Old names: Pharmakeus, Therapeia
These days it’s a rare foreign visitor who makes it as far up the Bosphorus as Tarabya which is a shame since it presides over one of the most magnificent bays on the strait. What’s more this was once the favoured setting for the summer residences built for the various Constantinople embassies so that their staff could escape the heat and humidity of high summer. As a result a handful of particularly fine 19th-century buildings can still be seen here, hanging on in varying states of (dis)repair.
The bay is dominated by the Grand Tarabya Hotel, a hotel with a venerable history as the old Tokatlıyan and before that as the Hotel d’Angleterre. Just beyond it is Kireçburnu (Lime Point), a promontory jutting out into the Bosphorus at the point where you start to be able to glimpse the Black Sea on the horizon. It’s home to several fine fish restaurants.
During the Crimean War (1853-56) Tarabya had a hospital for wounded soldiers and the families of many senior officers took up residence here. British Ambassador, Sir Stratford Canning (the “Büyük Elçi”), had a house here which he made available to the nurses working under Mary Stanley (1813-79), an erstwhile friend of Florence Nightingale who fell out with her over nursing methods during the War.
Around Tarabya
As you come into Tarabya from Yeniköy you will pass what was once the summer residence of the German Embassy. Designed by the Belgian architect Cingria, it was given to Kaiser Wilhelm II by Sultan Abdülhamid in return for his help in modernising the Ottoman navy. The back garden contains a German military cemetery and a memorial to Marshall Helmuth von Moltke the Elder who helped Sultan Mahmud II reform the Ottoman army in 1829. Restoration in 1990 robbed the building of most remaining features of the historic interior.
Further north, the summer residence of the Italian Embassy was housed in a beautiful wooden Raimondo d’Aronco-designed mansion put up in 1908. Alas, it has been left to rot.
The summer residence of the French Embassy was originally built for one of the Fener grandees who also kept summer homes on this part of the shore. When owner Alexandre İpsilanti was executed for treason in 1806, his home became the property of the French emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte. A fire in 1913 virtually destroyed the property which now belongs, in its reincarnated form, to Marmara University. The British Summer Embassy next door, possibly but not conclusively designed by Giorgio Domenico Stampa and opened in 1870, burnt down in 1911; all that survives now are the auxiliary buildings.
Eating
A branch of the upmarket kebab chain Big Chefs (tel: 0850-399 4500) now occupies the striking building that was once home to the the Le Pecheur fish restaurant.
Sleeping
Grand Tarabya Hotel. tel: 0212-363 3300
Transport info
Most of the buses plying the coast road from Kabataş or Beşiktaş to Sarıyer pass through Tarabya as do minibuses from the 4.Levent Metro station.
Nearby areas
