Galataport and Karaköy, How the Bosporus Southern Gate Became a Private Cruise Mall
Where the Golden Horn meets the Bosporus, on the shore below the Galata Tower, Istanbul has handed 1.2 kilometres of its waterfront to a private company for 30 years. Galataport runs from Karaköy to Fındıklı: a cruise terminal, a promenade, shops, hotels and the new Istanbul Modern museum. In 2025 it handled 595,000 cruise passengers on 224 ship calls, according to the operator, which says more than 50 million people have visited the complex since it opened.
It is also the clearest example on the strait of how Istanbul's shoreline has been sold during the Erdoğan years, and of who ended up carrying the bill.
The old port
Galata was the Genoese colony across the water from Byzantine Constantinople, and later the city's banking and shipping quarter. Karaköy, at the waterline, was its port. For most of the 20th century the passenger ships of the Turkish lines tied up here, at the Karaköy Passenger Hall, a 1940s modernist terminal registered as a protected building in 2002. Next to it stood the Paket Postanesi, a customs house built between 1907 and 1911. The Karaköy ferry pier, the Galata Bridge and the fish sellers made it one of the busiest corners of the city (ferries and cruises).
Image: pxef.com
The sale
In 2013 the government's privatisation agency sold the right to run and redevelop the Salıpazarı port area for 30 years. The Doğuş Group, one of Turkey's biggest conglomerates, won with a bid of 702 million dollars, in partnership with Bilgili Holding. Critics called it a betrayal of Istanbul, a public shore turned into a gated shopping strip. The Council of State, Turkey's top administrative court, suspended the project in 2014. It went ahead anyway.
In April 2017 Istanbul's conservation board stopped the works and filed a criminal complaint after the Karaköy Passenger Hall, which was supposed to be taken apart by hand and preserved, was knocked down with heavy machinery. The city's zoning office sealed the site too. The building was gone regardless.
What was built
The first cruise ship docked in October 2021, three years late. The engineering is clever: the terminal is underground, and the quay covers lift to make way for passengers only when a ship is in, so the promenade stays open the rest of the time. Renzo Piano designed the new Istanbul Modern, which opened in 2023, and the Ottoman Tophane clock tower was restored in the middle of the square.
The public can walk the waterfront, but on the operator's terms: security at the entrances, private rules, and a shoreline lined with brands rather than ferry offices and fishmongers. For a city whose residents fought over Gezi Park in 2013, and are now fighting over what becomes of Haydarpaşa station, Galataport is what the losing side looks like.
Who pays
The project was built on about 1.02 billion euros of bank loans. By December 2024 Doğuş couldn't service them; reports put the debt at about 1.5 billion euros. It agreed to hand 49 percent of Galataport to its creditor banks, among them Garanti BBVA, Yapı Kredi, İşbank and the development bank TSKB, keeping an option to buy the shares back within three years. Ziraat, the state bank, is also among the lenders. Doğuş had earlier explored selling the port to Qatar's sovereign wealth fund.
The cruise numbers are healthy and the operator is targeting 280,000 home-port passengers in 2026. But a public waterfront was sold, a protected terminal was demolished, and the debt has landed partly with the banks. That is the Bosporus development model of the last twenty years, in one kilometre of shore (the neighbourhoods).