The Sunset, From Three Different Coasts

There are, strictly, three sunsets in this city, and they are not the same sunset wearing different clothes. They are different geographies, different angles of light, different arguments about what Istanbul is at the end of the day. The hotel you book for the hour before dark is, more than you might think, a small confession of which Istanbul you came for.

The European-side rooftop, west-facing

This is the postcard. A small rooftop in Beyoğlu or Karaköy — The Marmara Pera, Soho House, 10 Karaköy — and at 19:30 in May the Golden Horn turns, briefly and entirely, gold. The Süleymaniye sits silhouetted on the historic peninsula across the water, the long flat dome and its four minarets going from terracotta to copper to black against a sky still burning. The Galata Tower hangs above your shoulder, picking up the last of the light a beat after the rest of the skyline has lost it. This is the Istanbul of every guidebook, every photograph, every postcard your aunt sent in 1994 — and the reason it remains the postcard is that it earns it, every evening, with no help from anyone. The pool below you, if there is one, has gone the colour of weak tea. A waiter walks past with three coupes balanced on a forearm. The call to prayer rises from the peninsula a little after sundown and the rooftop, almost without meaning to, goes quiet.

The Marmara coast, sun into water

Fifteen minutes west of the airport, where the city thins and the Marmara begins, the geography changes entirely. At Crowne Plaza Florya, at the Sheraton Atakoy, the pool faces south-southwest into open sea and there is no skyline in the frame at all. The sun does not set behind anything; it drops, slowly and then suddenly, into water. The horizon is unbroken. It is the kind of horizonless ocean-sunset that belongs more to a Greek island than to a city of fifteen million — and the strangeness of finding it here, on the wrong side of an airport, fifteen kilometres from a Byzantine wall, is exactly the point. The freighters waiting their turn for the Bosphorus are pinpricks of red at the edge. The light flattens against the water and goes peach, and then, with a kind of dignity, violet. This is the least-photographed Istanbul sunset, and the one that surprises people who thought they already knew the city.

The Asian-side terrace, looking back

And then the third sunset, the editor’s quiet favourite, the one the Istanbullular keep for themselves. From a terrace at Sumahan-on-the-Water in Çengelköy, or A’jia in Kanlıca, you face west across the Bosphorus at the European bank, and the city itself becomes the sunset image. Dolmabahçe’s long flat dome, the Beşiktaş palaces, further south the silhouettes of Topkapı and Hagia Sophia — all of it goes black against a sky still burning, the European skyline cut out in paper against gold. Ferry wakes catch the last light a beat after the buildings lose it. The view is the city’s face, not its back. Many Istanbullular will tell you this is the better sunset, and what they mean, if you press them, is that the European-side rooftop hands you a famous view and the Asian-side terrace hands you something stranger — the sight of your own city becoming the postcard, from the only angle that lets you see it whole.

Choosing where to be at sunset is, in the end, a small and telling kind of self-knowledge. The European rooftop if you came for the Istanbul of the photographs. The Marmara deck if you wanted to be reminded the city has a sea-coast as well as a strait. The Asian-side terrace if you have already had the postcard once and would like, this evening, to look back at it from somewhere quieter. Three coasts, three sunsets, and the same hour of light landing on each of them differently. Pick the one that matches the day you’ve had. The light, in any case, will not wait.