Pierre Loti Hill

A French naval officer fell in love with this city so completely that Istanbul named a hill after him. Julien Viaud — who wrote under the pen name Pierre Loti — first visited Constantinople in 1876 and was immediately consumed by it. He had an affair with a Turkish woman named Hatice (whom he fictionalized as "Aziyade" in his 1879 novel), spent his evenings in the coffee houses above the Golden Horn, and returned obsessively throughout his life to a hilltop café where he would write, smoke, and gaze at the water below.

The café is still there, perched at the top of the hill with a panoramic view of the Golden Horn that explains everything about Loti's obsession. From here you can see the sweep of Istanbul's old city skyline — the Süleymaniye Mosque, Hagia Sophia, and the minarets of a dozen other mosques poking above the rooftops. The café itself, formerly known as the "Coffee of Rabia Kadın," has been restored with traditional Ottoman seating and decorated with old photographs of the writer.

The hill sits in Eyüp, one of Istanbul's most sacred neighborhoods, home to the Eyüp Sultan Mosque — built around the supposed burial site of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, the standard-bearer of the Prophet Muhammad who died during the first Arab siege of Constantinople in 674-678 AD. The contrast is remarkable: a sacred Ottoman burial ground adjacent to a café named after a French Orientalist novelist. Only Istanbul manages these kinds of juxtapositions without blinking.

You can reach the top by cable car — a 550-meter ride that takes 115 seconds and offers bird's-eye views of the Golden Horn — or by walking through the Eyüp Sultan Cemetery, which covers the hillside with Ottoman-era gravestones tumbling between cypress trees. The dead have the best views in Istanbul.