For visitors, history is one of the city’s main draws, and while the Istanbul Research Institute might sound dry, it is an essential – and fascinating – destination if you’re trying to get a handle on this fast-changing megacity. An extension of the nearby Pera Museum (a two-minute walk away; free admission 6pm-10pm on Friday), it highlights the city’s Byzantine, Ottoman and modern history from unusual standpoints.
The current show, Four-Legged Municipality: Street Dogs of Istanbul (until 16 September), explores the city’s long and complicated relationship with street dogs through photographs, travel journals, postcards, moving images and magazines. Showcasing how dogs have played a part in the city’s social life, it also raises questions about their current fate under the march of accelerated development. Past exhibitions have been equally curious, focusing on everything from the Şişli Mosque to foreign visitors in the city from the Victorian era to 1950.
If an Orientalist painting or Turkish mosaic has caught your eye in Turkey, and you want to find out more, the wooden-floored reference library is open to everyone and has an easy-to-use online catalogue. Even the late-19th-century building itself is worth a look, with its intricate frescoes and curved balconies.
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