Ferzan Özpetek left Istanbul at seventeen, fifty years ago. His most famous film still opens in the city he left: a bathhouse in Istanbul that a young Italian inherits and can’t quite let go of.
Table of Contents
From Kadıköy to Rome
In 1976, Özpetek left Kadıköy for Italy. He enrolled first at the University for Foreigners in Perugia to learn Italian, then moved to Rome, where he studied art history and film history at Sapienza University.
Building his directing career there over three decades instead of at home, Ferzan Özpetek achieved the unthinkable: he became one of Italy’s most distinctive and celebrated filmmakers while remaining unmistakably connected to Istanbul, the city that continued to shape his imagination from afar.
The neighborhoods, ferries and hamams that appear throughout his films and his 2013 memoir are still there to visit.
Fifteen Years Behind the Camera
Before directing his own films, Özpetek spent about 15 years working as an assistant director in the Italian film industry, alongside directors including Marco Risi and Sergio Citti.
Watching other directors block a scene, choose a lens, and manage a crowded set taught him where to put a camera in a room full of people and secrets. That instinct is what carries Hamam: The Turkish Bath, a film built almost entirely on what a camera catches in tiled corridors and steam.
He made his own directorial debut in 1997, after that long apprenticeship.
Özpetek's Career at a Glance
- Born: 1959, in Istanbul.
- Left home: 1976, for Italy, first to Perugia, then Rome.
- Directorial debut: Hamam: The Turkish Bath (1997).
- Top honors: Italian Order of Merit in October 2019 in Rome by Italian President Sergio Mattarella as a high national distinction.
- Memoir: Rosso Istanbul (2013), adapted into the 2017 film Red Istanbul.
The Bathhouse That Made His Name
Hamam: The Turkish Bath (1997) is Özpetek‘s directorial debut. It follows a young Italian who inherits a hamam in Istanbul and travels there to sell it, only to be drawn into the building, the neighborhood, and the city itself. The film introduced international audiences to the hamam tradition and remains Özpetek’s best-known work.
Steam fills the room, marble holds the heat for hours, and the hush between strangers is part of the ritual — this is the scene Hamam: The Turkish Bath opens on, and hamams like it still operate in Istanbul today.
Steam & Marble
Learn More About Hamams
Our quest for the ultimate hamam experience has taken us to numerous locations throughout Istanbul, allowing us to curate a list of the very best based on the essential criteria of authenticity, cleanliness, and affordability.
Harem Suare & the Ottoman Harem
Harem Suare (1999), Özpetek‘s second film, moves back a century into the final years of the Ottoman Empire and the imperial harem, framed by scenes set in 1990s Istanbul.
The rooms it imagines aren’t fiction. The Topkapı Palace harem quarters are open to visitors today: tiled corridors and inner courtyards where hundreds of women once lived under a strict hierarchy the film dramatizes.
Most visitors duck through the low doorways without knowing what they’re standing in. A guide who reads these rooms for a living stops you at the right threshold and names the rank that decided who was allowed to cross it.
Not Whoever's Assigned
Meet the Guides Who Grew Up Here
The Moda backstreet, the harem threshold that decided who could cross it, the hamam hour when the marble room empties — none of that is on a map. It sits in the head of a guide who has been crossing that water their whole life. We match you to one by interest, language and pace, and every guide is a licensed professional we’ve worked with for years. Read who they are, then tell us which one sounds like your kind of day.
Facing Windows & His Roman Years
Facing Windows (La finestra di fronte), released in 2003, won Özpetek his widest recognition in Italy, including the David di Donatello for Best Film, the country’s equivalent of the Oscars.
It’s the film through which most Italian audiences met him, long before they connected the name to Istanbul. Without that context, it’s easy to miss what makes the film odd in his filmography: it’s the one work that never touches Istanbul at all, proof that his Roman career and his Istanbul roots ran on separate tracks for years.
A guide walking you through his old Kadıköy streets might still bring the film up. Not for anything it shows of Istanbul, but for what it says about how long Özpetek kept those two lives apart before his own memoir finally brought them back together.
His Other Istanbul
Trace the Kadıköy That Raised Him
Recurring Themes in His Films
Family secrets and queer identity resurface film after film, but the pull of a city left behind is the one that lingers longest. It’s the same pull a visitor feels riding the ferry from Eminönü toward Kadıköy at dusk, or turning down a Moda backstreet that hasn’t changed since Özpetek walked it as a teenager.
The exact landing and backstreet that still hold that mood aren’t the view every day-tripper photographs from the top deck, a guide who grew up crossing that same water can point you to them directly. Hamam and Harem Suare carry it. So does Facing Windows, and every film that followed.
The Water He Grew Up Crossing
Ride the Bosphorus End to End
Özpetek’s crossing takes twenty minutes. The strait itself keeps going for another thirty kilometres, and the sightseeing boats turn back long before it does. Our private ferry day runs the full length — the fortresses, the fishing villages where the channel narrows, a lunch table you’d never spot from the top deck of a cruise. Tell us your dates and we’ll time the day to the light he kept filming.
A Hamam You Can Still Visit
The bathhouses that shaped Özpetek’s most famous film are still operating in Istanbul today. This is the other Istanbul his films keep pointing to: a neighborhood hamam where the ritual hasn’t changed in a century.
The traveller who knows which door to walk through skips the tourist-packed bath near Sultanahmet at midday for the quieter neighborhood hamam instead, timed for the slow hour when the marble room empties out.
The marble platform holds heat for hours, and a skilled attendant scrubs harder than any Western spa would attempt.
FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
Explore His Istanbul with The Other Tour
Istanbul exports monuments by the thousands: mosques, palaces, a skyline built to be photographed. Özpetek’s films export something rarer: the ordinary city, the ferry commute, the neighborhood hamam. In his Istanbul you can still sit down to simit and a glass of tea at a Kadıköy market stall, on the streets he walked before he ever picked up a camera.
Tell us you want to trace the Istanbul that shaped Özpetek, and we’ll build the day around it: the Kadıköy neighborhood where he grew up, a hamam morning timed to the slow hour instead of squeezed between two bus-tour stops.
Fill the form below and we’ll take it from there.
