İstiklal Avenue

A mile and a half of pedestrian street from Taksim Square down to Tünel, with a red heritage tram nosing through the middle of it. On a weekend evening something like a million people walk it. The crowd is not incidental to İstiklal; the crowd is what it is.

It was the Grande Rue de Péra, the European quarter’s main street, and the embassies along it became consulates when the capital moved to Ankara. They are still there behind the shopfronts, which is why the buildings are so much grander than the shops in them.

What it costs

Free, and the tram along it takes an İstanbulkart tap like any other line.

When to go

Evening, and Saturday evening most of all, if you want it at full volume. Weekday mornings it is an ordinary shopping street and you can actually see the buildings, which are nineteenth-century and much better than the shopfronts suggest.

Getting there

Taksim at the top, on the M2 metro and the F1 funicular from Kabataş; Tünel at the bottom, on the funicular up from Karaköy. Walk down rather than up — it is a real hill.

If you only have an hour

Walk the length of it once, then leave it. The interest is in the side streets: the Çiçek Pasajı arcade, the fish market lanes off it, Asmalımescit at the bottom end. İstiklal itself is the corridor between them.

Two more worth the detour: the Pera Museum, a short walk off the top end, and the church of Saint Antoine, set back behind a courtyard halfway down and all but invisible from the street.

If you do one thing off it, make it the Çiçek Pasajı and then the fish market lane behind — five minutes’ walk and a completely different century from the chain stores outside.

What people get wrong

Expecting the tram to be transport. It moves at walking pace through a crowd and is there to be photographed. Walk.