Welcome back to AL-MONITOR Istanbul.

This week’s edition plays with time. We begin with Halil Pasha, the Ottoman painter who captured Istanbul’s fading imperial elegance at the turn of the 20th century. From there we step into another kind of nostalgia at Pano Wine Bar, the Beyoglu winehouse founded in 1898, where writers, artists and night owls have long gathered over wine and meze.

The journey then stretches outward. A book by Sakip Sabanci Museum revisits the image of Turks in the 17th century, and we return to the present with the numbers: how Europeans see Turkey today.

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Nazlan (@NazlanEr on X)

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1. Leading the week: ‘By the Water’

Halil Pasha’s “Port of Cengelkoy.” (Courtesy of Pera Museum)

It takes a certain nerve to mount a major exhibition on Halil Pasha and promise surprise. He is, after all, one of the best-known names of the Ottoman military-painter generation — the master of Bosporus light and, in many art histories, the first Turkish impressionist.

Pera Museum’s new exhibition, “By the Water: The Life and Art of Halil Pasha,” does precisely that. Rather than reheating the familiar story, curator Ozlem Inay Erten went digging — into archives, sketchbooks and private collections — and the result is a painter who feels far less predictable.

“We redefine Halil Pasha not simply as an old master,” Erten said, “but as a modern figure who studied light like a scientist and believed deeply in the power of drawing.”

Spread across two floors of the museum, the exhibition brings together a wide spectrum of works from institutional and private collections alongside letters, photographs and sketchbooks that reconstruct the artist’s world. Highlights include the “Bostanci shore,” the 19th-century deserted version of the current hub; the elegant still life “Morning Coffee”; sketches prepared for The Carriage Affair; and the illustrated Brittany Diary, which traces his early experiments with painting outdoors.

Halil Pasha’s biography reads like a miniature history of Ottoman modernity. Born in Beylerbeyi, he grew up in a Bosporus yali where reflections on the water became an early visual laboratory. Trained at the Imperial........

© Al Monitor