I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve traveled to London over the past 11 years. Each visit was an intellectual journey of its own kind, one spent getting lost in the corridors of this city’s vast cultural institutions. For a long time, though, places like the British Museum or the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) spoke to us from a certain distance. They narrated world history through their own imperial filters, their own centralizing gaze. As an Istanbul-based writer and researcher, standing before the famous portrait of Mehmed the Conqueror in London always stirred something deep in me, and yet, the encounter never quite exceeded what it was: becoming part of a story curated by others, frozen inside a permanent collection.

Museum gaze

This November, something at the V&A South Kensington promises to fundamentally upend that settled perception. Presented under the corporate patronage and vision of Koç Holding, "Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires” arrives in London not as a conventional showcase of borrowed objects behind glass, but as a deliberate, heavyweight intellectual intervention. It establishes genuine common ground where two ancient cultures might actually speak to each other, strictly at eye level. What makes this project an international milestone rather than a mere temporary exhibition is the profound institutional ecosystem supporting it. This is not a display harvested from Western depots, but a monumental collaboration directly involving Türkiye’s premier cultural guardians: Topkapı Sarayı (Topkapı Palace Museum), the Turkish Manuscript Institution (Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı) and the Istanbul Archaeology Museums.

The scale of the preparation behind the scenes speaks volumes about the seriousness of the undertaking. Most striking is the intensive work invested by senior curator Tim Stanley, who conducted extensive fieldwork in Istanbul during the preparation process. Stanley entered into direct, sustained contact with these Turkish institutions, engaging in a back-and-forth that resembled a sophisticated form of cultural shuttle diplomacy. This rigorous groundwork signals that the curatorial ambition here is not merely to produce a viewable exhibition, but to build a lasting foundation for an entirely new thought language between East and West.

Continuity, memory

For roughly two hundred years, Turkish intellectuals have lived under the shadow of an imaginary but deeply painful identity crisis, caught between East and West. We kept asking ourselves: Do we belong to the East, or are we part of what makes the West the West? In the throes of modernization, we were always chasing the question of how to transform, but we kept a certain distance from the most fundamental question of all: Who are we? The exhibition, shaped through this meticulous institutional alliance, reads as a mature, multi-layered answer to precisely that question. It treats Istanbul not as a fault line where civilizations collide, but as a form of organic continuity. This holistic approach aligns closely with Koç Holding’s long-standing vision of cultural stewardship – one that embraces both Ottoman art and culture and the Byzantine legacy as part of a singular, unfragmented heritage. This is not incidental: the same family-affiliated institutions – the Vehbi Koç Foundation, the Sadberk Hanım Museum with its Byzantine and Ottoman collections side by side and the Pera Museum’s holdings spanning Orientalist painting to Anatolian weights and measures – have long treated Byzantium, the Ottoman world, and the layered city of Istanbul as facets of a single, continuous heritage rather than separate, walled-off domains. What the V&A exhibition does, in effect, is lend that same integrative gaze an international stage.

It brings to mind a reflection from a blog post I wrote back in 2011, on the occasion of the landmark "Byzantium 1200” exhibition at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum: Ottomans and Byzantines are not structurally each other’s antithesis; they are each other’s continuation. Both civilizations rose within the same historical garden, and whichever side you look from, they complete one another. Mehmed the Conqueror’s self-designation as Kayser-i Rûm (Caesar of Rome) after the conquest of Istanbul is perhaps the most concrete emblem of this continuity: an Islamic, Eastern sovereignty seamlessly folded into the political and spatial inheritance of Rome.

The V&A’s exhibition design transforms this historical continuity into a tangible reality by placing the aesthetic peaks of both civilizations side by side, allowing objects from different institutional archives to converse. From the halls of Topkapı Palace, the exhibition draws refined courtly arts, imperial silks, rare manuscripts and the luminous tiles of İznik, representing the peak of Ottoman aesthetic philosophy. These meet the monumental Byzantine architectural elements, sacred relics, ivory carvings and intricate mosaics preserved across Istanbul’s deep historical strata. Among the most exciting fruits of this extensive preparation is the inclusion of a rare copy of the historic Üsküdar Water Channels Map (Üsküdar Suyolları Haritası), generously loaned from the prestigious collection of the Turkish Manuscript Institution. The map is not merely an engineering marvel of its era. It is a fluid record of Istanbul’s layered urban memory, connecting civilizations and geographies like water itself. What makes the map especially resonant here is that it operates on two registers at once: it depicts the city’s actual topography while simultaneously constructing a visual, almost cartographic relationship to that topography – mapping not just where the water flows, but how Istanbul has always pictured itself to itself. By bringing these treasures together under one roof, the exhibition visually demonstrates that the Ottomans did not erase Byzantium; they absorbed it, transformed it and let it grow again in their own colors.

2 cities, 1 archive

London has always been a significant stop and refuge for Turkish intellectuals wrestling with the East-West dilemma. Walking back from a day of research at SOAS and the British Library, I happened to pass by one of the houses where Charles Dickens once lived. Standing there, his seminal work "A Tale of Two Cities" naturally came to mind. For centuries, the encounters between East and West, or London and Istanbul, have been narrated through comparisons of contrasting geographies, viewed through deeply entrenched, Eurocentric lenses. Yet this November, the V&A’s upcoming exhibition presents a different kind of "tale of two cities” – or rather, two civilizations bound within the continuous narrative of a single, living metropolis.

When tracing this very continuity through the archives, these historical connections cease to be abstract; they become vividly concrete. My presence in London this time was not merely to anticipate this exhibition. It was a deeper quest into historical cartography, tracing the legacy of the celebrated Cedid Atlas (Atlas-ı Cedid) through the archives. It was during these intense days of research, particularly while walking through the intellectual corridors of SOAS, that the historical ghost of its founding director, Sir Edward Denison Ross, began to converse with my own imagination. Getting lost in those specific archives provided the ultimate inspiration and backdrop for my upcoming historical novel, "Sessiz İngiliz" ("The Silent Englishwoman").

What struck me, moving between these cities and these layers, is this: a thread picked up in a London archive often completes itself in an Istanbul ruin, while a fragment unearthed in Istanbul suddenly illuminates a marginal note left behind in London. London and Istanbul – or perhaps Istanbul and its own earlier selves – seem to function as each other’s footnotes, each other’s mirrors. Neither can be read to completion without the other; each is, in some sense, an annotation written in advance for a text not yet found. Perhaps this is the quiet, unstated premise beneath "Constantinople to Istanbul”: no single layer is ever a self-sufficient text. Byzantium glosses the Ottoman city, the Ottoman city glosses Byzantium and London, two centuries of fascinated, anxious attention, turns out to be a third archive in which both are still being written.

I want to open a parenthesis here around two figures whose paths and fates intersected in Istanbul, a parenthesis that reaches across geographies and binds my research directly to the soil. The first is Mahmud Raif Efendi, chief secretary to Yusuf Agâh Efendi, the Ottoman Empire’s first permanent ambassador to London. It is worth noting here a significant visual link to this diplomatic milestone: a magnificent portrait of Yusuf Agâh Efendi was painted in England during his historic tenure. This portrait, which once served as a cornerstone of the celebrated "Ambassadors and Painters” exhibition, is today preserved as a permanent treasure within the collection of the Pera Museum in Istanbul, bridging the visual memory of London and Istanbul.

Present in London’s intellectual circles at the close of the 18th century, Mahmud Raif Efendi was one of the leading theorists of the Nizam-ı Cedid (New Order) reform movement. Through the geographical treatise he contributed to the Cedid Atlas, he managed to bring Western geographical science into conversation with Ottoman statecraft. His life ended tragically during the reactionary Kabakçı Mustafa Revolt. The London counterpart to this early exchange is, of course, Sir Edward Denison Ross himself. A scholar who devoted his life to understanding Eastern cultures, Ross spent his final years in Türkiye and left a deep imprint on Turkish cultural life. Dying in Istanbul in the 1940s, in the shadow of the Second World War, he rests today in the British Cemetery in Haydarpaşa, Kadıköy.

And here is where history offers us something extraordinary. While Edward Denison Ross lies in Haydarpaşa, Mahmud Raif Efendi, who carried Western geographical knowledge to the Ottomans, rests at a site that is geographically just nearby – the Ayrılık Çeşmesi Cemetery. That these two pioneering figures from two societies that long tried to understand one another ended up as neighbors in death carries a quietly shattering, metaphorical weight. It tells us how close the things we imagine to be distant can actually be. Haydarpaşa itself, with residents ranging from Edward Barton, Queen Elizabeth I’s ambassador to the Ottomans, to Richard Guyon, who served as a general in the Ottoman army under the name "Hurşit Paşa,” stands as a living, physical archive that mirrors the very spirit of the "Constantinople to Istanbul” exhibition.

It seems safe to say that in the years ahead, this project will not remain simply an exhibition. Thanks to Tim Stanley’s careful curation and the unprecedented institutional openness demonstrated by Türkiye’s cultural authorities, it will constitute an important foundation for a new, post-orientalist vocabulary. It directly invites the Western world to stop viewing Türkiye through exoticizing, fragmented windows. That this ongoing, unbroken story of Istanbul is being told in London, within the halls of the V&A, marks a profoundly valuable moment. It is an occasion for one of the world’s most deeply rooted cities to address the global stage from the heart of another, breaking away from the traditional, one-sided gaze.

Opening in London this November, the exhibition ultimately brings the stormy, deep strata of our shared past into a common space. It calls on both East and West, not as exotic strangers to one another, nor through hierarchical distinctions of higher and lower, but as co-inheritors of a shared Mediterranean and world heritage, gathered around the same table, looking at each other, for once, at eye level. Perhaps the true worth of this metropolis can be measured through such global dialogues. Yet, while Istanbul’s ultimate value can be partially understood by comparing it with the world’s other great cities, its true, absolute essence can only ever be measured by comparing Istanbul with Istanbul itself.