Passages in Istanbul: 8 Historical Arcades Worth Finding

The historical passages in Istanbul are the glass-roofed shopping arcades that ran riot along Istiklal in the 19th century, and the good news is that most of them are still standing and still open. If you only have time for one, make it the Flower Passage (Çiçek Pasajı). But if you give Beyoğlu an afternoon, you can slip through half a dozen of them in a single walk, and that is exactly what I do with friends who think they have “already seen Istiklal”.

Here is the thing nobody tells you on the main avenue: the best parts of Beyoğlu are not on the street, they are just off it, through an unassuming archway you would walk past a hundred times. A passage (from the French passage) was simply a covered lane lined with shops on both sides, a way to keep the rain off and the gaslight on while people shopped, gossiped and showed off. Walk the length of Istiklal Avenue with your head turned slightly sideways and you will start spotting the doorways.

I have ordered these roughly the way you would meet them walking from Tünel toward Taksim, so you can do the whole loop in an afternoon and not double back. Confirm opening hours on the day, since Beyoğlu shifts fast, but at the time of writing every passage below was accessible.

Syrian Passage (Suriye Pasajı, Cité de Syrie)

Construction started in 1901 and finished in 1908, financed by the Syrian Hasan Halbuni Pasha together with Mehmet Abbud Pasha, then head of the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce, under the architect Dimitros Basiladis. Three separate buildings were eventually merged into one arcade, the Cité de Syrie. Like its neighbours it filled with tailors, florists, hatmakers and cloth and book sellers, and it was here that a double-elevator system was tried for the first time in the city. A movie house, the Tarihî Santral Sineması, once ran inside it too.

The reason I send people here today sits in the basement: ByRetro, a vintage and costume shop that has been at this address for around 25 years and reportedly holds more than 30,000 original pieces, which makes it one of the largest retro stores anywhere. The inventory is genuinely surreal. Shirts and skirts, gloves and corsets, wedding and ball gowns, hats with veils, old televisions, rotary phones, the lot. Turkish film and TV productions raid it constantly for period costumes. Go in, breathe the mothballs, and resist nothing.

The arcade itself opens roughly 09:00 to 22:00, and ByRetro keeps its own slightly shorter hours, usually late morning to early evening.

European Passage (Avrupa Pasajı)

A café garden called Jardin des Fleurs stood here until fire destroyed it, and in 1874 a neoclassical arcade went up in its place by the architect Pulgher. Locals call it the Mirror Passage (Aynalı Pasaj) because gas lamps once burned in front of mirrors along the walls, which gave the whole 56-metre lane a soft, slightly theatrical glow. It held 22 shops: a shoemaker, tailors, barbers, a grocer, a watchmaker, florists. The design borrowed from the Passage du Choiseul in Paris, and you can still see it in the marble, the gilding and the little statues tucked into corners.

These days the 22 units lean heavily toward antiques, souvenirs, old photographs, vinyl, badges, small brass and ceramics, jewellery and curios. It is one of the prettiest spots in Beyoğlu and, predictably, one of the most photographed. To find it, turn off Istiklal near the Galatasaray Lyceum and you are at the entrance within a minute. It runs through to Sahne Sokak by the Fish Market, so you can pop out the far side straight into the back streets of the neighbourhood. Usual hours are about 10:00 to 20:00.

Beyoğlu Cinema Passage (Beyoğlu Pasajı)

This one is for film people. The building was put up as a theatre, and for some 87 years it housed the Varyete Sirk Tiyatrosu, a theatre-circus. In 1989 it reopened as the Beyoğlu Cinema, and to make room the shops on the lowest floor were stripped out, which, as you can imagine, did not please everyone at the time. The cinema has been one of the rare Istiklal screens devoted to independent and arthouse film ever since, and it became a regular venue for the Istanbul International Film Festival in its very first year. If you care about old single-screen cinemas, this is a working one, not a museum piece. The arcade opens early, roughly 08:00 to 19:00.

Rumeli Passage (Cité de Roumélie)

Look up above the Istiklal entrance and you will see “Cité Roumeli” and the date 1894 carved in stone. It was commissioned by Ragıp Pasha, a chamberlain of Sultan Abdülhamid II, who built three arcades and named their gates after the three continents the empire reached: Rumelia, Anatolia, Africa. The architects were almost certainly Italian, and the name turns up at the door in French, Greek and Ottoman Turkish, which tells you everything about how cosmopolitan this stretch of Pera once was. (You will see the architect August Jasmund, who designed Sirkeci station, credited in some accounts, though the record is not settled.) When it went up it was the tallest building on what was then Cadde-i Kebir: nine floors, more than fifty apartments and thirty shops, with three doors onto three different streets.

Inside there were bakeries, jewellers and tailors, the famous Abdullah Efendi restaurant from 1920 to 1968, and, for a while, the Rebul pharmacy. That detail is worth a pause: Rebul is the ancestor of today’s Atelier Rebul perfume and cosmetics chain, founded by Jean César Reboul, and the family that ran it kept the pharmacy tradition going for generations. The main doors are often shut now, so admire it from the street and move on.

The Hazzopulo Passage

Most tourists walk straight past Hazzopulo, which is exactly why I like it. The Greek merchant Hacopulo opened it on 15 April 1871, and over the years it sold hats, buttons and yarn before becoming a meeting place for writers, reporters and poets. Ahmet Mithat Efendi ran his printing press here; Namık Kemal had his İbret newspaper printed in this courtyard, and the two were arrested on the spot, after which the passage became a haunt of the Young Turks. There is a lot of Turkish literary history compressed into one small open court.

Since the 2000s the courtyard has been taken over, in the best way, by tea gardens and cafés. Order a glass of çay, sit under the canopy and watch Istiklal happen at one remove. It is one of the calmer places to catch your breath if the avenue’s crowds get to you, and an easy stop on any walking route through the area. The passage runs through to Meşrutiyet Caddesi and opens roughly 08:00 to 20:30.

Oriental Passage (Pasaj Oriental, Şark Aynalı Pasajı)

Built in 1840 and known to locals as the Eastern Mirror Passage, this arcade once held a printing house, a hairdresser, a tailor and a yarn merchant, but it was a small sweet shop that made its name. Édouard Lebon opened the Lebon patisserie here with the newest baking equipment from Europe, and his profiteroles became the thing to order. Travellers stepping off the Orient Express came straight for it, and the regulars included Pierre Loti, Ahmet Haşim, Namık Kemal and Ziya Pasha. The saying went “Chez Lebon, tout est bon”, everything at Lebon is good. In 1920 a hand-painted panorama was shipped from France to line the walls, turning the place into something closer to a gallery than a café.

In 1940 Lebon moved across the street and Markiz Pastanesi took over the spot, with its celebrated Art Nouveau tile panels of the four seasons. Markiz became the literary café of Beyoğlu and closed in 2013, and for years all you could do was peer at the doors. Here is the update worth knowing: under new owners the historic Markiz has been undergoing restoration, and from 2025 it began hosting events again ahead of a full reopening. If you are a fan of old Istanbul rooms, check whether the doors are open before you go, because this is finally a story with a happy ending rather than a closed shutter.

Flower Passage (Çiçek Pasajı)

The most famous passage of them all, and rightly so. On this corner once stood the Naum Theatre, where Sultans Abdülaziz and Abdülhamid II watched Italian opera, including Verdi’s Il Trovatore. The great Beyoğlu fire of 1870 took the theatre with it. The Galata banker Hristaki Zografos Efendi bought the land, and in 1876 the Italian architect Cleanthi Zanno designed a new kind of building here: a long covered market hall below for 24 stalls and luxury apartments above. The market was named Passage Hristaki after the banker, while the building as a whole carried the words “Cité de Péra”, which you can still read above the entrance. In 1908 it passed to the grand vizier Said Pasha and was renamed Said Paşa Geçidi.

The name everyone uses, Flower Passage, came later. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, émigré families fleeing to Istanbul set up selling flowers in the arcade, and the flowers stuck to the name. Through the 20th century the stalls gave way to meyhanes, the noisy old taverns serving meze, fish and rakı under the glass roof, and that is still the draw. Come in the evening, ideally around seven before the tables fill, and treat it as your introduction to Istanbul’s meyhane and fish-meze culture. It is touristy, yes, but it has earned the right to be.

Elhamra Passage

According to Reşat Ekrem Koçu’s Istanbul Encyclopedia, the Elhamra arcade was built, or perhaps heavily remodelled, between 1920 and 1922 on the initiative of Said Bey Adapazarlı, and the architect’s name has been lost. Before it, the site held a building from 1831 with the Palais de Cristal theatre inside, later used as a cinema where one of the first sound films in Turkey was shown. It has been on the city’s protected list since 1971.

Today it is the most everyday of the lot, with haberdashery, bridal and ready-to-wear shops, and on some evenings live music drifting out of a bar inside. It even hosted part of the Istanbul Biennial in 2025, which is a nice reminder that these old passages are still working buildings rather than relics behind glass.

A short plan for walking the passages

You can string the lot together in two or three hours. Start near Tünel, work up toward Galatasaray for the European and Hazzopulo passages, finish at the Flower Passage for dinner, and you have a complete afternoon-into-evening that costs almost nothing. Wear comfortable shoes, the marble gets slick, and keep an eye on shop hours, since the smaller dealers shut earlier than the cafés.

If this kind of Istanbul appeals to you, the layered, slightly faded, look-up-not-ahead kind, then save a day for Beyoğlu and treat the passages as the spine of it. Pair them with the most popular and lively streets in the city, a stop for proper Istanbul street food, and a wander into the quieter corners locals keep to themselves. That, more than any single monument, is how Beyoğlu rewards you.