Plan Your Trip
Create your own itinerary — search for places, add them to your route, and save it to come back to later.
- Anadolu Fortress: Ottoman Gateway to the Bosphorus
Your route is empty. Search for places above, or click a pin on the map, to start building your journey.
Building a route through a city split by water
Istanbul doesn't lay out in a straight line. The historic peninsula, Beyoğlu, the Bosphorus villages and the Asian side are each their own world, connected by ferry, tram and bridge rather than a single walkable thread — so a trip plan that ignores geography usually means backtracking across the water more than once a day. This tool lets you search any place on Istanbook, drop it into a route, reorder the stops, and see the straight-line distance between them before you commit a day to it.
Every place you add links back to its full page — history, sources, nearby food, the neighborhood it sits in — so the route you build here is a shortlist, not the whole story. Add a stop, read what it actually is, decide if it earns a slot in your day.
Save a route once you're signed in and it stays on your account, ready to open again from your phone once you're actually walking the city.
Before you start adding stops
- Group by neighborhood, not by famous name
- Sultanahmet, Karaköy and Kadıköy each reward a half-day on their own. A route that chains one landmark per district looks efficient on a map and burns hours in transit in practice.
- The Bosphorus crossing is part of the day, not a gap in it
- Ferries run on a timetable, not on demand. If your route spans both continents, build the crossing in deliberately rather than treating it as dead time between stops.
- Read the place before you commit to it
- A pin on a map tells you nothing about what a place actually is. Open the story behind it first — what period it's from, what's verified versus disputed — then decide if it belongs in your day.
- Leave room between stops
- The distance this tool shows is a straight line, not a walking time. Crowds, hills and ferry waits all add up — a route with four unhurried stops beats one with eight rushed ones.
Not sure where to start?
Browse curated routes built around a single theme, or start from a neighborhood and see what's nearby.