By The Numbers
What We Do
Long-Form Essays
Slow narratives tracing ferries, breakfast tables, and backstreet ferries across the city's many islands and coves.
Bosphorus Diaries
Weekly dispatches from the water — fishermen, commuters, fog, and the light that changes by the hour.
Portrait Series
Photographic essays on greengrocers, simit sellers, and the people who make a continent-spanning city feel small.
Walking Conversations
Audio-led walks through Karaköy, Balat, and Çengelköy with writers, architects, and regular residents.
Reader Letters
A monthly open thread where readers send their own Istanbul memories, recipes, and hidden quays.
Print Quarterly
A collectible magazine on uncoated paper, pairing each season with one neighborhood explored at walking pace.
How We Work
Drift the Shores
Every story begins with a slow walk along the Bosphorus, notebook open, ferry horn in the distance.
Listen to Locals
Interviews happen over tea, not transcripts — voices, laughter, and pauses are kept intact.
Write in Layers
We braid history, weather, and overheard sentences into scenes you can almost smell the rain in.
Publish Slowly
Stories ship only when the city has settled into them — weekly essays, monthly portraits, seasonal films.
What People Say
Anlat Istanbul writes the way the Bosphorus moves — patient, layered, and impossibly beautiful.
It feels less like a magazine and more like a long letter from someone who truly knows the city.
Let Istanbul arrive in your inbox
One quiet, cinematic email each Sunday — a story, a map, and a single line to carry into the week.
Join the Letter →