Bosporus Bridges and Tunnels, From the 1973 Bridge to the 15 July Renaming and the Bill for Guaranteed Traffic

For most of Istanbul's history the only way across the Bosporus was a boat. The first bridge opened on 30 October 1973, timed for the 50th anniversary of the Turkish Republic, and turned a city of two shores into one commuter market. There are now three road bridges and two tunnels, and between them they carry the daily traffic of Europe's largest city. Each one also carries a piece of Turkish politics.

Five crossings, south to north

The Marmaray rail tunnel is the southernmost, running under the strait's mouth between Sirkeci and Üsküdar. It opened on 29 October 2013, again on Republic Day, and connects with suburban rail on both sides. It's the fastest way across for most people and the only crossing that doesn't care about traffic.

Photo: Calistemon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Eurasia Tunnel, a two-deck road tunnel for cars and minibuses only, opened in December 2016 between Kazlıçeşme and Göztepe. It's a toll road with a separate night rate, and it's one of the projects built under state traffic guarantees.

The 15 July Martyrs Bridge is the original 1973 Bosporus Bridge between Ortaköy and Beylerbeyi. The Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge followed in 1988, upstream between Rumeli Hisarı and Kavacık, a few hundred metres from the fortress Mehmed II built to take the city. These two carry most of the city's road traffic, and neither raised its tolls in July 2026.

The Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge, near the Black Sea entrance between Garipçe and Poyrazköy, opened on 26 August 2016. It's built for trucks and through traffic on the Northern Marmara Motorway, as a bypass for the city, and it is one of the widest suspension bridges in the world.

The night of 15 July

On the night of 15 July 2016, soldiers involved in the coup attempt drove tanks onto the Bosporus Bridge and closed it. Crowds came out to face them after Erdoğan called people into the streets, and dozens were killed on and around the bridge before the soldiers surrendered the next morning. Ten days later the government renamed it the 15 July Martyrs Bridge.

The coup attempt was real, bloody and deserved to fail. What Erdoğan did next is why the name sits uneasily with many Turks. He declared a state of emergency that lasted two years and used it to dismiss more than 150,000 public servants, from judges and teachers to soldiers and academics, close more than a hundred media outlets and jail tens of thousands, many on thin evidence of links to the Gülen movement he blamed. The emergency decrees then fed straight into the 2017 referendum that gave him a presidency with few checks. The bridge's new name honours the people who died. It also serves as a daily reminder of the night Erdoğan says saved Turkish democracy, and that he then used to dismantle it.

Selim the Grim and the traffic guarantee

The third bridge drew two controversies. The name honoured Selim I, the 16th-century sultan whose campaigns against the Safavids came with massacres of the Kızılbaş, the ancestors of Turkey's Alevis, who make up a large religious minority. Alevi groups protested the choice; the government kept it.

The second was money. The bridge and its motorway were built under a build-operate-transfer deal in which the state guaranteed the operator a minimum daily traffic flow, and the treasury pays the difference when real traffic falls short, which it has. The same model covers the Eurasia Tunnel, the 1915 Çanakkale Bridge across the Dardanelles and Istanbul's new airport. In July 2026, when tolls rose by up to 17.6 percent on the guaranteed roads, an opposition MP called it "a heavy build-operate-transfer bill presented to the citizen": drivers pay tolls, taxpayers pay the guarantees. A car crossing the Yavuz Sultan Selim paid 110 lira from 1 July 2026 and the Eurasia Tunnel 330 lira by day.

The bridges and tunnels work, and Istanbul couldn't function without them. Who profits from them is a different question, and one Erdoğan's government has been careful not to answer in public.

From the water, the first two bridges are best seen on a ferry up the strait (the ferry guide). The third is almost at the Black Sea, where the traffic in the strait begins.