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Ever since Daniel Craig rode across the terracotta rooftops of Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar in the James Bond Skyfall movie, viewers have been flocking to do the same, or at least set foot on the location themselves. It’s no wonder, given the adrenaline rush produced by the scene, but it wasn’t the first time a James Bond film was set in Istanbul, or that Türkiye has featured in the movies.
Kapali Carsi, to use its Turkish name, is one of the oldest and largest shopping malls in the world. It started off as a small wool market in the 1,400s, and today it contains more than 4,000 shops on over 60 streets. In 1963, parts of From Russia with Love starring Sean Connery were filmed there, as well as in the Yerebatan Basilica Cistern.
Once the major water supply of Constantinople, the cistern was built in the 6th century A.D. during the reign of Emperor Justinian. In this second ever Bond film, it’s a flooded underground chamber located beneath the Russian Consulate where British Secret Service head Ali Kerim Bey rows Bond through the murky darkness, past 336 columns in a space that originally held nearly 100,000 tons of water. All that can be heard is the splash of the oars and squeaking of rats until Kerim Bey says, “It’s my daily exercise, at 11 in the morning, and 3 in the afternoon”.
These days, tourists follow a boardwalk over the water, past eerily beautiful floating sculptures and two snake-covered heads of Medusa, one laying sideways and the other upside down. A modern interpretation of this Gordon monster from ancient Greek mythology looks on.
The same year, renowned French director Alain Robbe-Grillet also came to Istanbul to shoot L’Immortelle (The Immortals). The story revolves around a man beset by huzun, melancholy, who meets a beguiling, mysterious woman, only for her to disappear. His search for her takes place against the mesmerizing backdrop of Sultanahmet Camii, Yedikule Kale, Dolmabahce Sarayi, and the Bosphorus.
Daniel Craig wasn’t the first movie star filmed on a famous rooftop in Istanbul. In the trailer for the 1964 film Topkapi, Melina Mercouri poses fetchingly on one of the chimneys of the palace of the same name. She introduces co-stars Peter Ustinov playing small-time hustler Simon Simpson and Robert Morley as mechanical genius Cedric Page, while Maximilian Schell, in the role of criminal mastermind Walter Harper, runs across the metal covers.
Mercouri stars as Elizabeth Lipp, a beautiful thief intent on stealing an emerald-encrusted dagger that belonged to Sultan Mahmud I. Believing they’re Communist agents plotting an assassination, the Turkish police arrest Simpson and convince him to spy on the others. Much of the film was shot inside the actual palace and in wooden yalı, summer houses, on the shores of the Bosphorus.
Love of the forbidden kind plays out in Turkish-Italian director Ferzan Ozpetek’s 1997 film Hamam (Steam: The Turkish Bath). When Italian designer Francesco goes to Istanbul after inheriting a hamam from a long-lost aunt, he not only discovers how loved she was by her customers, but also a new side to himself. The exterior scenes were shot in Cibali on the Golden Horn at the now-defunct Aynali Sultan Hamami. The steamy (in both senses of the word) interior scenes featuring Francesco and the bathhouse assistant were shot in the still operational Cukurcuma Hamami in Beyoglu.
Running naked through the Misir Çarsisi (Spice Bazaar) and surrounding streets isn’t recommended, unless you’re a martial arts expert and king of slapstick, Jackie Chan. In his 2001 movie The Accidental Spy, filmed in Istanbul and Cappadocia, Chan flees a hamam, losing his towel along the way. In an amazing show of dexterity, he uses tea trays, dried fruit baskets, and various spice paraphernalia to protect his modesty and fight off his attackers. The chase ends when he hurls himself into a length of white cloth hanging from a clothesline slung between two buildings, twirling and spinning until he’s completely covered from head to toe, just like the local women in the scene.
In 1969 villagers were shocked to see scantily clad extras on the plains of Cappadocia, in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s epic movie Medea, starring the incomparable Maria Callas. Extras playing mythical creatures clad in kepenek, heavy shepherd cloaks, with animal horns on their head, added to the drama. Pasolini based the script on the 5th-century B.C. play Medea by ancient Greek tragedian Euripides, about the vengeful sorceress of Greek myth who betrays her country and family to help her lover Jason obtain the Golden Fleece.
More recently, pilgrimages made by tourists heading to the wintery city of Kars in north-east Türkiye, following in the footsteps of Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow, were dramatized on celluloid. Ostensibly, Riza Sonmez’s 2016 film Don’t tell Orhan Pamuk that his novel Snow is in the film I made about Kars tells the story of visually impaired singer Yüksel. Preparing to perform for important guests, Yüksel needs musicians to accompany him, but all the best ones have gone to a festival in Erzurum. Scenes featuring his quest are interspersed with those of tourists tracking Snow through the city, paperback in hand, ardent Pamuk fan hairdresser Kasım, who creates postcards showing people, scenes and streets resembling those in the book, three imaginary musicians, and cameos by a flock of geese, constantly on the run from their caretaker.
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