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Istanbul has a way of playing its cards close to the vest.
You can smell it in the damp stone and the coal smoke, hear it in the ferries grinding across the Bosphorus, and see it in the eyes of men who look like they know something you don’t—and aren’t telling.
That’s probably why it keeps turning up whenever James Bond comes to town and why Ian Fleming, who knew a thing or two about secrets, couldn’t leave it alone.
Mystery surrounds everything about the next, still-under-wraps Bond picture: who’ll wear the tux, who’ll carry the gun, and where the bodies will fall.
Word on the street says Istanbul might be back in the lineup. That would make sense. The city has a history with Bond. Long history. Dark history. Except for London, no place has hosted 007 so often, and none has ever worn intrigue so naturally.
Fleming first came in the mid-1950s, when Istanbul was still widely regarded as a crossroads of spies, double agents, and men who had learned to sleep with one eye open. In 1955, he arrived as a reporter to cover the 24th General Assembly of Interpol, just as Türkiye was stepping into NATO.
He stayed at the Hilton, high enough to look down on the city like a chessboard, and from his window, he watched the Sept. 6 riots—Muslim mobs turning on Greek Orthodox neighbors, history erupting into the present with clubs and fire.
He visited the Association of Former Eunuchs—down to a dozen members, relics of an older, crueler order—and filed it all away in that cold, efficient mind of his.
By then, Fleming had already loosed Bond on the world. “Casino Royale,” “Live and Let Die,” “Moonraker,” and “Diamonds Are Forever.” They sold like hot gin. But Fleming was bored. Bond, as he’d written him, was a paper cutout: a swaggering British snob with a taste for martinis and women who came conveniently labeled. Fleming wanted to rough him up and give him bruises that showed.
So in “From Russia with Love,” Fleming set Bond a trap and chose Istanbul as the bait. The job was simple on paper: steal a Russian decoding machine, escort a beautiful defector named Tatiana, and take the Orient Express west.
Simple jobs are the ones that kill you. Istanbul gave Fleming everything he needed—shadowed mosques, echoing cisterns, and the sense that at any moment someone might step out of the dark with a knife.
Bond falls for it. Of course, he does. By the time Rosa Klebb kicks him with her poison-tipped shoe, Fleming had intended to finish him off for good.
The last line drops Bond face-first onto a wine-red floor in Venice. Dead. Done. Except readers howled like a wounded pack. Fleming backed down, muttered something about fugu poison and “definite improvement,” and promised Bond would be back. He was in “Dr. No” and then in the movies, where he really learned how to live forever.
When “From Russia with Love” hit the screen in 1963, Istanbul played itself, no makeup required. Sean Connery’s Bond lands at Ataturk Airport. He meets contacts in the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. He slips through the Basilica Cistern, boots splashing softly as he spies on the Russians above. He rides the Bosphorus ferry, blends in at Sirkeci Station, and pays a visit to Klebb’s hideout in the Grand Bazaar’s Zincirli Han.
Outside town—on a soundstage pretending to be wild country—two gypsy girls fight over him, knives flashing, interrupted by gunfire. Bond survives. He always does. He tears off in a speedboat near Pendik, leaving smoke, bullets, and broken promises behind him.
Success breeds imitation. By the mid-1960s, everyone wanted a piece of Bond. Even Türkiye got its own cut-rate version: "Altin Cocuk," (Golden Boy) a black-and-white oddity from 1966 starring Goksel Arsoy, blond and bland, a man who looked like he’d misplaced his menace on the way to the set. The series never went anywhere. Istanbul didn’t need a fake Bond. It already had the real one.
Seventeen films and 26 years passed before 007 came back. In “The World Is Not Enough,” Pierce Brosnan’s Bond meets his match in Elektra King and ends her in the Maiden’s Tower, the Kiz Kulesi, a lonely tooth of Byzantine Empire stone rising from the Bosphorus. Romance curdles into murder, as it tends to do in this cinematic town.
Then Daniel Craig arrived, hard-faced and mean, and "Skyfall" opened with a motorcycle chase tearing across the Grand Bazaar rooftops, through Eminonu, and past the old Deutsche Orientbank. It was the kind of opening that reminded you why Bond had survived all those decades: motion, danger, and cities that know how to look guilty.
Now another Bond is coming, due in 2027, with no Fleming novels left to strip-mine. Producers like sure things. Istanbul has always delivered. You can picture it already: a sprint down a jammed Istiklal Avenue, elbows flying; a motorboat slamming across the Bosporus chop, spray in Bond’s eyes, the city closing in from both sides.
For Bond, Istanbul will always be what it was in Fleming’s day—a place where East and West trade secrets over thick coffee, where history never quite stays buried. Or, as 007 once put it, lighting a cigarette and looking the city over like a suspect in a lineup: “Let’s just say that Istanbul is a rough town.”
Then, in a smoother, amused voice, he asks the beautiful heroine, “You’ve never been to Istanbul? Where the moonlight on the Bosphorus is irresistible.”
Bond smiles, already halfway gone. “I’ve always wanted to have Christmas in Turkey.”
Set as preferred source
Set as preferred source
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