The cemetery was founded in 1859, a decade before the railway reached Sirkeci, during the late Tanzimat reform period when Ottoman Istanbul was reorganising many aspects of public life. The establishment of a consolidated Orthodox cemetery in Şişli reflected both the geographic growth of the non-Muslim communities beyond the old city and the administrative rationalisation of burial practices.

Shişli was then a newer district, still developing north of the historic peninsula. The Greek Orthodox community of Constantinople — the Rum, as they were known in Turkish — was at this point substantial, concentrated in districts like Pera, Fener, and Büyükada. The cemetery served as a common ground, in the most literal sense, for a diverse congregation of Orthodox believers who shared a faith and a city but often came from different national and ethnic traditions.

The funerary chapel at the heart of the cemetery is dedicated to the Metamorphosis — the Transfiguration of Our Lord — a feast day of particular significance in the Orthodox liturgical calendar. The chapel was built in 1888 through the philanthropy of the Schilizzi Stephanovik family, whose parents are commemorated in the building's founding inscription. The Schilizzi family was among the prominent Greek merchant families of nineteenth-century Constantinople, whose wealth moved through the banking and trading networks that connected the Ottoman capital to Odessa, Trieste, and London.

Demetrius Stefanovich Schilizzi, who died in 1893 and is buried here, was a member of this family. His grave stands near the chapel his family funded — a physical proximity that makes the philanthropic gesture legible across time. Walk through this cemetery and the institutional history of the Greek community becomes readable in the stone.

Georgios Zariphis, who lived from 1810 to 1884, is one of the most historically significant figures buried here. A Greek Ottoman banker and financier, Zariphis was one of the most influential Galata bankers of the nineteenth century, deeply involved in the Ottoman Empire's debt-raising and the establishment of the Düyun-u Umumiye — the Office of Public Debt — in 1881. His career exemplified the position of prominent Greek merchants and bankers in Constantinople — deeply embedded in Ottoman commercial life, internationally connected, and influential far beyond the boundaries of any single religious community.

The Zariphis grave is a reminder that the Greek Orthodox community of Istanbul was not merely a minority living at the margins of Ottoman society, but an integral part of the city's economic and intellectual life. The demographic contraction of the twentieth century — shaped by the 1923 population exchange, the 1942 capital levy, and the 1955 Istanbul pogrom — dramatically reduced the Greek community of the city. Those events make a cemetery like this more significant as a record, not less.

Anastasia Georgiadou, who lived from 1891 to 1939, was a singer known by the stage name Deniz Kızı Eftalya — 'Eftalya the Mermaid.' She was celebrated in the early recording era of Turkish and Greek popular music, and her voice documented a moment when the musical cultures of Constantinople's communities were genuinely intertwined, before the political separations of the mid-century pulled them apart. She is buried here.

Eleni Fotiadou, who lived from 1921 to 2001 and worked under the surname Küreman, was a photojournalist whose career spanned the turbulent middle decades of the twentieth century. Her photographs recorded Turkish public life from the inside. The presence of these two women in this ground — a singer from the era of acoustic recording, a photojournalist from the era of the 35mm camera — traces a particular arc of cultural participation and belonging.

The Şişli Greek Orthodox Cemetery still receives the dead of Istanbul's Orthodox communities, though the communities themselves are smaller now than at any point in the city's modern history. The Greek population of Istanbul, which numbered in the tens of thousands in the early twentieth century, has contracted to a few thousand in the early twenty-first. The Russian, Serbian, and Bulgarian communities have their own trajectories. Yet three or four burials take place here each week, and the grounds are maintained with evident care.

To visit is to move through 165 years of a city's religious and cultural life, layered in stone. The chapel of the Metamorphosis stands at the centre. The graves extend in rows that reflect the long sweep of Ottoman and Republican Istanbul. Across the road, the Cevahir Mall rises with its glass facades. The coexistence is not ironic — it is simply Istanbul, where the ancient and the contemporary have always occupied the same block.