The structure on Gedikpaşa Street was erected in 1859, initially for purposes other than theatre. By 1866 it had been converted into a performance venue, inaugurated as one of Istanbul's first modern theatres. The timing mattered enormously: these were the years of the Tanzimat, the decades of Ottoman reform in which the empire looked westward for models of modernisation in law, education, journalism, and the arts. Theatre — Western-style theatre, with written scripts and trained actors and paying audiences in fixed seats — was part of that project.

When the Naum Theatre, which had been the dominant performance space in Istanbul, was destroyed by fire in 1870, the Gedikpaşa stepped into the resulting void and became the city's principal stage. For a decade and more, it was the centre of theatrical life in the Ottoman capital.

The key figure in the Gedikpaşa's transformation into a national theatre was Güllü Agop, an Ottoman Armenian theatre director who had previously worked with the Oriental Theater. Taking the directorship of the Gedikpaşa in 1867, Agop founded a company he called the Ottoman Theatre — and the names became so intertwined that theatre and company were often treated as one.

Agop's achievement was genuine and paradoxical: an Armenian Christian director built the company where Muslim Turkish actors first took the stage. For the first time in the empire's history, Turkish men performed professionally in front of mixed audiences. Women were a different matter — female roles continued to be played by Armenian actresses, since no Muslim Turkish woman appeared onstage until the 1919–1920 season, more than three decades later. The barrier that Agop helped breach for men held firm, for women, until a different era.

Agop left the theatre in 1880, four years before the building's destruction. The reasons for his departure are not fully documented, but his legacy at the Gedikpaşa was already secured.

Where a theatre stands tells you something about who it was built for. The Gedikpaşa was deliberately not in Pera — the neighbourhood across the Golden Horn that was home to European embassies, foreign merchants, and the cosmopolitan non-Muslim elite. Pera had its theatres; they served a specific, largely non-Turkish crowd.

Gedikpaşa sat between Çarşıkapı and Beyazıt, toward the Sea of Marmara — in the heart of the Muslim Turkish residential and commercial city. As one period source observed, this location "demonstrates that the theatres not only attracted minority groups, but that Western style of arts became so popular that theatres were established in even highly populated Muslim neighbourhoods." The theatre was a statement about cultural possibility. It was saying, in its placement, that this art form belonged to Turkish Istanbul as much as to anyone else.

The Gedikpaşa Theatre was destroyed in 1884. Gone, within a year, was the building that had contained eighteen years of Istanbul's theatrical revolution. But the people it had trained scattered rather than disappeared. Many of the actors from the Gedikpaşa went on to form the Ottoman Theatre Company, which dominated Istanbul's theatrical world from 1884 until 1908. That company was succeeded in turn by the Darülbedayi — founded in 1914, later renamed the Istanbul City Theatres in 1934 — which continues to this day.

The line from Gedikpaşa to the Istanbul City Theatres is direct, carried in the training and habits and professional networks of the people who worked in that building. The physical structure is gone. The tradition it established is not. In that sense, the Gedikpaşa Tiyatrosu did not end in 1884. It transformed.