For nearly two centuries, from 1273 to 1453, the district of Galata on the northern shore of the Golden Horn was a Genoese colony. The Republic of Genoa had negotiated trading rights with the Byzantine Empire and established what amounted to a city-within-a-city: walled, governed by its own officials, and economically powerful. The Genoese dominated the trade routes through the Bosphorus, levying tolls on goods moving between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

At the centre of this colonial administration stood the Palace of the Podestà — the Podestà being the Genoese governor appointed to rule Galata. Built in 1314, the palace was the town hall, the court, and the symbol of Genoese authority in one building. Its construction date places it in the early decades of the colony's peak prosperity. One year after it was built, a fire damaged it; the following year it was repaired and resumed its function. That kind of resilience — damaged and quickly restored — would characterise the building's entire existence.

The Genoese Palace is most often photographed with the Galata Tower visible behind it. The tower, built by the Genoese in 1348 — thirty-four years after the palace — is one of Istanbul's most recognised landmarks, its conical cap visible from across the city. Together, the palace and the tower were the two most prominent Genoese structures in Galata, the administrative and defensive anchors of the colony.

The tower has been maintained, restored, and turned into a tourist attraction. The palace has not. This divergence — between the monument that became iconic and the one that became a problem to solve — tells you something about how cities decide what to preserve and what to let deteriorate. The Galata Tower draws crowds. The Genoese Palace draws attention mainly when someone steals from it or puts it up for sale.

The building's appearance remained essentially unchanged from its 14th-century construction until 1880, when the front facade — the southern face on Bankalar Caddesi, looking toward the Golden Horn — was demolished. The reason was straightforwardly utilitarian: a tramway line was being laid along the street, and about two-thirds of the building, including its main public face, was removed to make room.

What survived was the rear portion, facing Kart Çınar Street. This fragment, stripped of its grand facade, became known in the 20th century as the Bereket Han office building. The medieval palace was absorbed into the commercial fabric of a modernising city, its origins visible mainly to those who knew to look for them. For decades it functioned as a mundane office building, its extraordinary age mostly unremarked by the people who passed through it each day.

In 2021, the Genoese coat-of-arms of Luchino De Fazio — a carved heraldic emblem on the surviving rear facade — was stolen. The loss of such a specific, identifiable object from a structure this old is not merely vandalism; it is the erasure of a particular piece of evidence about who built this place and when. Luchino De Fazio was one of the Genoese Podestàs who governed Galata; his arms on the wall were a signature, a record carved in stone.

In 2022, the building was put up for sale at a reported price of 7 million dollars, following years of neglect. A medieval palace, survivor of the Genoese colonial era, the Byzantine-Ottoman transition, centuries of Istanbul's growth, and a 19th-century demolition for a tram — now listed on the property market. Whatever becomes of it will be the next chapter in a very long story.