Anadolu Hisarı and Göksu: the older, smaller fortress
Bayezid I's 1394 fortress at the Bosphorus's narrowest stretch, looking across at Rumelihisarı. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Anadolu Hisarı bus stop
The 15F from Üsküdar drops you at the village above the fortress. Walk south along the shore first — it's the cleanest way to read the walls from outside before stepping inside them.

2. Anadolu Hisarı
Bayezid I's 1394 stone fortress — Güzelce Hisar in the old sources, built sixty years before the conquest when the Ottomans still asked permission to cross the Bosphorus. Smaller than its European partner across the water, and the scale is the point. The interior keep is open most afternoons; the curtain wall is the better walk.

3. Göksu Deresi
The stream that gives the area its name — Göksu means heavenly water. The mouth broadens into a small lagoon where rowing skiffs once moored on summer evenings; the Pasha set was painted here by every Istanbul Orientalist who passed through.

4. Küçüksu Kasrı
Sultan Abdülmecid's 1857 summer pavilion by Nikoğos Balyan, in florid Bosphorus Rococo. Two storeys, ornamental, more about the water meadow it faces than the building itself. Museum hours Tue–Sun, modest entry.

5. The village wooden houses
Two streets back from the water, the timber yalı that defined Bosphorus residential building before concrete took the shore. Most are private and inhabited; walk slowly and look up at the bay windows.

6. Çay garden facing Rumelihisarı
Find one of the tea gardens along the seafront and sit with the view. The strait is only seven hundred metres across here; Rumelihisarı's three towers read in detail from this bench. Tea is a few lira; the view is the rest of the afternoon.

Anadolu Hisarı and Göksu: the older, smaller fortress