The Oldest Video of Istanbul: Alexandre Promio’s 1897 Film

This 1897 film shot by Alexandre Promio is generally accepted as the oldest surviving moving image footage of Istanbul that we know today.

In 1897, Alexandre Promio, one of the chief cameramen of the Lumière Brothers, traveled through the Ottoman Empire and filmed short actuality scenes in Istanbul, then commonly referred to in the West as Constantinople.

The surviving footage typically includes:

• Views of the Galata Bridge
• Boats on the Golden Horn
• Pedestrians and daily life scenes

These are not staged films but actuality films, meaning documentary-style recordings of real life, which was the dominant form of cinema at the time.

The Galata Bridge seen in the 1897 film is historically known as the Third Galata Bridge, an important structure that connected the old city on the Historic Peninsula with Galata, then a major commercial and port district.

After earlier wooden bridges proved insufficient for the growing traffic of people, animals, and goods, the Ottoman administration sought a more durable solution. In 1870, a contract was signed with the French company Forges et Chantiers de la Méditerranée to build a new bridge. However, the outbreak of the Franco Prussian War caused delays, and the project was reassigned in 1872 to the British firm G. Wells. Construction was completed in 1875.

This third bridge was a ponton bridge, resting on 24 floating pontoons, which allowed it to adapt to the strong currents of the Golden Horn. It measured 480 meters (1,575 feet) in length and 14 meters (46 feet) in width, making it wide enough to accommodate dense pedestrian traffic, animal carts, and early wheeled transport. The total construction cost was 105,000 gold liras, a substantial investment at the time.

In the 1897 footage, the bridge appears lined with wooden structures, small shops, and shelters, which were typical features of the Galata Bridge in the late nineteenth century. These additions turned the bridge into a lively social and commercial space rather than a simple crossing point. Fishermen, port workers, merchants, and passersby all shared the same narrow span, giving the bridge a unique urban character.

The Third Galata Bridge remained in use until 1912, when it was towed upstream to replace the aging Cisr-i Atik Bridge. Its appearance in the film is therefore historically significant, preserving a rare moving image of a structure that played a central role in Istanbul’s daily life during the late Ottoman period.

The Cisr-i Atik Bridge was an older Ottoman era bridge over the Golden Horn, located upstream from the Galata Bridge, near the inner parts of the Haliç. Its name literally means “Old Bridge” in Ottoman Turkish, with cisr meaning bridge and atik meaning old.

Alexandre Promio

Jean Alexandre Louis Promio (9 July 1868 – 24 December 1926) was one of the key pioneers of early cinema and a central figure in the global spread of motion pictures at the end of the nineteenth century. Born into an Italian family settled in Lyon, he developed an early interest in photography while working as an assistant to an optician. After witnessing the first demonstrations of the cinematograph, he joined the Lumière Brothers in 1896 and quickly became head of their film unit, training the first generation of cinematograph operators.

Promio’s main task was to introduce and promote cinema worldwide. Between 1896 and 1897, he traveled extensively across Europe and the United States, filming some of the earliest urban documentaries ever made. His works include early films of Madrid, Saint Petersburg, London, Chicago, Venice, and Stockholm. His 1896 film Panorama du Grand Canal vu d’un bateau, shot from a moving gondola, is widely regarded as the first film made with a moving camera, a major technical breakthrough.

Promio also played a crucial role in early newsreels. In Sweden, he filmed the arrival of King Oscar II at the General Art and Industrial Exposition in 1897, considered the country’s first newsreel, and trained Sweden’s first native cinematographer.

Among his most historically important works are the films he shot in Istanbul in 1897. These short actuality films show the old Galata Bridge, the Golden Horn, and daily life on the Historic Peninsula, and they are widely accepted as the oldest surviving moving images of the city.

After 1898, Promio settled in Lyon, later working for Pathé and serving in World War I. He spent his final professional years producing photographs and documentary films in Algeria before returning to France, where he died in 1926.

Lumière Brothers

The Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, were French inventors, photographers, and filmmakers who played a decisive role in the birth of cinema. Born in Besançon in the 1860s and raised in Lyon, they grew up in a family deeply involved in photography. Their father, Charles Antoine Lumière, ran a successful photographic business, which allowed the brothers to develop strong technical and scientific skills from an early age.

Louis Lumière made a major breakthrough in photographic plate production while still a teenager, leading to the rapid growth of the family factory. By the early 1890s, the Lumières were among Europe’s leading manufacturers of photographic materials. Inspired by reports of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, they began working on a system that could both record and project moving images for an audience.

Their solution was the Cinématographe, patented in 1895. This compact, hand cranked device functioned as a camera, film processor, and projector, operating at 16 frames per second. On 28 December 1895, the Lumière brothers held the first paid public film screening in Paris, an event traditionally regarded as the birth of cinema. The program included short films such as Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, scenes of everyday life that fascinated audiences with their realism.

In 1896, the Lumières expanded cinema globally by sending trained operators around the world to screen films and record new footage. These efforts produced some of the earliest newsreels and documentaries, capturing cities, industries, royalty, and daily life across Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

Despite their success, the brothers viewed cinema as a temporary novelty and withdrew from filmmaking by 1905. They redirected their focus to scientific research and photography, culminating in the Autochrome Lumière process, the first widely successful color photography system, introduced in 1907.

Louis Lumière died in 1948 and Auguste in 1954. Today, their legacy endures as the foundation of modern cinema, combining technical innovation with a new way of recording reality.

Sources

• Alexandre Promio on Wikipedia
• Galata Bridge on Wikipedia
• Auguste and Louis Lumière on Wikipedia
• Lumière Brothers on the Encyclopedia Britannica website