Exploring İstanbul's glorious Golden Horn

The Golden Horn is a narrow strait that carves a seven-kilometer path between the historic peninsula of Old İstanbul and the lower slopes of Beyoğlu, or New İstanbul. First let's get a linguistic mystery out of the way. All sorts of reasons have been given for the Golden Horn's colorful name. Some suggest that the “golden” part was derived from the sheen cast on the water by the rays of the setting sun, others that it harbored a memory of the gold coins hastily tossed into it by the last Byzantines as they awaited the approach of the Ottomans in 1453. As for the “horn” part, most people assume that it refers to the horn-shaped split at the upper end where the Alibey and Kağıthane rivers flow into the inlet. In more prosaic reality the name was probably taken from the Greek word “chrysokeras” whose own derivation is unclear. Eschewing all such romanticism, the Turks themselves make do with calling it the Haliç, an abbreviation for Haliç-i Dersaadet, meaning “the Bay of İstanbul” in Osmanlı, the language of the Ottoman Empire.

Unlike the prominent Bosporus ferry terminals at Eminönü, the terminal for the Golden Horn ferries lurks inconspicuously on the western side of the Galata Bridge which partly explains the relative paucity of visitors. To find it look for the Zinhan building with the Storks nightclub on the roof, then follow the path beside it down to the shore. The ferries run roughly every hour but it's a good idea to pick up a timetable so that you can plan your sightseeing around them.

The ferries stop first on the northern shore at Kasımpaşa, a dejected suburb dominated by assorted military installations standing on the site of what were once old shipyards. Even if you don't disembark from the ferry you will still be able to admire the statue of “Güzelce” Kasım Paşa (?-1543), an eccentric commander who served Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, and his pet lion. If you do disembark you could make your way inland to the Cami-i Kebir, a mosque that has been rebuilt too frequently to be of much architectural interest but which comes paired with the Büyük Hamam, the city's largest Turkish bath, with separate sections for men and women.

It would be good to report that you could also drop in on Aynalıkavak Kasrı, a beautiful small palace in extensive gardens beside the water, but unfortunately it's been closed for restoration for many years. Instead, you can hop back on the ferry and recross the water to Fener on the southern shore. From the deck of the ferry be sure to look out for the huge building in Cibali that now accommodates the Kadir Has University and a small archeological museum but which was once a vast tobacco factory. The deck also offers the best vantage point for viewing the huge red-brick building on top of the hill that houses the Fener Greek High School for Boys (aka the Red Castle), a shadow of its former self in terms of the number of pupils.

Fener is a fascinating suburb, once home to the Phanariote Greeks, descendants of the Byzantines who stayed on after the Ottoman Conquest and often rose to high office both in İstanbul and in the Balkan provinces. Of their magnificent brick mansions only a handful survive -- one now houses the city's Women's Library, another houses a glass workshop. The coast road was built on reclaimed land and on the inland side of it you can still make out traces of the old sea walls that, with the great Theodosian land walls, once guarded the city so carefully. Today Fener is filled with families who've moved here from elsewhere in the country and whose washing invariably festoons the streets, but it's also home to the Patriarchate, a walled enclosure inside which sits the mother church of Greek Orthodoxy.

Midway between Fener and Balat stands a real curiosity -- the Gothic-style Church of St. Stephen of the Bulgars which was made out of cast iron in Vienna in 1871, then shipped here and reassembled right on the shore. The landing stage at Balat is currently out of action but it's only a short walk from Fener so you might want to divert there to browse the pretty little market streets and to admire the row houses, some of them newly restored with money from a joint UNESCO-EU project. Balat was once the heart of Jewish İstanbul and is home to the beautiful late 17th-century Ahrida Synagogue. To visit it you need advance permission from the Rabbinate in Galata.

From Fener the ferry tacks back across the Golden Horn to Hasköy where you can disembark to visit the Rahmi M. Koç Museum, Turkey's first (and best) industrial heritage museum built on the site of another old shipyard and an anchor-making factory. With an extensive collection of old cars, trams and buses, as well as several reconstructed shops and even a submarine, it's a great place to bring children who've had enough of all the historic sightseeing. Afterwards you can hop back on the ferry and cruise to Ayvansaray, the point where the sea walls met the land walls and one of the best places to get an idea of what the fortifications would have looked like towards the end of the Byzantine period. You can also pop into the Blachernae Church, built over one of the city's many sacred springs and an important place of pilgrimage in Byzantine times.

The ferry then crosses back to Sütlüce on the northern shore, which is dominated by a huge new conference center housed inside what was once a much grimmer slaughter house dating back to 1923. From here you can hire a rowing-boat to take you upstream to Miniatürk where children can cast an eye over cut-down models of all Turkey's major tourist sites. No children in tow? Then stroll north along the newly landscaped promenade to Bilgi University where Santralİstanbul is the city's most cutting-edge art gallery, home to a series of changing exhibitions.

From Sütlüce the ferry ambles to its last terminal at Eyüp right beside the long burgundy Feshane where all the city's fezes used to be made and the Old Galata Bridge that now serves as a footbridge between Sütlüce and Eyüp. Eyüp is home to the Eyüp Sultan Camii, İstanbul's most holy shrine as the burial place of Ebu Eyüp el-Ensari, the standard-bearer to the Prophet Mohammed. The current mosque dates back only to 1800, but the tomb was built in 1458, not long after the holy man's remains had been rediscovered. It's always crowded with worshippers, and the surrounding area is often full of small boys in colorful circumcision costumes, brought here to pray before their sünnet. In contrast you may well have the streets behind the mosque more or less to yourself even though they contain a magnificent collection of Ottoman funerary art, with wonderful medreses (seminaries), imarets (soup kitchens) and türbes (tombs).