Taksim Square and the Atatürk Cultural Center

On the eastern side of Taksim Square, glass and an aluminum grille enclose a large cultural venue that houses opera, ballet, drama, concert halls, a cinema, gallery, and library. The city plan once set aside its site for an opera house. Behind the glass, an enormous red sphere is visible: the opera hall shell, seating two thousand forty. Before the current building, another center with a similar facade stood here, while the site and its purpose remained.

At the beginning of İstiklal Avenue stands a low stone building—a maksem, the distribution chamber of an old water system. From seventeen thirty-two to seventeen thirty-three, Sultan Mahmud I ordered water brought here from the forests north of the city. In the chamber, the flow was divided between lines supplying the fountains of Pera and Galata. In Turkish, division is “taksim”; the structure gave the square its name. Water has not been distributed here for a long time, and a museum is open in the maksem, but a stone reservoir has survived behind it.

The cultural center on the opposite side came about through another city project. In nineteen thirty-six, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, invited the French urban planner Henri Prost to draw up a new plan for Istanbul. Prost set aside the eastern edge of the future square for an opera house. Atatürk lived to see neither the building’s groundbreaking nor its performances: he died earlier. Yet the opera’s path to Taksim Square began with his invitation.

Construction began in nineteen forty-six, then the city ran out of money. Ten years later, the unfinished building was handed over to Hayati Tabanlıoğlu—an architect at the Ministry of Public Works who had studied theater design in Germany. It was his first major project. Tabanlıoğlu expanded the original plan: instead of a single opera house, he prepared stages for ballet, drama, and concerts. The work took thirteen years, and the building itself was named the Istanbul Culture Palace.

On April twelfth, nineteen sixty-nine, Çeşmebaşı and Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida were performed here. Nineteen months later, during a performance of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, a fire broke out. No one died, but the stage and main hall burned out, and part of the roof collapsed. Along with the sets, museum objects brought from Topkapı Palace for a planned production about Sultan Murad IV burned up. The cause of the ignition could not be determined; the official investigation pointed to the lack of proper technical operation of the building.

Tabanlıoğlu was tasked with putting the project back together, after already giving it thirteen years of his life. During the renovation, Turkey’s first Minister of Culture, Talat Sait Halman, declared that the word “palace” belonged to the imperial era and that a republican institution needed another name. Thus the former Culture Palace became the Atatürk Cultural Center. After eight years of work, Istanbul State Theatre, Opera and Ballet, together with the Istanbul State Symphony Orchestra, acquired a permanent stage here.

That building did not survive to the present day: it was closed and dismantled in nineteen eighteen. The new center was designed by Murat Tabanlıoğlu, Hayati’s son. He retained the position of the main volume and the character of the glass facade with its aluminum grille. Behind the glass, an enormous red sphere is now visible—the shell of the opera hall, seating two thousand forty. The center reopened in nineteen twenty-one; in addition to opera, ballet, and concerts, it houses a theater, cinema, gallery, and library. From the first building remain the location, the name, and the facade design, while father and son Tabanlıoğlu worked successively on the project on the same site.