The address of Meroddi Bağdatlıyan bears one of Istanbul’s most revealing street names: İlk Belediye Caddesi. In most cities, streets are named after flowers, birds or heroes; here, the street name is quite literally an institutional birth certificate. For it was at the top of this very slope that Turkey’s first municipality in the modern sense was established.

Paris’s sixth, Istanbul’s first

In 1857–58, the Ottoman administration divided the capital into fourteen municipal districts, and the first office to begin operating was Galata-Beyoğlu. The name given to this first municipality is surprising: Altıncı Daire-i Belediye. Why was the first municipality to be established called “sixth”? Because the name came not from its order, but from admiration: it was modelled on Paris’s celebrated Sixième Arrondissement. As the institution that lit the streets, opened roads and mapped the district, the Sixth Municipal Office transformed the face of Galata. The public, in turn, gave the avenue leading to the municipal building not the institution’s title, but recognition of its seniority: İlk Belediye.

A historic figure also stood at the head of the institution that gave the avenue its name: the first president of the Sixth Municipal Office, Edward Blacque — making this street, at the same time, the route to work of Istanbul’s first modern mayor.

The twins of Karanfil Sokak

The twin buildings that make up our hotel today rose on this avenue between 1895 and 1905 — on what was then known as Karanfil Sokak. In insurance maps dated 1905, both buildings are recorded as “Bağdatlıyan Apartmanı”. Their commissioner, Ohannes Bağdatlıyan, was an Istanbulite of Armenian descent who held senior posts in the Ottoman bureaucracy, with a career that extended as far as Berlin. Like many affluent figures of the era, he did not live here himself; the twins were designed as modern rental residences of their day — this side’s representatives of Galata’s apartment revolution.

Records also mention an intriguing architectural detail of the period: an iron bridge extending from the Sixth Municipal Office to Karanfil Sokak. Physically linking the municipality and the street, this bridge was almost a steel-clad proof of the connection embodied in the avenue’s name.

Three names on one street, one story

Karanfil Sokak, İlk Belediye Caddesi, Bağdatlıyan — three names, three layers of the same slope. As you walk between the twin façades of our hotel, you are in fact exploring all at once: the Ottoman Empire’s first municipality, established with Paris in mind; a bureaucrat’s vision of the modern city; and an apartment-building tradition that has endured for more than a century. Street names can sometimes be the shortest history books; this avenue is among the finest examples.

To stay in the twins of İlk Belediye Caddesi: Meroddi Bağdatlıyan →