“Baby” or “Doll”
To take the pulse of Turkish high society at play you could do worse than head for Bebek, between Arnavutköy and Rumeli Hisarı, which is a suburb with a well-deserved reputation as a place to see and be seen. The coast road narrows as it makes its way through Bebek which slows the traffic down, making it easier to eye up a great choice of restaurants with something for everyone but mostly for the better off.
A solid wedge of shops and restaurants blocks the view of the Bosphorus from the main stretch of Bebek high street but as you come in from Kuruçeşme you will see a pleasant waterside park with plenty of benches where you can sit and watch the boats go by. Then at the Küçük Bebek end of the high street as it heads out towards Rumeli Hisarı the water side of the road turns into a delightful promenade where you can join the fishermen and sunbathers who crowd in in the summer.
Bebek is home to Turkey’s most prestigious university, Boğaziçi (Bosphorus) University, which hunkers down on the hillside in buildings of Victorian sturdiness amid extensive grounds overlooking the strait.
Around Bebek
The small but pleasing waterside Türkan Sabancı Park comes equipped with exercise machines, a dog-walking pound and a tree with mosaic embedded in its bark. A statue of the Iraqi-born poet Fuzuli (1480-1556) forms a somewhat surprising centrepiece but really this is a place to come to people-watch rather than try and get inside the heads of the urban decision-makers.
Overlooking the park on the Kuruçeşme side stands the magnificent Art Nouveau building that houses the Egyptian Consulate/Hıdiva Sarayı. Dating back to 1902 and completed renovated in the 2010s, it was designed originally for Emine Hanım, mother of the last Egyptian Khedive, Abbas Hilmi, who later had a summer house built for himself on the opposite side of the Bosphorus at Çubuklu. It is not absolutely certain whose eye lay behind the building’s design. Although it’s usually claimed for Raimodo d’Aronco, it’s just as likely that it was designed by either of the two Austrian architects, Fabricius and Antonio Lasclac.
As you head out of Küçük Bebek you will see the gate that leads up to the Boğaziçi Üniversitesi (Bosphorus University) campus with its impressive buildings set in grounds that will remind many British visitors of an Oxbridge College and American visitors of an Ivy League campus such as Harvard. Founded by Cyrus Hamlin (1811-1900) and Christopher Robert (1802-78) in 1863 as Robert College, the first American college outside the USA, it was turned into a university in 1971 at which time the college relocated to Arnavutköy and added a sister college for girls.
Kavalyan Konağı, 2009
Art Nouveau details on Egyptian Consulate
