Saint Anthony of Padua and the Plural City of Galata and Pera

Set back from Istiklal Avenue behind a brick courtyard, the Church of Saint Anthony of Padua is the largest Roman Catholic church in Istanbul, and it opens the door to a layer of the city most visitors never read. This is the merchant, banking, European Istanbul of Galata and Pera, the hill across the Golden Horn where Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Italians, and Ottomans built their houses of worship side by side. The famous peninsula of Hagia Sophia and the great mosques is the city of one dominant faith and dynasty. This hill was deliberately the plural city. A single church on a crowded avenue is the clearest way into that whole story.

A church that hides in plain sight

The building you see went up between 1906 and 1912, designed in a Venetian Neo-Gothic style by the architect Giulio Mongeri, working with Edoardo de Nari. It replaced an earlier church that the city's Italian community had built on the same ground in 1725. That double date matters. It tells you this was not a single monument dropped onto the avenue but a congregation that had held its place here for nearly two centuries before rebuilding in brick and pointed arch.

There is a detail worth carrying inside with you. The future Pope John the Twenty-third, then a priest named Angelo Roncalli, preached here for about ten years while he served as the Vatican's envoy to Turkey. A statue of him stands in the courtyard today. Long before he was elected pope, he was a working diplomat in this quarter, and the church he preached in was one node in a diplomatic and merchant world that stretched across the whole hill.

This is a working parish, not an exhibit. If you step inside, dress modestly, keep quiet, and avoid Mass times. But the reason to pause is larger than the walls. Look at how the church sits: not on a grand civic axis but folded behind a courtyard, one doorway among many on a shopping street. That is how the plural city survives here, at the upper floors and behind the gateways, above the modern signage.

The layer the postcards leave out

For centuries Galata and Pera held Roman Catholic churches like this one, Greek Orthodox and Armenian churches, synagogues in the historic Jewish quarter of Galata including the Neve Shalom synagogue, and mosques, all within a short walk of one another. That is the layer the imperial story tends to skip. The merchant and diplomatic character of the quarter made it so. Traders and embassies of many origins needed their own institutions, and they got them, clustered on a single steep hill.

Saint Anthony of Padua is the way in because it is legible and central, right on the avenue. But it is one stop on a route built to read the whole plural city in stone, and the argument only lands when you walk the sequence. You can plan that walk from the Istanbul walking tours hub, which gathers the self-guided routes across the city.

Where the church sits on the walk

The tour begins uphill at the Galata Tower, the stone watchtower the Genoese rebuilt in 1348 and called the Christea Turris, the Tower of Christ. The Genoese ran their merchant colony here from 1267, self-governing, answering to Genoa rather than to the Byzantine emperor across the water. Standing at the tower, you look south to the peninsula everyone photographs, then turn to face the hill behind you. Everything else unfolds downhill from there.

Below the tower runs Bankalar Caddesi, Banks Street, once the financial centre of the entire late Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Stock Exchange was established here in 1866, and the grand Ottoman Bank, designed by Alexandre Vallaury and completed in 1892, still stands as a museum and the SALT Galata research archive. Nearby, the Camondo Stairs curve down the slope in a double sweep of Neo-Baroque and early Art Nouveau. Abraham Salomon Camondo, patriarch of a Sephardic Jewish banking dynasty, commissioned them around 1870 to 1880. Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed them in 1964. On those steps you feel the argument in stone: a Jewish banking family, an Ottoman-chartered bank, and a foreign-designed stock exchange shaped one skyline together.

Then comes Saint Anthony of Padua, the multi-faith anchor. After it, the walk turns to the arcades. Cicek Pasaji, the Flower Passage, opened in 1876 as the Cite de Pera, built for the Ottoman Greek banker Hristaki Zografos Efendi and designed by Kleanthis Zannos. Its flower name came later, after emigre Russian women opened flower shops there following the Russian Revolution. Next door, the Balik Pazari fish market carries the same cosmopolitan Pera down to the level of daily trade.

The engineering stop is the Tunel, a short underground funicular that opened on the seventeenth of January, 1875, making it the second-oldest underground urban railway in the world after the London Underground, which opened on the tenth of January, 1863. Conceived by the French engineer Eugene-Henri Gavand and chartered by Sultan Abdulaziz, it still hauls passengers up the hill on a standard Istanbulkart fare. Then the quieter counterpoint: the Galata Mevlevi Lodge, founded in 1491 during the reign of Sultan Bayezid the Second and described as the oldest Mevlevi lodge in Istanbul, where whirling dervishes performed the sema until the Turkish Republic closed the dervish lodges in 1925. It reopened as a museum, reorganized under its present name in 2011.

The route resolves at Taksim Square. The name preserves the Ottoman water-distribution system, a taksim or division point where a reservoir once branched the city's supply. In the middle stands the Republic Monument, sculpted by the Italian artist Pietro Canonica and unveiled in 1928, commemorating the Turkish Republic founded in 1923. The plural, merchant, European hill hands over, at this square, to the republic that came after.

Walk it, don't just read it

Saint Anthony of Padua rewards a minute of quiet, but its full meaning depends on the stops around it. The church makes the plural city legible; the banking street, the arcades, the funicular, and the lodge prove it. The route runs roughly five kilometres over about two hours, steep and stepped in places, so wear shoes with grip and keep looking up above the shop signs where the older city survives. Start with the wider context of Istanbul, then let this hill show you the layer the postcards leave out.

Sources

• Church of Saint Anthony of Padua, Istanbul (Wikipedia): construction dates, architects Giulio Mongeri and Edoardo de Nari, the Roncalli connection, and its status as the largest Catholic church in the city.
• Galata Tower (Wikipedia): the Genoese colony, the 1348 rebuilding, and the Christea Turris name.
• Camondo Stairs and Bankalar Caddesi (Wikipedia): the Ottoman Bank, the 1866 stock exchange, and the Camondo family's stairway.
• Tunel (Wikipedia): the 1875 opening, Eugene-Henri Gavand, and its rank as the second-oldest underground railway.
• Galata Mevlevi Lodge Museum (Wikipedia): the 1491 founding, the 1925 closure of the lodges, and the museum's reorganization in 2011.