When Sultan Mehmet II took Constantinople in 1453, the city was partly depopulated — years of siege and decline had emptied many of its quarters. The new Ottoman administration repopulated the city deliberately, directing different communities to different neighborhoods. In 1458, Armenians were settled in Samatya by Mehmet II's order, bringing with them the institutions that would define the quarter for the next five centuries. The church of Surp Kevork — Saint George in Armenian — became the community's anchor. The building had previously served as an Eastern Orthodox church, with roots stretching back before the Ottoman conquest, and the Armenians inherited both its stones and its centuries. The church is also known by the name Sulu Manastırı, the Water's Monastery, a name that ties it to the sea and to the springs that once made this sandy shore distinctive.

Samatya was not exclusively Armenian. The Greek Orthodox community also had a presence here, and the quarter's layered identity — Byzantine, Armenian, Greek, Ottoman — is reflected in its churches and institutions. That layering was built over centuries of coexistence that was sometimes peaceful and sometimes tense, shaped by larger political events that the residents of Samatya did not control. The quarter was destroyed in 1782 by one of the largest fires in Istanbul's recorded history, a catastrophe that periodically reshaped many of the city's older neighborhoods. Communities rebuilt. Churches were repaired or replaced. The sandy shore kept its character even as the population's composition shifted with each generation and each political turn.

Samatya produced people whose work extended far beyond the quarter's boundaries. Hrachia Acharian, the Armenian linguist whose etymological dictionary of the Armenian language remains a foundational scholarly work, was born here. So was Avedis Zildjian III, whose family name became synonymous with cymbals — the Zildjian company, founded in Constantinople in 1623, eventually became the oldest continuously operating family-owned business in the United States after relocating there in the 1920s. Gomidas Keumurdjian, a priest of the Armenian Catholic Church who was martyred for his faith, also came from Samatya. These are not incidental details. They are the record of what a community makes when it is given space to exist — artists, scholars, craftspeople, martyrs.

The quarter still sits along the Marmara shore in the Fatih district, west of the old city center and east of the Yedikule Fortress, the Castle of the Seven Towers that guards the land walls. A tram stop on the T6 line, named Kocamustafapaşa after the wider neighborhood, connects Samatya to Sirkeci and the rest of the city. The Istanbul Educational and Research Hospital serves the area. The Armenian and Greek Orthodox communities that shaped Samatya's centuries are smaller now than they once were — Istanbul's non-Muslim minorities declined sharply during the twentieth century due to emigration, discriminatory policies, and political pressures. What remains is a neighborhood that holds its past carefully, in church stones and street names and the occasional older building whose proportions speak of a different era.