People are given their names at birth, and they generally keep them. Buildings, however, change according to their owners; their names are forgotten, then rewritten. The building that houses Meroddi Barnathan is a striking example of this transformation: within a century, it was known by at least four different names — and ultimately returned to its original one.
1892: Barnathan
When the building was completed in 1892 and 1893, it took the name of the family who commissioned it: Barnathan. This was the convention of the period; if the owner was non-Muslim, the building bore their surname, while for Muslim owners, the title "Bey" was added to the name of the person who commissioned it. In French commercial directories, the property appears with its residents under the heading "Maison Barnathan".
After the war: Appartements Vlahioti Antoine
The First World War transformed not only the district’s demographic fabric, but also its map of ownership. Part of the Barnathan family left Istanbul before the war, and the rest in the late 1920s; the family dispersed across a geography stretching from America to Brazil. In the last commercial directory published before the war, the building is still called Barnathan; in the first directory issued after the war, however, a new name appears: Appartements Vlahioti Antoine.
The 1960s: Halil Hamit Apartmanı
From the 1930s onward, Halil Arda and Hamit Karaorman, both lawyers, began purchasing one by one the shares dispersed among numerous heirs. The first sale took place in 1932; the acquisition process continued until 1960. In the end, the building had effectively been divided in two, and among Galata residents it came to be known as "the apartment building of two brothers named Halil and Hamit" — although the records show that the two lawyers came from different families. In official documents, the building appears during this period as Hamit Bey Apartmanı, followed by Halil Hamit Apartmanı. The second block took the name Demir Apartmanı at a later date.
The only evidence left in stone
As the names changed, one thing never did. Two words carved above the second entrance quietly endured through the entire century: "Barnathan Han". While papers, title deeds and directories gave the building new names, the stone held to its own truth.
That is why restoring the building’s original name after its restoration was not merely a marketing choice for us; it meant acknowledging what the stone had already written. Today, those who enter through the doors of Meroddi Barnathan walk across both 1892 and all the names that came in between.
Why do names matter?
Because the name of a building carries, in a single word, who commissioned it, which community it belonged to, and how the city changed. This is also why we took the name Meroddi from a seven-century-old inscription: in Galata, names are never accidental. They are erased, covered over — but once they are written in stone, someone eventually comes to read them again.
Source: "Barnathan Apartmanları" (Çiğdem Oğuz, Nar Yatırım, 2016). To stay in the building that has regained its name: Meroddi Barnathan →
