Our story
Istanbul has a way
of keeping you.
Ali arrived in Sultanahmet in 1997, a few streets from Topkapı Palace, with a travel desk and a city he already knew by heart. He started answering phones, showing people around, making sure every recommendation was somewhere he'd genuinely send his own family. The agency grew quietly — not through advertising, but through guests who came back and brought their friends.
The turn came when Betül — his wife, and someone who had spent twenty years studying Turkish crafts as an academic — asked a simple question: why are we sending our guests to other people's workshops? So they built their own studio. Hired working artists. Wrote a curriculum from scratch. And Turkish Arts was born out of that conversation.
That's the whole story, really. Two people who love Istanbul, love craft, and decided to stop pointing at the map and start making things together.
The people behind it
Ali Şengüler
The one who knows every shortcut.
Ali has been navigating Istanbul professionally since 1997. He knows which taxi drivers to trust, which restaurants don't need a reservation, and where the light falls best on the Bosphorus at dawn. When guests ask for a recommendation, they get his personal answer — not a list pulled from a pamphlet.
He built Şengüler Turizm on a single principle: never send anyone somewhere you wouldn't go yourself. It sounds obvious. Very few agencies actually follow it.
Betül Şengüler
The one who knows every material.
Betül spent two decades inside Turkish arts as an academic before she started teaching them. Ebru, calligraphy, tile painting, miniature — she learned these crafts the slow way, from masters, with real materials. That foundation is what makes the workshops here different from a tourist activity.
She designed the studio's curriculum, chose the artists who teach alongside her, and has a very clear standard for what a session should feel like when it's done well. Guests usually leave having made something they didn't expect to be proud of.
1997
Year the agency opened in Sultanahmet
25+
Years in Istanbul tourism
500+
Five-star reviews across platforms
5.0
Average guest rating, all time
What to expect
Small groups.
Real craft.
No performance.
The studio sits behind the agency office — kilns, marbling trays, brushes, paper, pigments. It's a working space, not a set. The artists who teach here use the same tools every day for their own practice. When you join a session, you're stepping into something real.
We keep groups small on purpose. A workshop with twelve people and one instructor is a different thing entirely from one with four. You actually learn the technique. You make something you made, not something that was guided entirely by someone else's hand.
Lonely Planet and Frommer's wrote about us independently. We didn't reach out to either of them. We mention this not to boast, but because unsolicited coverage is the only kind that means anything — it means guests told people, and people told writers.
The agency behind Turkish Arts
Şengüler Turizm
Turkish Arts grew out of Şengüler Turizm, the licensed travel agency Ali founded here in 1997. The agency handles everything the studio doesn't — airport transfers, multi-day itineraries across Türkiye, private guiding, hotel bookings, visa support.
If you're visiting Istanbul and need someone who has moved ten thousand people through this country without a single complaint, that's who you'll be working with. TÜRSAB licence A-4691.
Visit Şengüler Turizm →Come make
something with us.
A half-day at the studio. Something you made yourself. Istanbul seen a little differently.