Istanbul Topkapi, from Gate to Palace
The city of Istanbul has been continuously inhabited for three thousand years. Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Turkish, and the layers don’t stay separate. They press against each other, visible in the same wall, the same neighbourhood, sometimes the same building. Topkapi is this compression made geographic: the name belongs simultaneously to one of the city’s ancient gates and to the Ottoman palace that sits at the city’s furthest point, facing the Bosphorus. Gate and palace. Entry and destination. Two thousand years of the same name.
In the summer of 1996, I walked the 7-kilometre route between them. From the Topkapi T4 tramway stop, through Turgut Özal Millet Caddesi and Ordu Caddesi, past Sultanahmet Square, past the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sofia, to the gates of the palace itself. Not to see the monuments. To document the city that surrounds them.
Istanbul in 1996 was a city in motion. Buses, trams, yellow taxis and street vendors selling simit and corn, schoolchildren and old men and women carrying bags, boys posing for a photographer. A city of twenty million people moving through the same streets at the same time, with the particular organised chaos of a place that has been doing this for longer than most countries have existed.
These 46 pages are that walk. The photographs processed twenty years later, reduced and layered until what remains is not 1996 Istanbul but the feeling of being inside it. The noise, the weight, the extraordinary ordinariness of one of the world’s great cities on a summer afternoon.
The series
Topkapi Gate to Palace is a series of 46 works, each a graphic novel page built from photographs taken during a walk from Topkapi Gate to Topkapi Palace in Istanbul in 1996. The photographs were processed in 2020 as part of the Virtual Journeys project. The route covers 7 kilometres through the historic heart of the city, from the western gate to the palace at the tip of the peninsula.
Editions & Pricing
Collector Edition
The definitive edition for serious collectors.
Limited edition of 10 per image — price rises as the edition fills.
| Edition numbers | Price |
|---|---|
| 1 – 3 | €700 |
| 4 – 6 | €850 |
| 7 – 10 | €1,000 |
- Signed and numbered
- Certificate of Authenticity
- Archival Giclée print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
- 80 × 120 cm / 31 × 47 inch
Early editions are the best value — and once they’re gone, they’re gone..
Fine Art Edition €199
An accessible entry point into the series.
- Open edition fine art print
- Premium fine art paper, 285gsm
- 60 × 90 cm / 24 × 36 inch
- Ships worldwide
Select an image below to see its current edition status and order.
About the Virtual Journeys series
Topkapi Gate to Palace is part of the Virtual Journeys project. Urban walks rendered as graphic novel pages. Istanbul is the project’s most ancient city and its layered, three thousand years of continuous habitation compressed into seven kilometres of walking. The photographs reduced, processed, stripped of photorealism until what remains is closer to memory than document. Not what Istanbul looked like in 1996. What it felt like to be inside it, moving from gate to palace, through everything in between.
All 42 pages in this series
