7 Surprising Facts About Istanbul That Sound Made Up

I have lived in and around Istanbul long enough to think I knew it, and the city still catches me off guard. It is the kind of place where a normal walk to the shop turns into a brush with a 1,500-year-old water palace, a subway older than most countries’ railways, and a street cat that has its own bronze statue. So here are seven surprising facts about Istanbul that actually hold up, with the real numbers and places behind them, not the recycled trivia you see copied across the internet.

These are the ones I tell first-time visitors over breakfast, and they are the ones that make people look at the city differently for the rest of the trip.

1. It is the only major city sitting on two continents

You have probably heard this one, but the detail behind it is what makes it stick. Istanbul is split by the Bosphorus, the narrow strait that connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, and that strait is also the dividing line between Europe and Asia. Roughly two-thirds of residents live on the European side and the rest live in Asia, which means a huge number of people commute between continents twice a day, often by ferry with a glass of tea in hand.

It is genuinely the only city of this size that spans two continents, and you can feel the difference between the two halves. The European side around Beyoğlu and Sultanahmet is where most of the famous landmarks sit. The Asian side, around Kadıköy and Üsküdar, feels more local, more relaxed, and in my opinion is where you should spend an evening if you want to see how Istanbul actually lives. If you only have a short stay, my honest advice is to cross at least once by ferry rather than over a bridge, because standing on the deck between two continents is the single cheapest thrill in the city. There is more on the divide in this guide to Istanbul’s Asian side, the half most visitors skip.

2. There are around 200,000 street cats, and they basically run the place

This is the fact that surprises people the most, and it is real. Estimates put the cat population in Istanbul at roughly 125,000 strays, climbing to about 200,000 once you count house cats. They are not feral in the way you might expect. Turkey has a long-standing no-kill, no-capture approach to street animals, and most Istanbulites treat the neighborhood cats as communal pets. Shopkeepers leave out food, residents build little wooden shelters in winter, and vets often treat strays for free or close to it.

The most famous of them was Tombili, a heavyset tabby in the Ziverbey area who used to lounge against a step with one elbow propped up like a regular at a cafe. After he died in 2016, locals petitioned for a statue and gathered 17,000 signatures in under two months. The bronze of Tombili in his exact lounging pose now sits on that same step. If you want the full picture, including why the cats matter so much here, there is a whole piece on the cats of Istanbul worth reading before you go.

3. The subway here is the second-oldest in the world

When you ride the little Tünel funicular up from Karaköy to the bottom of İstiklal Avenue, you are riding the second-oldest underground urban railway on the planet. It opened on 17 January 1875, just twelve years after the London Underground. A French engineer, Eugène-Henri Gavand, came up with the idea after watching crowds struggle up the steep hill of Yüksek Kaldırım, and he built a short funicular to carry them instead.

The whole line is only about 555 meters long and the ride lasts around 90 seconds, so it is more a piece of living history than a serious commute. The original wooden carriages were swapped for electrified steel cars in 1971, but the route has not changed in 150 years. It costs the same as any other ride on an Istanbulkart, so it is an easy thing to tick off on the way to İstiklal. For the bigger network around it, the Istanbul metro guide breaks down which lines actually get you where you want to go.

4. The Grand Bazaar is one of the oldest shopping malls on earth

The Grand Bazaar, or Kapalı Çarşı, has been trading continuously since construction began in 1461, right after the Ottoman conquest. That makes it one of the oldest and largest covered markets in the world, and calling it a market undersells it. It covers over 54,000 square meters with 21 gates, roughly 60 streets, and close to 4,000 shops, and it still employs more than 30,000 people. Two to three million visitors pass through every year.

It is genuinely a small city under one roof, complete with its own restaurants, mosques, and tea runners darting between stalls with trays of çay. My advice: go in the morning before the cruise crowds, get deliberately lost for an hour, and treat the first price you hear as the opening line of a conversation rather than a final number. Bargaining is expected and good-natured here. For a calmer route through it, the Grand Bazaar history and shopping tips guide is the one I send people to first.

5. Tulips are Turkish, long before they were Dutch

Everyone associates tulips with the Netherlands, but the flower was prized in Istanbul more than a century before it reached Holland. Tulips are native to Central Asia and were cultivated across Anatolia, then adored by the Ottoman court. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent loved them so much he had subjects supply them as tithe in the 1500s. The first tulips planted in the Netherlands came in 1593, well after Istanbul’s gardens were already full of them.

The Ottomans even had their own tulip-mania. The period from 1718 to 1730 is literally called the Tulip Era, or Lale Devri, when the flower became a symbol of wealth and the court threw lavish garden parties around it. That heritage is still on full show every April, when millions of tulips are planted across Gülhane Park, Emirgan, and the city’s roundabouts for the Istanbul Tulip Festival. If you visit in spring, it is one of the prettiest free things you can do here.

6. There is a 1,500-year-old underground palace beneath the old city

A few steps from Hagia Sophia, you can walk down into the Basilica Cistern, an underground water reservoir built in the 6th century under Emperor Justinian. Locals call it Yerebatan Sarnıcı, “the sunken palace”, and the name fits. The ceiling is held up by a forest of 336 marble columns, each about nine meters tall, many of them salvaged from older Roman buildings. At full capacity it could store 80,000 cubic meters of water for the palaces above.

The strangest part sits in the far corner: two enormous carved heads of Medusa used as column bases, one lying on its side and one completely upside down. Nobody knows for certain why they were placed that way. The cistern reopened after a careful restoration finished in 2022, and the lighting now makes it feel even more like a film set, which is fitting given it has appeared in everything from James Bond to Dan Brown novels. There is a full walkthrough in this guide to the Basilica Cistern if you want to plan a visit.

7. The city’s name comes from a Greek phrase for “to the city”

Istanbul has worn a lot of names. It started as Byzantium, became Nova Roma and then Constantinople under Emperor Constantine in the 4th century, and was Constantinople for most Western speakers right into the 20th century. The name we use now most likely comes from the Greek phrase “eis tin polin”, which simply means “to the city”. The phrase was so common that nobody needed to say which city, because in this part of the world there was really only one that mattered.

The name became official in a single stroke: on 28 March 1930, the Turkish Republic formally adopted İstanbul and asked the rest of the world to drop Constantinople. So the next time someone hums the old “Istanbul, not Constantinople” line, you can tell them the exact date it changed. If the history grabs you, why Istanbul is not Constantinople goes deeper into the whole tangle of names.

The takeaway

What I love about these facts is that none of them are hidden away in a textbook. The cats are on your street, the cistern is a five-minute walk from the main square, and the 1875 funicular is a normal stop on your transit card. Istanbul rewards the curious. Start with one of these, and you will keep finding more for the rest of your trip. If you want a few unusual stops to chase next, the offbeat picks in non-touristy Istanbul are a good place to keep digging.