14 Best Books about Istanbul for Its Hidden History

Istanbul’s story runs from a small Greek colony on the Bosphorus to the capital of three empires, and every era left its own way of telling the tale. These 14 books capture it from the inside. Their authors include historians, poets, a captive diplomat and people who grew up in its oldest neighborhoods. The best books about Istanbul put the city’s past in your own hands.

1. The Middle of Istanbul—Malik Aksel

Turkish writer and painter Malik Aksel (1901-1987) lived through the last decades of old Istanbul, and this book, first published in 1977, is his eyewitness account of it. He writes about the city’s nightlife, street performers and the everyday customs that shaped the Istanbul before today’s metropolis took over. Don’t expect a straight timeline. Expect sketches of real characters instead—a street singer here, a lucky peddler there. Check the price on Amazon.

2. Pages from Istanbul—İlber Ortaylı

Dr. İlber Ortaylı, one of Türkiye’s best-known historians, collected his newspaper and magazine columns on Istanbul into this volume, first published in 1987.

The chapters move neighborhood by neighborhood. Sultanahmet, Beyazıt, Pera, Balat, Eyüp: each one is traced back to how it earned its place in the city’s story. If this list has one academic-leaning pick, it’s this one. Check the price on Amazon.

3. The Historical Atlas of the Bosphorus—Sedat Bornovalı

Art historian and guide Sedat Bornovalı, born in Istanbul in 1970, wrote this as his first book, and it reads like a long letter to the strait that splits the city in two. He traces the Bosphorus from antiquity—including a bridge of boats the Persians lashed together there around 2,500 years ago—through the Byzantine and Ottoman periods and into the present. Rich illustrations do a good share of the storytelling. Check the price on Amazon.

4. Istanbul’s History, Culture and Life—Richard Tillinghast

American writer Richard Tillinghast turns his attention to Istanbul’s art, architecture and food across the Byzantine, Ottoman and modern eras. The book reads less like a reference guide and more like a long walk through the city’s streets, museums, palaces and mosques, where Byzantine emperors and Ottoman sultans share the page. Footnote lovers may prefer item 2. Everyone else gets a story. Check the price on Amazon.

5. A Captive Russian Diplomat’s View of Istanbul—Pavel Artemyevich Levashov

Pavel Artemyevich Levashov served as Russia’s envoy in Istanbul from 1763 until 1771, right through the tense years before the 1768-1774 Russo-Turkish War. When the war broke out, Ottoman authorities imprisoned the Russian embassy staff at Yedikule Fortress, and Levashov later wrote up his memories of that captivity in the book’s first half, followed by his letters on everyday life in the city.

It’s an unusual angle on 18th-century Istanbul, seen by someone who had every reason to watch it closely. Check the price on Amazon.

6. The Jews of Istanbul—Okşan Svastics

From the city’s Byzantine years through the Ottoman period and into the 20th century, editor and writer Okşan Svastics traces the history of Istanbul’s Jewish community. The book covers the families who shaped the community’s culture, the synagogues they built and the neighborhoods, mansions and houses tied to that history. It isn’t a travel guide. Still, it’s one of the more specific windows into a side of Istanbul that general histories tend to skip. Check the price on Amazon.

7. The City’s Secrets—Faruk Pekin

Faruk Pekin, a Turkish writer and the founder of the long-running Adım Adım İstanbul (“Istanbul, Step by Step”) walking tours, has spent more than three decades getting to know the city on foot.

His argument cuts against the city’s favorite lament: loving Istanbul means engaging with its present, too—its economy, its neighborhoods, its people—not just mourning an “old Istanbul” people assume no longer exists. It works well as a companion for anyone who plans to actually walk the streets it describes. Check the price on Amazon.

8. Istanbul’s Waterside Mansions and Pavilions—Sema Akkoyun Özbay

Sema Akkoyun Özbay, who has also written about the city’s tombs and its history of coexistence, turns here to the yalıs and köşks: the waterside mansions and garden pavilions that line the Bosphorus and dot Istanbul’s older districts. Known for their architecture, colors and gardens, these buildings are some of the city’s most photographed structures, and the book digs into the stories behind the ones still standing. Read it before a Bosphorus boat tour. You’ll pass dozens of them from the water, and they stop being just pretty facades. Check the price on Amazon.

9. Yedikule and Samatya: Istanbul’s Historic Peninsula—Nursel Gülenaz, Oya Koca

Samatya sits inside the old city walls, on the peninsula bordered by the Golden Horn, the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara.

Nursel Gülenaz and Oya Koca, both local to the area, spent several years observing the neighborhood and talking to longtime residents before writing this book, which traces a main street that has run the same route since Byzantine and Ottoman times. It’s a niche pick. For readers who want to go beyond the usual Sultanahmet-Beyoğlu axis, though, it’s a rewarding one. Check the price on Amazon.

10. Old Istanbul—Mehmet Mazak

“Eski İstanbul,” old Istanbul, is a phrase every longtime resident has heard someone sigh about. But what do people actually mean by it? Mehmet Mazak’s book is one way to find out. Mazak, who has written several other books on Istanbul and Ottoman history, organizes this one around everyday life: the Bosphorus and its rowboats, drinking culture, street-cleaning customs and how the city used to light its streets at night. There’s an old Istanbul saying that whoever drinks from the Tophane Fountain never recovers from loving the city. The book is full of details in that spirit. Check the price on Amazon.

11. Rumeli and Magnificent Istanbul—Münevver Ayaşlı

Münevver Ayaşlı (1906-1999) was born in Thessaloniki in the Ottoman Empire’s last years and lived long enough to witness most of the Turkish Republic’s history firsthand. In her own words, this book is neither a palace romance nor a political memoir. Instead, it’s a record of a world and the people in it that no longer exist, built as much around Rumeli, the Ottoman Balkan territories few younger readers today have even heard of, as around Istanbul itself.

For history-minded readers, it’s a rare firsthand account from someone who actually lived through that transition. Check the price on Amazon.

12. Beyoğlu—Turan Akıncı

No conversation about Istanbul goes very long without Beyoğlu coming up, and writer and researcher Turan Akıncı gives the district a close study of its own. By the mid-19th century, European states had built their embassies there. Levantine families followed, and the district’s main street, then known as the Grande Rue de Pera, became a strip of Western-style arcades, hotels, theaters and cafés, with the Naum Theatre—once among Europe’s notable opera houses—at its center. Akıncı walks through the buildings, institutions and families that turned Beyoğlu into the Ottoman Empire’s window on the wider world. Check the price on Amazon.

13. Writers’ Istanbul—Neşe Mesutoğlu

This one is a collection, not a single author’s account. Editor Neşe Mesutoğlu brought together interviews with more than a dozen major Turkish cultural figures about their own Istanbul. Historian İlber Ortaylı and art historian Semavi Eyice cover the city across centuries. Novelists Buket Uzuner and Ahmet Ümit talk about the Istanbul that surfaces in their fiction, while photographer Ara Güler—who once called himself “the symbol of Istanbul”—appears alongside writers Hıfzı Topuz, Emre Kongar, Çetin Altan, Aydın Boysan and food writer Artun Ünsal. For the city in pictures as well as words, there’s the Pera Museum in Beyoğlu. Its online feature, “İstanbul: Before & After,” pairs Istanbul photographs from the 1850s to the 1980s with present-day views of the same places. Check the price on Amazon.

14. The Istanbul Dictionary—M. Orhan Bayrak

A fitting way to close the list: a dictionary. Historian and writer M. Orhan Bayrak (1926-2016) spent decades researching Istanbul’s history before compiling this alphabetical reference. The span he had to cover is part of why it runs so deep—the city served as capital for 65 years under the undivided Roman Empire, 1,058 years under the Byzantine Empire, and 469 years under the Ottomans. Entries run from castles, city walls, mosques and madrasahs to palaces, mansions, towers, libraries, aqueducts, cisterns, bridges, lighthouses and barracks, which makes it less a book to read cover to cover than one to keep nearby and dip into. Istanbul’s historic peninsula, the area covering most of the sites in Bayrak’s dictionary, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985.

Sources: UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Historic Areas of Istanbul; Pera Museum.