 1912 although the building must be older than that.
If you divert north along nearby Baçtar Sokak you will come to the walled compound enclosing the Church of Hagia Paraskevi, built originally in Byzantine times but rebuilt in 1692 and extensively remodelled in the early 19th century. It sits in an inviting garden and you can sometimes get inside to visit.Uphill behind it is a large and ruinous brick building that used to be a school.
Transport info
The nicest way to get to Hasköy is by ferry from Üsküdar, Kadıköy or Karaköy although there are also frequent buses from Eminönü and Taksim.
Nearby areas
Read more about Hasköy: http://www.turkeyfromtheinside.com/blogbloggingaboutturkey/entry/19-behind-thegolden-horn-shipyards.html
