Istanbul, Layer by Layer

Istanbul is a city you never see all at once. Every street rests on an older street, every building remembers the one that stood before it. A Byzantine church becomes a mosque, then a museum, then a mosque again. A wooden mansion built by an Armenian family now serves tea to strangers. An Ottoman gravestone, carved for someone whose name few can read anymore, disappears slowly under poppies.

Between May and October 2026 I tried to draw some of these layers, in Eyüp, on the Princes’ Islands, along the old land walls and in Balat, sometimes alone, sometimes with Urban Sketchers Istanbul. My small yellow square sketchbook is always with me, so the city never has to wait for a better moment.

I draw very fast. I usually skip the pencil and start straight in ink, then drop watercolour on top while the scene is still in front of me. There is no time for details, so the drawing becomes a matter of choosing what really matters. After years in animation, I still think of figures as frozen frames of movement rather than static poses. And I rarely paint the real colours; I paint what the moment feels like. Watercolour helps with that, because it never quite does what you plan. Each page becomes a small conversation between me, the paint and the place.

What struck me most in Istanbul was not how much of the past survives, but how casually it lives alongside the present: taxis circling a mosque by Mimar Sinan, café tables in front of an island mansion, cats sleeping above a quiet cove.

In a few drawings I let the past step back in. A man in a fast walks past a house on Kınalıada. Theodore Metochites, who appears in the mosaics of Kariye offering the church to Christ, kneels outside and offers it once more, as it looks today. I did not see them that day, of course. But in Istanbul you always feel that someone stood exactly where you stand, looking at the same wall, centuries earlier.

On some pages I wrote the names in two scripts, Latin and Ottoman, because the city still seems to speak in both. Drawing here feels less like recording a place and more like listening to it.

Ink, watercolour and pastel in a small yellow square sketchbook.

About the artist
Mehmet Saygın is an illustrator based in Adana, Turkey. He began drawing cartoons for Turkish humour magazines as a university student, then spent around fifteen years in animation before moving into mobile game design. He returned to sketchbook drawing recently, and sketches with Urban Sketchers Istanbul.