Balat

The old Jewish quarter on the Golden Horn, next door to Greek Fener, and now the most photographed residential street in the city. Terraces of tall narrow houses painted in flat blues, oranges and greens, running steeply up from the water.

Fener next door was the Greek quarter and still holds the Ecumenical Patriarchate; between them the two neighbourhoods were the non-Muslim heart of the Ottoman city for four hundred years. The houses are tall and narrow because the plots were.

What it costs

Free. It is a neighbourhood where people live, not a site with a gate.

When to go

Weekday mornings. On a weekend afternoon the coloured street is a queue of people waiting to be photographed on the steps, and the residents have to walk through it.

It has gentrified quickly — the cafés arrived in about five years — so it is busier than any guidebook older than that will suggest.

Sunday runs the other way: the antique dealers open and the street market runs, and it is the one day the neighbourhood is busy for its own reasons rather than for photographs.

Getting there

The T5 tram along the Golden Horn from Eminönü, or a ferry to Ayvansaray or Fener. It is also a pleasant flat walk along the water from Eminönü if you have the time.

If you only have an hour

Walk up from the water rather than being dropped at the top: Vodina Caddesi and the lanes off it, then the coloured houses, then keep going up to Chora if you have the legs. The antique shops and the old Greek school are the parts nobody photographs.

What people get wrong

Treating people’s front steps as a studio. These are occupied houses, the residents have been vocal about it, and there is a whole neighbourhood past the one street.

Also: Balat, Milas is an entirely different place — the ancient site of Miletus, four hundred kilometres south. Search results mix them.