Princes' Islands

The ferry cuts its engine and the sudden quiet lets you hear what makes this place different — no car horns, no engine rumble, just the creak of wooden carriage wheels on cobblestone and the soft clop of hooves. The Princes' Islands sit in the Sea of Marmara, nine small peaks of green rising from blue water, close enough to Istanbul that you can see the city's minarets across the strait, far enough that the air tastes different.

People have been escaping to these islands for more than a thousand years. Byzantine princes were exiled here in the ninth and tenth centuries — hence the name — sent away from the palace intrigues of Constantinople to live out their days in island monasteries. Later, wealthy Ottoman families built summer mansions along the pine-shaded hills, and in the nineteenth century the islands became a refuge for Istanbul's Greek, Armenian, and Jewish communities, who constructed the ornate wooden villas that still line the waterfront today.

Four of the nine islands are inhabited, but most visitors head to Büyükada, the largest, or Heybeliada, the second-largest. Büyükada means big island in Turkish, though it is only five square kilometres. What it lacks in size it makes up for in architecture — hundreds of Victorian-era wooden mansions painted in faded pastels, their gingerbread trim and turrets rising above gardens thick with wisteria and fig trees. Many are crumbling now, paint peeling in long strips, but that decay has its own beauty, a sense of time moving slowly here while the mainland races ahead.

The islands banned motor vehicles in the eighteen-nineties, a rule that still holds. Residents and visitors move by foot, bicycle, or horse-drawn carriage, called a fayton. The carriages queue at the ferry dock, drivers calling out destinations, and the ride up the island's main hill takes you past iron gates, stone walls draped in ivy, and the occasional glimpse through an open gate of a mansion's interior courtyard. The rhythm of hooves on stone becomes the island's heartbeat.

At the top of Büyükada sits the Greek Orphanage, a massive wooden structure built in eighteen-ninety-eight, once the largest wooden building in Europe. It stands empty now, its windows broken, its floors sagging, but even in ruin it commands the hilltop. The building was meant to house Greek Orthodox children, but it operated as an orphanage for only a few years before closing. Later it became a hotel, then a casino, then nothing at all. Restoration plans surface every few years, but the building waits, pigeons nesting in its eaves.

On Heybeliada, the Naval Academy occupies a hillside compound of stone barracks and parade grounds, training Turkish naval officers since the eighteen fifties. The island also holds the Halki Seminary, a theological school for Greek Orthodox clergy that closed in nineteen-seventy-one. Its Byzantine-style buildings sit silent now, though the library still holds thousands of rare manuscripts. The closure remains a point of tension between Turkey and the Orthodox Church, a reminder that these islands carry political weight beneath their pastoral surface.

The smaller islands — Burgazada, Kınalıada — draw fewer tourists but reward those who make the trip. Burgazada has a single town square, a handful of fish restaurants, and steep streets that climb to quiet neighbourhoods where cats nap on doorsteps. The writer Sait Faik Abasıyanık lived here in the mid-twentieth century, and his house is now a small museum, its rooms preserved as he left them, typewriter on the desk, books stacked by the window.

The islands' Greek and Armenian populations have dwindled over the past century, especially after the Istanbul pogrom of nineteen-fifty-five and the expulsion of Greek citizens in the nineteen-sixties. The communities that remain are small but visible — Orthodox churches still hold services, and on summer weekends you hear Greek and Armenian spoken in the cafes along the waterfront. The islands feel like a palimpsest, each layer of history still faintly readable beneath the next.

Swimming happens from small rocky beaches and wooden platforms built out over the water. The Sea of Marmara is not as clear as the Aegean, but it is calm and warm in summer, and locals dive from the platforms in long arcs, their bodies dark against the blue. By late afternoon the water fills with families, children shrieking as they jump, parents floating on their backs, eyes closed against the sun.

The ferry ride back to Istanbul takes about an hour. As the islands recede, their green hills folding into the haze, the city's skyline sharpens — domes and towers and the long suspension bridge spanning the Bosphorus. The quiet you carried from the island stays with you a little longer, even as the ferry docks and the city's noise rushes back in. You step onto the pier, and for a moment the cobblestones underfoot feel wrong, too smooth, too still, missing the rhythm of hooves.