Sarıyer

Sarıyer () is a municipality and district of Istanbul Province, Turkey. Its area is 177 km2 and its population is 350,454 (2022). It is on the northeastern part of Istanbul's European side. Sarıyer also administers the Black Sea coast to the west of the mouth of the Bosphorus, including the neighbourhood of Kilyos. It borders Eyüpsultan to the northwest, Beşiktaş to the south and Kağıthane to the west. The mayor is Mustafa Oktay Aksu of the Republican People's Party (CHP).

== History == It is the site of the ancient Greek city of Phinopolis (Greek: Φινούπολις), which was founded on an existent Thracian settlement. Sarıyer's Bosphorus villages, backed by steep hills, were once rural fishing communities. In the 18th century, palace officials and other people close to the Ottoman sultan started building their yalıs on the coastline. Around this time, wealthy foreign traders of Pera and Galata built summer residences in the area. In the beginning of the 19th century, the embassies, located in Istanbul proper, started acquiring plots of lands to build summer residences. Despite all this development, the villages remained quiet fishing towns up until the 1950s. In the 1950s and 60s, the Sarıyer villages were considered "holiday towns" for the people living in Istanbul. However, since the construction of the coast road, these villages, and increasingly the hillsides behind them, rapidly urbanized. By the 1980s, the coastal areas were full of newly built, expensive apartments, while the hillsides being built up with illegal housing called gecekondu.