Centuries of rich architecture define this city straddling two continents. But to understand how the new constantly challenges the old in Istanbul, the Boston Globe’s Tom Haines considered its architecture piece by piece: its minarets and mosques, its skyscrapers and soccer stadiums, even its bathrooms. For example, the public restroom in Kadikoy Park, designed by architect Gokhan Avcioglu, has “historical identity, looks nice and does its job,” he writes.

To see the evolving landscape from a distance, Haines crossed the Bosporus, climbed the narrow streets of the Beyoglu district and went to a glass-walled, rooftop restaurant called 360 Istanbul to see the spread of history and newfangled hipness before him.

“On most evenings, the place could be South Beach by the sky,” he writes. “Funked-up beautiful people linger with an inward air indicating that, perhaps, they do not notice the domes, minarets, and rooftops all about them. Yet beyond the windows and the Golden Horn, the historic harbor to the south, the Hagia Sofia, the Blue Mosque, and the Suleymaniye Mosque loom like a row of architects’ models in golden lamplight.”

The British design journal Wallpaper named Istanbul “The World’s Best City” this year, Haines notes. But he cites Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk, observing that the “tarnish of history” can also feel like a trap.

Wrote Pamuk in “Istanbul: Memories and the City”: “To see the haze that sits over [Istanbul] and breathe in the melancholy its inhabitants have embraced as their common fate, you need only to fly in from a rich western city and head straight to the crowded streets; if it’s winter, every man on the Galata Bridge will be wearing the same, pale, drab, shadowy clothes.”

Haines’s story is accompanied by Globe photographer Essdras Suarez’s terrific photos from the trip.

Related on World Hum:
* Tunneling the Bosporous Strait
* Where in the World Are You, Christy Quirk?

Photo of Blue Mosque by Papalars via Flickr, (Creative Commons).