The building's origins are modest and slightly strange. In 1839, an Italian illusionist named Bartolomeo Bosco built a wooden theatre in Ottoman style on a plot of land on İstiklal Avenue owned by the Naum family. Bosco's act — he was a celebrated conjurer known across Europe — was presumably the main attraction. When Bosco left Constantinople, the Naum brothers, Michel and Joseph, of Levantine Catholic background, took ownership of the building, renovated it, and reopened it in 1844 as the Théatre de Péra. The inaugural performance was Vincenzo Bellini's opera Norma. The original wooden structure caught fire in 1846, which was not uncommon in 19th-century Constantinople. A new, permanent theatre was built in its place, opening on 4 November 1848 with Giuseppe Verdi's Macbeth. The following year it was renamed the Théatre Italien Naum.

The Naum Theatre's claim on music history rests partly on one remarkable fact: it hosted a production of Giuseppe Verdi's Il Trovatore before the opera houses of Paris did. Michel and Joseph Naum had secured the sole right to stage many European plays and operas in Istanbul, which meant that troupes and premieres that might otherwise have gone to western European capitals found their way instead to Pera. The brothers also brought something more practical and thoughtful to their programming: they printed the first Ottoman Turkish translations of many operas as booklets, making the performances accessible to audiences who didn't read Italian. They organized daytime matinees specifically for audiences traveling from the Asian side of the Bosphorus, whose ferry schedules made evening performances difficult. Sultans Abdülmecid I and Abdülaziz were frequent attendees. The theatre was, in the words of one contemporary Turkish newspaper headline, what the Palais Garnier was to Paris.

On 5 June 1870, the Fire of Pera swept through the district. The Naum Theatre was badly damaged — severely enough that it never reopened as a performance venue. The ruins sat on İstiklal Avenue for several years before Ottoman Greek banker Hristaki Zoğrafos Efendi purchased the plot. In 1876, Ottoman Greek architect Kleanthis Zannos designed a new building on the same land: the Çiçek Pasajı, the famous flower passage and arcade that still stands today. The transition is almost too neat a metaphor — an opera house consumed by fire, replaced by a passage of flower stalls and restaurants, the grand replaced by the everyday. The Naum Theatre left no building behind, only the address.

Nothing of the original theatre survives. The Çiçek Pasajı that replaced it is now itself a historic landmark, a beloved destination for raki and meze. But the gap in the fabric of Istanbul's performing arts history is real: the city that heard Il Trovatore before Paris no longer has the building where it happened. What remains is the account in Flaubert's letters, the names in the opera booklets, the knowledge that for roughly three decades Pera had a house that could hold its own against anything in Europe. The Naum Theatre is one of those places that is more vivid in its disappearance than it might have been in its survival — a reminder that cities contain enormous histories in the lots where nothing now stands.