A view of Bosphorus and my bicycle from Rumelikavağı

Here’s a view of the Bosphorus with my road bike (a 2015 Cannondale CAAD10) from Rumelikavağı (Rumeli Kavağı), a neighborhood of the Sarıyer district in Istanbul Province.

Rumelikavağı

Formerly, Rumeli Kavağı was a small fishing village. “Rumeli” is the Turkish name for Thrace (actually literally means “the Greek land” or “the place where Greeks live”), and “Kavak” means “control post” in Ottoman Turkish, referring to the strategic position of the location on the Bosphorus.

In the 17th century, a castle was built to check Cossack naval assaults from the Black Sea. In 1877, during the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878), a part of the immigrants from the Russian-occupied provinces settled in the village. Up until the 1960s, most of Rumelikavağı was a restricted zone by the Turkish military.

The Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge (the third bridge over the Bosphorus) is to the north of the neighborhood.