Our friend Lisa Morrow, a long term resident of Istanbul, used VoiceMap to create an audio tour of Kadikoy, tracing back though the history of this once multicultural neighbourhood on the Asian side of the city. Kadiköy is where she regularly shops, walks, and socialises, so researching and writing about its forgotten secrets in order to produce a tour sharing her discoveries was an enjoyable and rewarding experience.

Kadikoy Crocodile

Kadikoy Walking Tour

Lisa first backpacked through Turkey in 1990. After numerous repeat visits, she moved to Kadiköy and started to explore the area’s past. Stopping in a quiet side street, she says, “This is Sivastopol Street. It’s likely the street was named by one of the more than 200,000 Russian refugees who landed along the Bosphorus shores, after the Bolshevik’s seizure of power in Russia in the October Revolution of 1917. The majority of Russians had left Istanbul by the end of the 1920s. But people of Greek descent who were born in Turkey, called the Rum population, were thriving”. 

Fish Street

Lisa Morrow, writer, sociologist and occasional belly dancer, has used innovative new storytelling platform VoiceMap to create her own audio walking tour of Kadiköy’s lesser known history. The result is an immersive and entertaining experience through Kadiköy that will leave you with a whole new understanding of Istanbul’s history.

VoiceMap, a recently-launched mobile application for iPhones and Android devices, uses cutting-edge GPS technology and the age-old art of storytelling to change the way people experience cities. “VoiceMap is a publishing platform for location-aware audio tours – or, with less jargon and more poetry, a way of seeing the world through another person’s eyes,” explains CEO and co-founder Iain Manley.

Surp Levon Armenian Church

After downloading the app and selecting a route, VoiceMap users can put their phone in their pocket and follow a storyteller’s voice through a particular neighbourhood, while anecdotes, commentary, and opinions play automatically at specific GPS locations.

Learn more: https://voicemap.me/tour/istanbul/stepping-back-through-chalcedon-kadikoy-walk

Read our interviews with Lisa on her books and website:

Inside out in Istanbul (the book) 
Inside out in Istanbul (the website)
Waiting for the Tulips to Bloom: Adrift in Istanbul 

Artists Street

All photos courtesy and copyright Lisa Morrow