Süreyya İlmen wanted something that Kadıköy — the busy, cosmopolitan district on Istanbul's Asian shore — had never had: a proper musical theatre. He engaged Kegham Kavafyan, a skilled Ottoman Armenian architect working in the late period of that tradition, and the result was a building of genuine elegance. The facade carried sculpted decoration; inside, the ceilings and walls were painted with frescos in a style that suited the era's taste for ornate cultural spaces. The problem was that by the time the building opened in 1927, the stage remained incomplete and no provision had been made for artists' dressing rooms. The absence of basic theatrical infrastructure meant that the operettas İlmen had envisioned were simply impossible to perform. The venue opened to plays — legitimate theatre, but not what had been planned — while the stage situation quietly remained unresolved.

The pivot came in 1930, when technical equipment for screening sound films was installed and the building was renamed Süreyya Sineması — Süreyya Cinema. As a cinema, it thrived. Its first manager was Hikmet Nâzım, father of the poet Nâzım Hikmet, whose own fame would far outlast his father's tenure at the box office. For decades, the Süreyya was one of Kadıköy's defining institutions — the kind of neighborhood cinema that people remember the way they remember specific smells or songs. İlmen himself donated the building in 1950 to the Darüşşafaka Cemiyeti, a charitable organization supporting the education of orphaned children in poverty, with the condition that he and his wife receive its revenues during their lifetimes. He died in 1955; his wife Adalet İlmen in 1966. After that, the building belonged entirely to the foundation — and to the question of what it was actually for.

The decision to restore the Süreyya and transform it into the opera house it was always meant to be came with the 2000s. Construction lasted nearly two years and cost approximately 14 million YTL, roughly nine million dollars at the time. Workers restored the frescos on the ceilings and walls, repaired the sculpted facade, and — critically — finally completed the stage infrastructure that had been missing since 1927. On December 14, 2007, the restored Süreyya Opera House opened with a performance of Ahmet Adnan Saygun's oratorio *Yunus Emre* (Opus 26). Saygun had composed the work decades earlier; its premiere at Süreyya carried a particular resonance, a sense of long-deferred things finally arriving. The ballroom on the second floor can accommodate 500 guests. The opera house became home to the Istanbul State Opera and Ballet, with opera and ballet performances staged three days a week.

Kadıköy occupies an unusual position in Istanbul's cultural geography. On the Asian side of the Bosphorus, it has long had the feel of a distinct city within a city — denser, more bohemian in character than many European-side neighborhoods, with a strong local identity and a slightly different pace. The Süreyya fits this context precisely: it is not a grand institutional building aimed at international prestige, but a neighborhood opera house, scaled to its surroundings. Walking along Gen. Asım Gündüz Avenue and encountering the facade, visitors often express surprise at finding something so formally handsome in what feels like an ordinary commercial street. That contrast is part of what makes the building work. It belongs to Kadıköy in a way that a more monumental venue never could, and Kadıköy, in turn, has taken genuine ownership of it.