Explore the real-world places that appear in A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Taksim Square, Beyoğlu (Pera) Streets, Duttepe Neighborhood, Ghaazi Quarter (Gaziosmanpaşa), Karaköy Waterfront and 10 more.
Beyoğlu — Heart of modern Istanbul, site of Mevlut's wanderings
Taksim Square is the great urban crossroads that Mevlut traverses again and again across decades of street vending. He wheels his boza cart through its periphery on cold winter nights, calling out in his haunting voice to attract customers in the apartment blocks nearby. The square embodies the collision of old and new Istanbul that defines the novel — a site of political upheaval, military coups, and relentless modernization that shapes the backdrop of Mevlut's entire adult life.
Taksim Square has been Istanbul's symbolic civic center since the late Ottoman period. The Republic Monument, erected in 1928, commemorates the founding of modern Turkey. The square witnessed the violent May Day clashes of 1977 and became the site of the Gezi Park protests in 2013, episodes that bookend the novel's historical span.
Taksim Square remains Istanbul's most iconic public space, recently pedestrianized and connected to a new metro station. The square is a major tourist destination and the symbolic heart of the European side of the city.
Visit: Taksim Square (landmark)
İstiklal Caddesi corridor — Mevlut's nightly boza route
Mevlut walks the back streets of Beyoğlu almost every evening for decades, his aluminum pitcher of boza balanced on his shoulder, calling out 'Boo-zaaa' in his distinctive voice. It is on these darkened streets that Mevlut feels most truly himself — free from his family obligations, his failed business schemes, and the pressures of modernity. Pamuk uses these nocturnal walks to explore Mevlut's inner life, his sense of strangeness, and his longing for a life that always seems just out of reach.
Beyoğlu, the historic Pera district, was the cosmopolitan heart of late Ottoman and early Republican Istanbul, home to embassies, churches, synagogues, and the famous Grand Rue de Pera. After decades of decline following the 1955 pogroms, it was revitalized in the 1990s into a pedestrian shopping and entertainment corridor.
İstiklal Caddesi is today one of the most visited streets in the world, drawing millions of visitors annually with its cafes, bookshops, cinemas, and historic tram. The side streets Mevlut would have walked retain much of their layered, atmospheric character.
Visit: İstiklal Caddesi (landmark)
Outer Beyoğlu hills — Mevlut's family home in the gecekondu
Duttepe is where Mevlut's uncle Hasan and his cousins Korkut and Süleyman have established themselves in an illegally built gecekondu house on the hills above the city. When Mevlut first arrives from his Anatolian village, he stays with them here, overwhelmed by the vast, sprawling cityscape below. It is at a wedding in Duttepe that Mevlut first glimpses the girl whose eyes captivate him — though he will later discover he eloped with the wrong sister, Rayiha, not Samiha, because of a mix-up at the wedding.
Duttepe and similar hillside neighborhoods around Istanbul were populated by waves of rural migrants — göçmenler — from the 1950s onward, who built informal gecekondu settlements on state and private land. These communities transformed Istanbul's demographic and physical character over the second half of the twentieth century.
The hills of outer Beyoğlu have been largely formalized and redeveloped since the gecekondu era, with many former squatter settlements replaced by apartment blocks. Traces of the old neighborhood fabric remain in the narrow streets and older buildings.
Northern Istanbul — Mevlut and Rayiha's married life
After eloping with Rayiha and starting a family, Mevlut settles into various rental apartments in the working-class outer districts of Istanbul, including Gaziosmanpaşa and similar neighborhoods. Rayiha raises their two daughters — Fatma and Fevziye — in cramped flats while Mevlut goes out each evening to sell boza. The domestic life Pamuk describes here is tender and specific: Rayiha's cooking, the children's homework at the kitchen table, and Mevlut's late returns home smelling of the cold night air.
Gaziosmanpaşa was one of the major destinations for rural migrants arriving in Istanbul from the 1960s onward, named after Gazi Osman Pasha. It developed rapidly as an informal settlement and was later incorporated into greater Istanbul's municipal structure.
Gaziosmanpaşa is a dense, working-class district of Istanbul on the European side. It has been substantially redeveloped through urban renewal projects but retains its identity as a neighborhood built by and for Istanbul's internal migrants.
Golden Horn ferry landing — transit point for Mevlut's city crossings
Mevlut frequently passes through Karaköy on his journeys between the European and Asian sides of Istanbul, catching ferries and navigating the busy waterfront. The Bosphorus crossing is a recurring image in the novel — the ferry journeys give Mevlut rare moments of stillness and contemplation, watching the minarets and hillsides of the city recede and approach. The waters of the Golden Horn represent both the beauty of Istanbul and the vast unknowability of the city Mevlut has given his life to.
Karaköy has been Istanbul's primary commercial harbor since Byzantine times, known in antiquity as the Galata landing. The area was the center of Genoese merchant activity in the medieval period and later became one of the Ottoman Empire's busiest ports and financial districts.
Karaköy is today a vibrant neighborhood that has undergone significant gentrification, home to galleries, design studios, and celebrated restaurants. The ferry terminal still operates Bosphorus and Golden Horn routes and is a major hub for commuters.
Visit: Karaköy Ferry Terminal (landmark)
Crossing the Golden Horn — a threshold between worlds
The Galata Bridge is one of the novel's great symbolic landmarks, a crossing point between the old Islamic city of the peninsula and the modern European city of Beyoğlu. Mevlut crosses it countless times on foot, his boza cart in tow, watching fishermen line its railings and the Bosphorus glitter beneath. The bridge encapsulates the Istanbul of the novel — ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, always in motion, always being rebuilt.
A bridge has connected Eminönü to Karaköy across the Golden Horn since at least 1836. The current Galata Bridge, completed in 1994, replaced the previous pontoon bridge that Istanbul residents knew for most of the twentieth century. The older bridge, famously lined with fishermen and teahouses on its lower level, was a beloved institution.
The current Galata Bridge remains one of Istanbul's most iconic landmarks and is always lined with fishermen casting into the Golden Horn. Its lower level contains a row of fish restaurants and cafes, and it is freely walkable by pedestrians.
Visit: Galata Bridge (landmark)
Old City waterfront — street vending, crowds, and commerce
Eminönü is the teeming commercial node where Mevlut sells yogurt from his cart in his earlier years, navigating the crowds of shoppers, commuters, and tourists. The square sits in the shadow of the New Mosque and is one of the great crossroads of Istanbul's street economy. Pamuk uses the chaos of Eminönü to illustrate the informal world of petty commerce that Mevlut inhabits — a world governed not by contracts and offices but by relationships, luck, and physical endurance.
Eminönü has been Istanbul's primary commercial hub for centuries, the terminus of the Spice Bazaar trade routes and the departure point for Bosphorus ferries. The square's present form dates largely from the late Ottoman period, though its function as a marketplace goes back to Byzantine Constantinople.
Eminönü remains one of Istanbul's busiest transit and commercial hubs, with the Spice Bazaar, ferry terminals, the New Mosque, and the Galata Bridge all converging here. Street vendors continue to sell roasted chestnuts, simit, and mackerel sandwiches from boats moored at the quay.
Visit: Eminönü Square (landmark)
Eminönü — the market world adjacent to Mevlut's street trade
The Spice Bazaar and its surrounding market streets represent the dense, layered commercial world in which Mevlut operates. He knows the streets around the bazaar intimately — the wholesale suppliers, the rival vendors, the rhythms of the market day. The bazaar and its precinct embody the Istanbul of transactions and relationships, the economic ecosystem of the informal city that Mevlut has spent his life navigating without ever quite prospering.
The Egyptian Bazaar, or Mısır Çarşısı, was built in 1664 as part of the New Mosque complex. Its revenues originally funded the upkeep of the mosque. It takes its name from the Egyptian customs duties that financed its construction, and it has traded in spices, herbs, and foodstuffs for over 350 years.
The Spice Bazaar is one of Istanbul's most visited tourist attractions and continues to function as an active market selling spices, Turkish delight, cheese, nuts, and souvenirs. It is freely accessible during market hours.
Visit: Mısır Çarşısı (Egyptian Bazaar) (historic site)
Historic peninsula — the vanishing old Istanbul
The ancient walled city of the historic peninsula represents the Istanbul that is disappearing even as Mevlut arrives — the Ottoman skyline of minarets and domes, the old neighborhoods of wooden houses and cobblestone streets. Mevlut is enthralled by this old city and mourns its gradual erasure as concrete apartment blocks spread across the hills. His boza-selling is itself a link to this vanishing world, since boza is a drink of Ottoman antiquity now drunk only by the elderly and the nostalgic.
The historic peninsula was the site of ancient Byzantium, then Constantinople, and finally the Ottoman imperial capital. Its skyline — dominated by the Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and the Topkapı Palace — is one of the most recognizable in the world. UNESCO designated the area a World Heritage Site in 1985.
Sultanahmet is the center of Istanbul's tourist industry, drawing millions of visitors annually. The Hagia Sophia, reconverted to a mosque in 2020, and the Blue Mosque remain functioning religious sites as well as major landmarks.
Visit: Sultanahmet Historic Area (historic site)
European Bosphorus waterfront — the city's glamorous contrast
The affluent Bosphorus-side neighborhoods like Beşiktaş represent the Istanbul that Mevlut glimpses but never inhabits — the world of wealth, modernity, and upward mobility that his cousins Korkut and Süleyman gradually access through real estate speculation and political connections. As Mevlut pushes his cart through these streets on winter nights, the lit windows of the grand apartments above the strait embody everything the novel's characters desire and most of them cannot reach.
Beşiktaş was an Ottoman imperial neighborhood, home to the Çırağan and Dolmabahçe palaces along the Bosphorus shore. In the Republican era it developed into a middle-class residential and commercial district. The waterfront has been a desirable address for Istanbul's elite for centuries.
Beşiktaş is one of Istanbul's liveliest and most popular districts, known for its fish market, Çarşı neighborhood, and the ferries that connect it to the Asian shore. Dolmabahçe Palace is one of the city's major museum attractions.
Visit: Dolmabahçe Palace (museum)
Beyoğlu backstreets — the underside of urban renewal
Tarlabaşı represents the Istanbul of the urban poor, the migrants, and the marginalized — the city that Mevlut and characters like him actually inhabit. As the novel spans five decades, Pamuk traces how neighborhoods like Tarlabaşı are repeatedly promised renewal and repeatedly left behind, their residents displaced to make way for projects that benefit the connected and the wealthy. Mevlut's boza route takes him through streets like these, where his customers are old women, lonely men, and families who remember the taste of the drink from their Anatolian villages.
Tarlabaşı was historically a Greek and Armenian neighborhood, largely depopulated after the 1955 pogroms. It was subsequently settled by Kurdish and Roma migrants and became one of central Istanbul's most impoverished districts. A controversial urban renewal project beginning in 2010 demolished and displaced much of the neighborhood.
Parts of Tarlabaşı have been demolished and redeveloped into luxury apartments and hotels. Remaining sections still house a largely poor, migrant population. The neighborhood's transformation is a flashpoint for debates about gentrification and urban justice in Istanbul.
Central Şişli — the gateway from Anatolia
The bus terminals and transit hubs connecting Istanbul to Anatolia are the invisible threshold of the novel — the point where characters like Mevlut and his father first arrive from their village in Beyşehir, stepping off long-distance buses into the bewildering immensity of Istanbul. This arrival moment is one of the novel's most affecting passages, as the young Mevlut encounters the city for the first time, simultaneously terrified and enchanted by its scale, its noise, and its strangeness.
Istanbul's role as the terminus of Anatolian migration accelerated dramatically after the 1950s, when mechanization of agriculture pushed millions of rural workers toward the cities. Long-distance bus travel replaced rail as the primary mode of transport for these migrants, and the bus terminals became the symbolic gateway between rural and urban Turkey.
The main intercity bus terminal for Istanbul is now the Büyük İstanbul Otogarı in Esenler, though Mecidiyeköy and other hubs continue to serve regional routes. Millions of passengers pass through Istanbul's bus terminals each year, continuing the pattern of Anatolian movement the novel describes.
Şişli hillsides — gecekondu settlement and family roots
Kültepe is one of the hillside gecekondu settlements where Mevlut's extended family puts down roots in Istanbul, building illegal houses on empty land and gradually formalizing their presence over decades. The novel traces how these informal settlements are the real engine of Istanbul's growth — built by migrants who had no legal standing but who created a city within the city. Mevlut's cousins Korkut and Süleyman eventually profit handsomely from the appreciation of these once-worthless plots, a source of bitterness and division within the family.
Kültepe and neighboring hillside settlements above Şişli were among the earliest gecekondu zones established by Anatolian migrants in the 1950s and 1960s. The term gecekondu — literally 'built overnight' — describes the practice of erecting structures before authorities could demolish them, exploiting a legal tradition that protected completed dwellings.
Most of Kültepe's original gecekondu structures have been replaced by multi-story apartment buildings as the area was formalized and urbanized over subsequent decades. The neighborhood is now a working-class district fully absorbed into the fabric of greater Istanbul.
Konya Province — Mevlut's village of origin
Mevlut's home village near Beyşehir in the Konya region of central Anatolia is the origin point of the novel — the place he and his father leave behind to seek their fortunes in Istanbul. Mevlut returns to the village for visits and for significant family events, and the contrast between the village's stillness and Istanbul's velocity structures much of the novel's emotional texture. The village also represents the values and social world — patriarchal, religious, communal — against which Mevlut's Istanbul life is measured.
Beyşehir is an ancient Anatolian town on the shores of Lake Beyşehir in the Konya region, historically significant as a Seljuk cultural center. The surrounding villages were primarily agricultural communities that experienced massive out-migration to Istanbul and other cities from the 1950s onward as part of Turkey's rapid urbanization.
Beyşehir remains a small provincial town of roughly 45,000 people, known for the 13th-century Eşrefoğlu Mosque, one of the finest surviving Anatolian Seljuk structures. Lake Beyşehir is a protected national park and the third-largest lake in Turkey.
Visit: Eşrefoğlu Mosque, Beyşehir (historic site)
Beyoğlu hilltop — the city's ancient watchtower
The Galata Tower presides over the neighborhood Mevlut knows most intimately, its medieval silhouette visible from many of the streets he walks on his nightly boza rounds. For Mevlut, towers and minarets and high places are part of the visual grammar of Istanbul — a city of hills and skylines whose beauty he registers even as he struggles within it. The tower is a symbol of the old city's persistence amid relentless change, much like boza-selling itself.
The Galata Tower was built by the Genoese in 1348 as the tallest structure in the city, serving as a watchtower for the Genoese colony in Pera. It survived numerous earthquakes and fires over the centuries and was used at various points as a jail, an observatory, and a fire-watch station. The legendary aviator Hezarfen Ahmed Çelebi allegedly glided from its summit to the Asian shore in the 17th century.
The Galata Tower is one of Istanbul's most popular tourist attractions, recently restored and offering panoramic views of the Bosphorus and the historic peninsula. It is open to visitors daily and surrounded by a lively neighborhood of cafes and shops.
Visit: Galata Tower (historic site)
More by Orhan Pamuk: My Name Is Red locations map · The Museum of Innocence locations map · All Orhan Pamuk books
Other nearby maps: Atlas of Cloudy Continents by İhsan Oktay Anar locations map