A coffee, a sheet of sketch paper and a pencil in your hand, inside the stone walls of a 200-year-old chapel, with nobody hurrying you back out onto the street. That is the hour Sekiz Art House gives you in Balat, on a slope of Istanbul the coach itineraries skip entirely.
The interior architect and painter Hamide Göksan opened Sekiz Art House in February 2026, and a gallery dedicated to the Turkish-Jewish painter Jackie Arditty is opening inside it. The Other Tour has operated in Istanbul since 2011, and our founder has been buying Arditty’s paintings in Balat for years.
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What Sekiz Art House Actually Is
Sekiz Art House is a contemporary art, design and collective-production platform at Derviş Ali, Kesmekaya Cd. No:46, 34087 Fatih, in the Balat quarter of Istanbul. They define themselves in a single line:
Sekiz is an art platform focused on contemporary art, design, and collective production.
One stone shell holds three things at once. There is a gallery, there is a cafe, and there is a room where you sit down and make something with your hands instead of photographing someone else’s work. They close on the motto that explains the mix, “Sanatın en büyük eseri insandır”, the greatest work of art is the human being.
Sekiz is the Turkish word for eight, and the house reads that as an eighth art opening inside the classical seven.
The design magazine ALDECOR borrowed it for a Spring 2026 headline about the place, “Tarihin dinginliğinde sekizinci sanat“, the eighth art in the stillness of history.
- Address: Derviş Ali, Kesmekaya Cd. No:46, 34087 Fatih, in Balat.
- Opened: February 2026, founded by Hamide Göksan.
- The building: the stone walls of a 200-year-old chapel.
- Inside: exhibition space, cafe, workshop room.
- Contact: Use the form below and we’ll tailor the tour around what you need and want. You can also contact them directly through info@sekizarthouse.com
- Opening hours: the venue publishes none, so message before you go.
The 200-Year-Old Chapel Walls
The wall you lean against is the stone of a 200-year-old chapel, and the venue says as much in its own words: “Giving life back to the cold stones of a 200-year-old chapel, it says, takes more than a commercial mind: it takes an architect who can read empty space and a painter who can see a soul”.
You feel the difference the moment you sit. The stone stays where it is, uncovered and cool under your palm, two centuries older than the cup in front of you.
Nobody has smoothed the room into a photo studio, so the acoustics are still a chapel’s acoustics and conversation drops half a tone the way it does in old buildings.
That is also the reason an interior architect founded an art house rather than a shop. Reading the emptiness of a small chapel and deciding what belongs in it is an architect’s problem, and Hamide Göksan solved it by leaving the building louder than the furniture.
Jackie Arditty & His New Gallery
Jackie Arditty is a Turkish-Jewish painter, born in Istanbul in 1960, who opened his first exhibition at the age of eleven at the Beyoğlu Sanat Galerisi. He trained privately with the painter Hasan Kavruk in oil and watercolour, and he won prizes in national and international painting competitions, including UNICEF ones.
Ceramics came next, at the Gorbon Işıl studio in 1980. The IDA art gallery in Beyoğlu showed him in 1994, and his eighth exhibition opened at the Çırağan Palace Art Gallery in 2002. In 2015 the Ekavart Gallery in Istanbul gave him a solo show, The Gleam of Hope, from 20 October to 6 November, with ten works listed including “Fire and Rebirth”, “Hope in Storm” and “Loneliness”. “The Rebellion”, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm, dates from the same year.
The gallery writes the show this way:
“In his exhibition, the artist shares with the art community his works of art that serve as visual recollections of our world. His works are inspired by his own life and impressions and generated through different mediums and forms like oil, charcoal, sculpture and relief.”
Fethi Karataş does not write about him as a gallery name:
Near the top of one of Büyükada‘s hills lives my friend Jackie Arditty, a Turkish-Jewish painter of remarkable pedigree.
An Arditty show opened at Sekiz Art House on 2 July 2026. The dedicated gallery is the next step from that show. When it opens, you will stand in a converted chapel in front of the work of a man whose paintings hung in a Beyoğlu gallery before he was old enough for secondary school.
The Gifted Children Law Explained
Turkey‘s Gifted Children Law, the Harika Çocuklar Kanunu, is the framework that sent exceptionally talented children abroad to study at the state’s expense. Law No. 5245, enacted on 7 July 1948, takes its title from sending İdil Biret and Suna Kan abroad for music education. Law No. 6660 of 1956 widened the same framework to children of exceptional talent across all branches of the fine arts, and that is the provision a fourteen-year-old painter would have travelled under.
Jackie Arditty won his scholarship at fourteen, to the Paris Fine Arts Academy. A State Fine Arts Academy board that included Nurullah Berk, Nuri İyem and Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, three of the defining names of twentieth-century Turkish painting, decided he should go. The same framework that put Biret in front of a piano in Paris put an Istanbul schoolboy in front of a life-drawing easel there.
How His Paintings Reached Balat
An art collector named Joseph has been selling Jackie Arditty’s paintings inside Balat for years, long before a gallery at Sekiz was on anyone’s plan. Fethi Karataş buys the canvases not from the painter but from Joseph, “the only Jew still living in Balat”, who sells Jackie’s work from a small spot at the back of the Yanbol Synagogue.
Hold those two facts next to each other and the new gallery stops looking like a launch and starts looking like a homecoming. The canvases already changed hands a few streets away, at the back of the Yanbol Synagogue, in the last working corner of Jewish Istanbul, and the man who sold them is the last of that community still living here.
Hamide Göksan, Architect & Painter
Hamide Göksan is the interior architect and painter who founded Sekiz Art House and has run it as founder and creative director since February 2026.
She studied painting for a year at Anadolu University, transferred to interior architecture, graduated in 2005, and after Hakan Helvacıoğlu, Hakan Kıran and Sistema Teknolojik Yapı she opened her own practice, Hamide Göksan İçmimarlık, in 2018.
Her stated position is that art should be experienced rather than only viewed, which is the whole argument of the building she opened.
HOME Art published her own house at Şile in 2022 as “Yeşilin İçinde Saklı Ev“, a house hidden in the green, and the chapel gets the same treatment: read the space first, then add as little as it will take. You meet the painter and the architect in the same room, because she hosts the workshops herself and she designed the space you take them in.
The Hatay Village Hamide Göksan Helped Build
The day after the 6 February 2023 earthquakes, the interior architect Zülal Çakıcı called round her architect friends. Göksan answered. With roughly 4,000 volunteers they built 100 tiny houses in about two and a half months.
Timber-clad and insulated, a kitchen and a bathroom in each, they went up on a 66 dönüm site at Kuzeytepe outside Antakya. Örnek Evler Yaşam Köyü opened on 22 October 2023 with 100 families living in it.
Çakıcı, Göksan, Tarık Hotamışlıgil and Haldun Dostoğlu then staged a benefit exhibition for the village at the Kethüda Hamamı in Ortaköy, from 21 to 25 March 2024. They called it “Kelebek Etkisi”, the butterfly effect. Sekiz opened in Balat two years later.
Art With Coffee at Sekiz
There is plenty to do at Sekiz Art House besides look. The cafe sells art-with-coffee packages: a 30-minute art break that arrives with one coffee, sketch paper, a pencil and an eraser, plus a 30-minute mini guided session.
A ready-to-paint template package waits for you if you would rather start from an outline than a blank sheet.
You do not need to be able to draw. That is the point of the guided half hour, and it is why the packages suit a couple who have never held a pencil together as easily as they suit someone who paints at home.
Nobody makes you buy anything to stand in front of the art. Turkish cafe prices move every few months, so ask at the counter rather than trusting a figure printed anywhere: the packages are bookable on the spot when you arrive.
Workshops Inside the Chapel Space
The Other Tour runs private and group workshops inside the chapel space at Sekiz Art House, hosted with Hamide Göksan. You work in English, in a group small enough that she answers you by name, with 200-year-old stone at your back and the finished thing in your hand at the end of it.
Workshops have run at Sekiz Art House since its opening months. If you want the wider picture of what a hands-on session in this country looks like, our guide to craft workshops in Turkey and our piece on traditional Turkish arts cover the older disciplines this one sits alongside.
Inside The Chapel
Paint Something Under 200-Year-Old Stone
Sit down with Hamide Göksan in the chapel space and make your own piece, in English, in a group small enough that she answers you by name. Email us your dates and how many of you there are, and we will arrange a private or group session, with no waiting for our Airbnb Experience listing to go live.
Walking In, Hours & Contact
Sekiz Art House has no set opening hours. Message ahead rather than trusting a guess: phone or WhatsApp 0533 697 16 59, email info@sekizarthouse.com, or send a note to @sekiz.art.house on Instagram. Ask two things: whether the door is open on your day, and what is hanging that week.
Exhibitions rotate, so the show you read about may not be the show you walk into. If you turn up and the door is shut, you have lost nothing: you are standing in Balat, a few minutes from specialty coffee and from the synagogues and churches on the same slope.
Guests who come with us skip the gamble, because we confirm the door and the current exhibition before anyone leaves their hotel.
Getting to Balat & Kesmekaya Caddesi
The T5 tram stops in Balat itself. Balat is the fifth station on the Eminönü to Alibeyköy line and Fener is the fourth, so you step off within walking distance of the address.
- By tram: the T5 line runs 10.1 km with 14 stations and operates 06:00 to 00:00.
- By ferry: the Üsküdar to Haliç line calls in order at Üsküdar, Karaköy, Kasımpaşa, Fener, Balat, Hasköy, Ayvansaray, Sütlüce and Eyüpsultan. The first departure from Üsküdar leaves at 07:30 and the last at 21:40.
- From Sultanahmet: take the T1 tram to Eminönü, then change to the T5 for Balat.
- By bus: services from Eminönü toward Balat include the 99, 99A, 36CE and 44B. Check the number on the front of the bus, since routes change.
- By taxi: the shore road along the Golden Horn runs the whole way from Sultanahmet. Traffic decides how long it takes.
Both the tram stop and the ferry pier sit down at the water. Kesmekaya Caddesi lies up the slope behind them, so the last few minutes of the journey climb away from the Golden Horn through streets of washing lines and cats. The ferry is the better arrival if you have the time for it: you watch the whole waterway open in front of you instead of a tram window.
Hills, Cobbles, Strollers & Wheels
Balat is hilly and cobbled, and that is the honest answer if you are pushing a stroller or using a wheelchair. The flat ground is the shore road along the Golden Horn. Everything interesting sits above it, and the gradient starts the moment you leave the water.
Children get something to do at Sekiz Art House rather than something to look at.
The art-with-coffee package hands a child sketch paper, a pencil and an eraser, so the half hour that would otherwise be spent asking to leave becomes the half hour they draw the chapel wall.
Balat’s gradient is manageable once you choose your direction. A taxi can put you at the top of the slope so you walk down rather than up, and our notes on travelling Istanbul with a stroller and on guided tours with a wheelchair set out how we route around this kind of ground. c
Kiremit Caddesi & the Quieter Hour
Kiremit Caddesi is the painted street everyone in Balat photographs, and by the middle of the day you wait your turn for the same frame as everyone ahead of you. Go early or go late. Weekday mornings before the tour groups arrive and the hour before sunset both give you the colour without the crowd, and in high summer they also give you the shade.
Sekiz Art House gives you the opposite of that street. On Kiremit Caddesi you photograph somebody else’s front door; in the chapel you sit down and make something, and the hour belongs to you rather than to the queue behind you.
Spring and autumn are the kindest seasons for a neighbourhood you cross on foot.
Evening worries nobody here. Balat is residential, the streets stay lived-in after dark, and walking back down to the water is ordinary rather than brave. If you want the wider picture, we keep a straight answer on safety in Turkey.
How Long to Give Balat
Give Balat half a day. Two hours covers the photographed street and a coffee; four hours lets you add the synagogues, the churches and an unhurried session at Sekiz Art House without checking your watch.
The same walk holds the Ahrida Synagogue, the Yanbol Synagogue, the Bulgarian iron church down at the water, and Fener one tram stop back toward town. Few of the neighbourhoods we walk pack that much into one slope.
Rain changes nothing about a plan built around an indoor chapel and a cup of coffee, which is why Sekiz turns up in our rainy-day Istanbul routing more often than the weather deserves.
For contemporary art at city scale you still want Istanbul Modern and the Pera Museum. What those two cannot give you is a gallery you can sit inside for an afternoon with a pencil in your hand.
Seeing Balat With a Guide
You can walk Balat alone and have a good day of it. What you cannot arrange alone is a workshop hosted by the founder, a confirmed door on a venue that publishes no hours, and the story of who Joseph is and why a painter from Büyükada ended up on this slope at all.
The Other Tour has operated since 2011 as TÜRSAB licensed operator #7651. This slope is the kind of place we built the company for, and it drops straight into an off the beaten path day: the tram along the water in the morning, the chapel and a pencil after lunch, the climb back up for the light before sunset.
The Other Balat
Walk Balat With Our Lead Guide
Ömer Çelik is our lead guide, an art historian whose Istanbul is built on its Jewish, Armenian and Greek Orthodox layers. In Balat he traces the synagogues, churches and schools behind the facades. He will confirm the door at a venue that publishes no hours, tell you who Joseph is, and walk you to the corners the photo crowd never reaches. Mention him by name in your inquiry.
Experience Art First-Hand with The Other Tour
An afternoon in a 200-year-old chapel in Balat, a coffee going cold beside your sketch paper, Hamide Göksan leaning over your shoulder, and a wall of Jackie Arditty canvases in the next room by a painter who first exhibited at eleven. That is the version of Istanbul a bus itinerary cannot reach, and it is two trams from Sultanahmet.
Tell us your dates and how many of you there are, and mention Sekiz Art House in the message.
We will confirm the door with the venue, arrange a private or group workshop with Hamide Göksan, build the rest of the day around Balat at the hour it is quiet, and reply with a plan you can change freely.
