Explore Istanbul in Google Street View

Istanbul is the only major city on two continents, and the Bosphorus between them is a working strait with tankers moving through it constantly. That geography is the whole story. The old city sits on a peninsula on the European side, Galata and the modern centre are across the Golden Horn from it, and the Asian side is a twenty minute ferry away and feels like a different, calmer city entirely.

The peninsula holds the layers. Hagia Sophia was a cathedral for nine hundred years, a mosque for five hundred, a museum, and a mosque again, and the exterior shows the accumulation: buttresses added over centuries, minarets from four different periods. The Blue Mosque faces it across a small park, built a thousand years later in deliberate response. Standing between them virtually, you are looking at an argument conducted in architecture.

The Grand Bazaar is covered, enormous and captured on foot. Sixty streets under one roof, organised historically by trade, and it is genuinely easy to lose your bearings inside it. The Spice Bazaar nearby is smaller and simpler to navigate. Both are worth entering because the interiors are what the buildings are for.

Istiklal Street runs a mile and a half from Taksim Square down to Galata and it is the busiest pedestrian street in the country. A single antique tram runs along the middle of it through the crowds. From the Galata end, the tower gives the view back across the Golden Horn to the old city, and the walk between the two is the most efficient way to see how the halves relate.

Cross to the Asian side. Kadikoy and Moda are residential, low-rise and full of small shops and cafes, and the ferry route across is the commute for hundreds of thousands of people. The imagery includes the waterfronts on both sides, and hopping between the wharves is the closest a browser gets to the actual experience of living here.

One thing to look for while exploring. Sections of the Theodosian land walls, built in the fifth century, still run for several kilometres across the peninsula, with roads cut through them and neighbourhoods built against them. Following the wall line in Street View shows a city that simply grew around a fortification it had no reason to remove.