Gloomy Galleria: The Slow Death of Turkey's First Shopping Mall

Istanbul's Galleria was all the rage when it opened in 1988, boasting sharp, elegant architecture and featuring an ice rink and wildly popular entertainment center. Today, it is practically empty.

The center of Galleria in January 2024. On the ground floor there used to be an ice-skating rink until it closed in 2010. Most other stores and facilities have also closed since.

Walking through the doors of Istanbul’s Galleria mall is like setting foot into the shell of something that was once great and significant. The mall opened in 1988 in Istanbul’s affluent Ataköy district after having been championed by Turgut Özal, the late technocrat and former president who drastically transformed Turkey’s import substitution-based economy via sweeping neoliberal reforms. To that end, Özal must have thought it was time for Turkey to have its own shopping mall, and named it after Galleria in Houston, Texas, still one of the most popular of its kind in the US to this day.

More than just a mall, Galleria was a wildly popular destination for Istanbul families in the 80’s and 90’s. It boasted a bustling food court, in the middle of which stood a small ice-skating rink. Adjacent to that was Fame City, an entertainment center that was frequently likened to Disney World, or at least the closest Turkey offered at the time. Featuring a bowling alley, arcade games, miniature golf, slides, ball pits and other attractions that kids in the 90’s yearned for, the online dictionary Ekşi Sözlük is full of entries from Gen X’ers and older millennials waxing nostalgic about visiting Fame City when they were youngsters.

“This was the place where I spent my weekends and happily spent all of the pocket money I saved. It brought joy to my childhood. When the money ran out, I’d have to beg my mom and dad for more. I saved the tickets I collected in a specific place and thousands of different toys could be bought with them,” wrote one Ekşi Sözlük user in 2004.

Galleria in its heyday, with ice-rink intact and Fame City still open. (Photo from Salt Arşiv)

But Fame City closed down over 20 years ago, followed by the ice rink in 2010, and most of the mall’s shops. At its entrance, there are security guards and the requisite metal detector and x-rays found in every mall, but the guards weren’t making anyone go through them. One of the few open shops is on the left immediately as one enters, it’s a watch shop called Big Ben. I find this meaningful, because for Galleria, time is of the essence. Reports in 2021 indicated that Galleria was going to be torn down and replaced by luxury residential housing and office buildings. This is no surprise, as the Ataköy coastline has been transformed by the rapid construction of high-rise buildings over the years, making it unrecognizable compared to the sandy beachfront area it was several decades ago.

Was there once a Versace store here? There certainly isn’t now.

In place of the Fame City that once entertained countless children over the years is a huge branch of the chain supermarket Migros. It’s relatively busy given the otherwise emptiness of the mall and probably the largest supermarket in the immediate area. There is still a pedestrian underpass that links the neighborhood of Ataköy to Galleria under the main coastal highway. Next to the Migros is a KFC restaurant, the only one left in the dismal, dark food court. On the top floor, there is a large furniture store, and I notice a couple clothing shops and optometrists, but these represent a fraction of the 140 stores that used to fill the mall.

An optometrist is the lone shop open in a stretch of vacant storefronts on the upper level of Galleria.

Walking through the dimly-lit, gloomy corridors of the mall, it seems like there are more security guards around than shoppers. I ask one of them why Galleria is so empty, and he said that it was a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. That certainly didn’t help things, but it seems more likely that Galleria has simply lost its relevance. There are currently 114 shopping malls in Istanbul, some of which are packed and others that, like Galleria, are experiencing a slow death. Nevertheless, it’s worth a visit. Designed by the late renowned Turkish architect Hayati Tabanlıoğlu, whose repertoire included the Atatürk (then-Yeşilköy) Airport and the Atatürk Cultural Center (AKM), Tabanlıoğlu won an international design award in 1989 for his work on Galleria, which remains an impressive, ornate structure and reeks of the 80’s, in a good way. As glum and sad as its current state is, it’s preferable to yet another gated housing complex or eyesore of a skyscraper.

What was once Sand Park is now more like Sad Park.