The heady Turkish city has dramatic echoes of its past at every turn.
Nick Redman - 2 July 2024
From Wallander to The Valhalla Murders, Nordic noir has long slayed the competition in the TV crime-drama stakes. The formula is fail-safe: a string of ritual homicides, lashings of moody light and a booze-addled detective. If, however, all that northern exposure is feeling like overkill, there’s a new thriller coming to BBC2 – based in rather sunnier Istanbul.
The setting is perfect: Istanbul and intrigue go together like Agatha Christie and the Orient-Express. Over eight episodes, The Turkish Detective finds hard-drinking, chain-smoking Inspector Cetin Ikmen pursuing elusive criminals through the turbulent city.
It’s directed by Niels Arden Oplev (of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and in taking Istanbul as his location, he’s given himself plenty to play with: it’s a fascinatingly unfathomable city, a geographical puzzle of marine expanses and continental landmasses that somehow never connect. Monuments on the Byzantine promontory rise as if from an eastern fairy tale: the turtle-domes of Suleymaniye; the Blue Mosque and its six minarets; Hagia Sophia, like a giant R2D2; and Topkapi Palace, inscrutable among evergreens. It’s the most extraordinary destination doable from London in a long weekend.
Image: Wooden mansions on Buyukada
Perhaps I’m biased. I lived in the city in the mid-80s and loved it. Then it was a strange sui generis outpost, marooned between paranoid Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union’s menace. Thick blue tobacco smoke veiled the dim cafés of the Grand Bazaar. My coterie spent evenings eating meze by candlelight at rough-tabled meyhane taverns in the back alleys of edgy Beyoglu, while slugs of potent raki swirled the brain, like the first twirls of a fairground ride.
Forty years on, the welcome remains. If I was there this summer I’d be on a Bosphorus ferry, leaving the jetty in a fury of wake foam – destination Anadolu Kavagi, a fishing village up near the Black Sea. There’d be sea bass, white wine and sunshine. Then again I might make for the Princes’ Islands, an hour’s voyage out in the Sea of Marmara. I’d tackle the path up the isle of Buyukada to spend a moment on a blue pew in the little Byzantine church of St George of the Bells at the summit.
Istanbul is the summer Euro-city: water’s edge brunches in the California-feel enclaves of Bebek and Arnavutkoy; late, great nights, too, at rooftop bars. First stop: Fumoir, at fashionable hotel Georges, on a cobbled alley in Galata. Here designer bites come with a view of glittery Asian shores beyond the Bosphorus. Next, maybe Mikla, a Manhattan-worthy eyrie 17 storeys up in the Marmara Pera hotel. It’s open to breezes and circling gulls, with views of golden-lit mosques in Sultanahmet.
If you can’t stand the heat, Istanbul can be a dish best served cold. In midwinter, snowstorms coming over the Black Sea from Russia coat the skyline domes white. Warming cups of traditional milky sahlep, dusted with cinnamon, are sold citywide, while street vendors roast chestnuts for the crowds streaming over Galata Bridge, where anglers hunch, waiting for a silver flash of hooked bluefish.
In the bitter months, Istanbul has all the chill of a spy story by Graham Greene, whose 1932 bestseller Stamboul Train concluded in the city, though you’ll also sense the presence of Ms Christie. Her favoured bolthole was the Pera Palace Hotel, opened in 1895 for disembarking Orient-Express travellers and before long a louche landmark. No winter weekend is complete without a glass of champagne in the maroon gloom of its Orient Bar. And you can check into room 411, where Christie is said to have worked on her novel. But I’d opt for the Four Seasons Hotel Sultanahmet, a world-class wonder set in what was once a prison. From here it’s an easy stroll to Istanbul’s marquee attractions, including Topkapi Palace, with its endless cocooning chambers.
Image: Treats at the Grand Bazaar
In the great palace kitchens are a few highlights of Topkapi’s coveted celadon porcelain range, transported from China on a magical mystery tour: around India and the Arabian peninsula, via Jeddah, Cairo and Alexandria, up the Nile; finally across the Mediterranean to Istanbul.
The sultans are said to have desired celadon not only for its exquisite beauty, but also because it was rumoured to change colour, or explode into shards, if piled high with poisoned food. If not? Murder by Orient excess – which would make for a terrific TV crime series…
The setting is perfect: Istanbul and intrigue go together like Agatha Christie and the Orient-Express. Over eight episodes, The Turkish Detective finds hard-drinking, chain-smoking Inspector Cetin Ikmen pursuing elusive criminals through the turbulent city.
It’s directed by Niels Arden Oplev (of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and in taking Istanbul as his location, he’s given himself plenty to play with: it’s a fascinatingly unfathomable city, a geographical puzzle of marine expanses and continental landmasses that somehow never connect. Monuments on the Byzantine promontory rise as if from an eastern fairy tale: the turtle-domes of Suleymaniye; the Blue Mosque and its six minarets; Hagia Sophia, like a giant R2D2; and Topkapi Palace, inscrutable among evergreens. It’s the most extraordinary destination doable from London in a long weekend.
Image: Wooden mansions on Buyukada
Perhaps I’m biased. I lived in the city in the mid-80s and loved it. Then it was a strange sui generis outpost, marooned between paranoid Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union’s menace. Thick blue tobacco smoke veiled the dim cafés of the Grand Bazaar. My coterie spent evenings eating meze by candlelight at rough-tabled meyhane taverns in the back alleys of edgy Beyoglu, while slugs of potent raki swirled the brain, like the first twirls of a fairground ride.
Forty years on, the welcome remains. If I was there this summer I’d be on a Bosphorus ferry, leaving the jetty in a fury of wake foam – destination Anadolu Kavagi, a fishing village up near the Black Sea. There’d be sea bass, white wine and sunshine. Then again I might make for the Princes’ Islands, an hour’s voyage out in the Sea of Marmara. I’d tackle the path up the isle of Buyukada to spend a moment on a blue pew in the little Byzantine church of St George of the Bells at the summit.
Istanbul is the summer Euro-city: water’s edge brunches in the California-feel enclaves of Bebek and Arnavutkoy; late, great nights, too, at rooftop bars. First stop: Fumoir, at fashionable hotel Georges, on a cobbled alley in Galata. Here designer bites come with a view of glittery Asian shores beyond the Bosphorus. Next, maybe Mikla, a Manhattan-worthy eyrie 17 storeys up in the Marmara Pera hotel. It’s open to breezes and circling gulls, with views of golden-lit mosques in Sultanahmet.
If you can’t stand the heat, Istanbul can be a dish best served cold. In midwinter, snowstorms coming over the Black Sea from Russia coat the skyline domes white. Warming cups of traditional milky sahlep, dusted with cinnamon, are sold citywide, while street vendors roast chestnuts for the crowds streaming over Galata Bridge, where anglers hunch, waiting for a silver flash of hooked bluefish.
In the bitter months, Istanbul has all the chill of a spy story by Graham Greene, whose 1932 bestseller Stamboul Train concluded in the city, though you’ll also sense the presence of Ms Christie. Her favoured bolthole was the Pera Palace Hotel, opened in 1895 for disembarking Orient-Express travellers and before long a louche landmark. No winter weekend is complete without a glass of champagne in the maroon gloom of its Orient Bar. And you can check into room 411, where Christie is said to have worked on her novel. But I’d opt for the Four Seasons Hotel Sultanahmet, a world-class wonder set in what was once a prison. From here it’s an easy stroll to Istanbul’s marquee attractions, including Topkapi Palace, with its endless cocooning chambers.
Image: Treats at the Grand Bazaar
In the great palace kitchens are a few highlights of Topkapi’s coveted celadon porcelain range, transported from China on a magical mystery tour: around India and the Arabian peninsula, via Jeddah, Cairo and Alexandria, up the Nile; finally across the Mediterranean to Istanbul.