1 · Position
The Karaköy–Tophane waterfront had been a working port since Ottoman times — Tophane takes its name from the fifteenth-century cannon foundry — and warehouses, customs fencing and restricted zones had sealed it off. The 1.2-kilometre boardwalk was open only to maintenance, deliveries and the five or six thousand passengers off each ship. Dror with Gensler won the masterplan competition; Autoban designed the terminal, taking the Roman and Byzantine cisterns beneath the city as the reference. It opened in October 2021.
2 · ⚑ The world first, and what it is actually for
Twenty-nine thousand square metres of terminal — passenger handling, baggage, passport control — placed entirely underground, beneath a retractable hatch system. When no ship is alongside the surface is a public promenade; when three of the largest are, it still is. Every other cruise port in the world takes the shoreline away from the city while it works. This one does not, and that is the single decision the entry exists to record.
3 · Why it is in the Library
It reopened about 1.2 kilometres of Bosphorus shore to ordinary foot traffic for the first time in roughly two centuries, and put Istanbul Modern and The Peninsula Istanbul on it. Read against Barangaroo — LHL-S-257 Barangaroo, Sydney — the pair are the two ways a city takes its waterfront back: Sydney demolished the port and rebuilt the land that preceded it; Istanbul kept the port working and buried it.
4 · Candour
⚑ The Karaköy Passenger Hall of 1940, by Rebii Gorbon, with a clocktower designed by Sultan Abdülhamid II's watchmaker, was demolished in February 2017 and rebuilt from scratch as part of the Peninsula development. Reviews that praise the restoration of historic buildings and the opening of the shoreline record that demolition in the same breath, and so does this entry. Galataport has also been widely described as turning a working-class district into a luxury one; the Library states the criticism without adjudicating it. The developer is LHL-402 Doğuş Group, in Capital.