A panel on the upper floor of the Pera Museum’s new show, From Konstantiniyye to Istanbul: Photographs of the Anatolian Shore of the Bosphorus, contains a quotation from Turkish novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s 1946 work Beş Şehir (Five Cities), in which Tanpınar reflects on memory, the past, and the changing physical faces of cities. According to Tanpınar, in the normal course of events “each city is transformed every three to four hundred years.” In the case of Istanbul, however, this transformation has occurred prematurely: “we have managed to lose even the most recent of pasts[.]” The metamorphosis already apparent to Tanpinar at mid-century has greatly accelerated since then, with many once rural or semi-rural neighborhoods on Istanbul’s periphery now become overpopulated cities-within-cities.  

The show, with its collection of black-and-white photographs ranging in date from the 1860s to the early years of the Republic, reveals just how much the city has changed over a century and a half. Photos by approximately a dozen different photographers are on display, in addition to a large number of anonymous images; the work of Ottoman photographer Pascal Sebah (of Sebah & Joaillier) is particularly well-represented. The show, which makes no attempt at covering all areas of Istanbul, focuses exclusively on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, from Paşalimanı/Kuzguncuk all the way to the mouth of the Black Sea at Anadolu Kavağı. The curators’ decision to begin here (and not further down the coast) is an appropriate one, since it is only north of downtown Üsküdar that one begins to feel one is not quite living in the city.

Information panels provide generous amount of detail about the history of these neighborhoods, many of which (e.g. Beykoz) were semi-independent from the rest of Istanbul until well into the 19th century.The exhibition is particularly informative about the names of the different neighborhoods (there are no fewer than 18 of these between Kuzguncuk and Anadolu Kavağı) and their origins. Anadolu Kavağı apparently refers not to the modern Turkish word kavak (poplar), but to an older kavak which meant “a place where customs duties were collected.” Beykoz, which looks like it means “the Bey’s walnut,” may in fact be Bey kos, “the Bey’s village” – kos being the Persian word for “village.”

Yet it is the photographs themselves – depicting long-vanished modes of life – that evoke the city’s past most tellingly. Ottoman-era ağaç evleri (wooden houses), one of the saddest casualties of Istanbul’s urban transformation, are thankfully much in evidence in these photographs.  In a pair of 1865 photos by Pascal Sebah, a trio of veiled female picnickers are conveyed to the top of Yuşa Hill...by ox-drawn carriage. A photo of the Mihrişah Valide Sultan Çeşmesi in Küçüksu contains a shepherd with his sheep – which you probably won’t find there today – and a man selling simit (which you will). Paddle-steamers, the ancestors of today’s Bosphorus ferries, feature in a number of photos; a picture-postcard of the Kuzguncuk İskelesi, like the old postcards sold at second-hand bookshops, has captions in the standard trio of Ottoman Turkish, English, and comically transliterated French. (The French title for this one is Débarcadère de Couscoundjouk).

An amusing pastime at a show of this kind is to examine a photo – ignoring technical issues like black-and-white versus color – and, without peeking at the caption, ask yourself: what is the earliest or latest date this photograph could have been taken? The presence in a Sebah photo of men in şalvar trousers and fezes dates the image to the pre-Atatürk period, as surely as a public inscription in the Latin alphabet would have dated it to after 1928. A view from Paşalimanı across the water to Beşiktaş and Taksim shows only the horizontal bulk of the Taşkışla – now a campus of Istanbul Technical University – on the hillside, without the Marmara Hotel or Ceylan Intercontinental. Cutoff date: late 1960s. The better your knowledge of Istanbul’s history, geography, and culture, the more precise your estimates will be.

The thrill of recognizing a familiar place in a photo taken decades earlier is akin to the thrill of seeing its satellite image on Google Earth: it is the same, and yet different. Of all the neighborhoods in the show, the reviewer was most curious to see the photographs of Kuzguncuk, where he had once lived himself. Though there were no pictures of İcadiye Caddesi, and very few of central Kuzguncuk in general, it was pleasing to find one of the waterside Üryanizade Mescidi, with its unmistakable gazebo-like minaret. Unfortunately, the show contained no photos of the gargantuan, centuries-old plane tree in Çengelköy, which may date back to before the conquest of the city.

While not all the photographs in a show of this size can be of equal interest, a number of them stood out in the reviewer’s mind, such as Sebah’s photo of the Beykoz Kasrı, looming above a Bosphorus so still as to look like a meadow of grass; Guillaume Berggren’s picture of the Kıbrıslılar Yalısı in Kandilli, in which the fading of the print made the opposite shore appear as though in a foggy haze; and a group of sailboats in Beykoz that looked for all the world like Viking ships. Go see From Konstantiniyye to Istanbul, and you are sure to come up with half a dozen of your own favorites. The show – with its nostalgic and at times striking images of a now-vanished city – forms the perfect accompaniment to a book like Orhan Pamuk’s nonfiction work Istanbul: Memories and the City (which should ideally be read beforehand) and is well worth a few hours of your time.

Pera Müzesi; Meşrutiyet Caddesi No. 141, Tepebaşı; P: (0212) 334 99 00