Balat

When Spain expelled its Jewish population in 1492, Sultan Bayezid II did something that no other European ruler was willing to do — he invited them in. Thousands of Sephardic Jews settled in Balat, joining a Macedonian Jewish community already there, and the neighborhood on the Golden Horn became one of the largest Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire. At its peak, Balat was home to 18 synagogues. Only three are still in use today.

The neighborhood has lived through every chapter of Istanbul's story. Greeks, Armenians, and Jews built houses here for centuries, layering their architectural traditions one atop another. The Ahrida Synagogue, founded in the 15th century to serve Jews from Ohrid (in modern North Macedonia), contains a beautiful wooden bema shaped like a ship — a reminder of the boats that brought them to safety. The Iron Church of St. Stephen of the Bulgars, built entirely of prefabricated cast iron shipped down the Danube from Vienna, sits nearby as one of the world's last surviving all-metal churches.

For decades, Balat was forgotten. As the Jewish and Greek communities shrank through the 20th century, the neighborhood fell into disrepair. The colorful paint on the Ottoman-era wooden houses faded, the cobblestone streets cracked, and the tourists stayed in Sultanahmet. Then, sometime in the 2010s, Instagram discovered the pastel-painted houses, and everything changed.

Today Balat is caught between preservation and gentrification, which is the predictable fate of any neighborhood that is both photogenic and cheap. Cafes have replaced hardware stores, boutique hotels occupy former family homes, and the 50-to-200-year-old houses have been repainted in candy colors that would have confused their original inhabitants. But wander deep enough and you still find the old Balat — fruit sellers, tea gardens, and elderly residents who remember when this was just a quiet neighborhood where nobody pointed a camera at your front door.