“Lighthouse Garden”
Market: Tuesday (Hasanpasa)
Best known as home to one of Turkey’s most famous and popular football teams, Fenerbahçe (“the Yellow Canaries”), Fenerbahçe is a waterside suburb that is home to the big Kalamış Marina. It’s named after the local lighthouse (fener) and is a generally well-heeled residential area with lots of inviting cafes and restaurants dotted about its streets. Just a handful of old wooden houses survive from the original neighbourhood.
Fenerbahçe play to crowds of up to 54,000 spectators in the modern Şükrü Saraçoğlu Stadium which was completely renovated in 2006. Nearby stands a statue of one of the team’s most famous players, Lefter Kücükandonyadis (1925-2012), who scored 423 goals over the course of 615 matches.
One of the great delights of summer in İstanbul is Fenerbahçe Parkı which sits on a promontory south of Kadıköy with splendid views out over the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus. An oasis for admirers of tulips and Judas trees, the park also boasts a wild garden set aside for poppies, cornflowers and other delicate blooms more usually associated with grass verges. The pretty Romantika Cafe was one of the many historic buildings restored by the late Çelik Gülersoy, the man who also brought us Soğukçeşme Sokağı behind Ayasofya in Sultanahmet.
The old Kadıköy Salı Pazarı (Tuesday Market) now takes places in nearby Hasanpaşa but is only really worth the effort of getting to if you feel the urge to stock up on cheap T-shirts.
Opposite the Kalamış Marina the small Church of Hagios Ioannis Khrysostomos (St John Chrysostom, 1875) is easy to overlook and of no great architectural interest. The narthex does, however, retain an old stone printing block that shows what İstanbul used to look like.
Amid a row of restaurants south of the marina look out for the Jean Botter Köşkü, a mansion with wooden dragons serving as corbels for its cumba and with a classical bust protruding just beneath its roofline. It was designed as a summer house for Jean Botter, tailor to Sultan Abdülhamid II, by Raimondo d’Aronco who also designed the better known Casa Botter on İstiklal Caddesi as his winter home.
Eating
Near the marina a string of chain restaurants such as Happy Moon’s and Midpoint Fenerbahçe sit facing the water. Their menus are hardly original but the location is great and they’re packed to the rafters over summer weekends.
The menu at Romantika in Fenerbahçe Park is no more original but eating right beside the water is an unbeatably lovely experience in high summer.
Sleeping
Wyndham Grand İstanbul Kalamış Marina Hotel. Tel: 0216-400 0000
Nearby areas
