PRIVATE HISTORY

In an ancient city linking continents and centuries, a 222 year-old home offers refuge from the past and a sweeping view of the future beyond the Bosporus.

- CARL SWANSON

In the grand old city of Istanbul, there is a lot that’s newly built and stridently flashy. In the last decade or so entire swaths of steep, winding streets have been dug up and replaced with futuristic shopping malls and often peculiarly shaped highrises that light up at night in attention-grabbing ways. This is the latest incarnation of a metropolis of 15 million, a bit blustery and inelegant, eager to show off, maybe take a selfie.

But all of that urban jumble seems very far away when you’re looking over the deep blue Bosporus from the 222-year-old home of Caroline N. Koç, a member of one of the wealthiest and most private families in Turkey. Discreetly overlooking the water and invisible from the public road below, the house is on a terraced hillside on the strait’s Asian side, which has been a place for country-in-the-city for generations of Turkish grandees, ever since the days of the Ottoman Empire.

“It looks like a separate little town,” Caroline says of the posh area, called Kanlıca, the way people in East Hampton describe their manicured Mayberry, when I meet her on the pool deck that she and her late husband added to take advantage of the view. Guarded by life-size reproductions of Chinese terra-cotta soldiers, the pool gazes out “to an area called Baltalimanı, where the Treaty of Balta Liman was signed between Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire,” she says. The house itself, which she has owned for two decades, was built for a high-ranking military officer clearly favored by the sultan.