The story behind the Zülfaris Synagogue begins not in Istanbul but in Spain. On 31 July 1492 — just three days before Columbus sailed west — the deadline expired for Jews to leave the Iberian peninsula under the Alhambra Decree signed by Ferdinand and Isabella. More than 150,000 people were expelled, many from communities that had been in Spain for centuries. Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire responded by welcoming them. He sent the Ottoman Navy under Admiral Kemal Reis to Spain to help evacuate refugees, and issued orders to provincial governors to receive the newcomers under penalty of death. His reported comment on Ferdinand's decision was sharp: you have impoverished your own country and enriched mine. The refugees came in enormous numbers, settling first in Salonica and then throughout the empire, including in Constantinople's Galata district. Within a single year of their arrival, in 1493, Sephardic Jews established the first printing press in the Ottoman Empire. The community that found shelter in the sultan's domains did not arrive empty-handed.

The Galata district had housed Jewish traders before the Sephardic arrival — through the Byzantine period and the Genoese colonial era that preceded Ottoman rule. The Zülfaris Synagogue stands on foundations that likely date from those earlier layers, and the first documentary evidence of a synagogue on this site dates to 1671. What stands today is the structure rebuilt in 1823, opened on 31 October of that year. Over the following decades the congregation maintained and renovated it: the marble frame of the Ehal — the Torah Ark — was donated by Samuel Malki in 1882, and the Camondo family, a prominent Sephardic banking dynasty based in Galata, financed major renovations in 1890. The synagogue's octagonal main hall, its women's balcony, and its carved wooden details accumulated layers of use and memory through generations of prayer, celebration, and mourning. The last wedding held within its walls was in 1983. Regular services ended in 1985, and in 1992 the building was allocated to the Quincentennial Foundation.

In 1989, 113 Turkish citizens — Jews and Muslims together — founded the Quincentennial Foundation to mark the approaching 500th anniversary of the Ottoman welcome of the Sephardic refugees. The foundation's museum, the Quincentennial Foundation Museum of Turkish Jews, opened in the Zülfaris building on 25 November 2001. Its scope was generous: not only the story of 1492 and after, but 2,600 years of Jewish life in Anatolia, stretching back to ancient settlements in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE. Among its holdings: a prayer book printed in 1512, among the earliest Sephardic printed works in the Ottoman Empire; an 1842 imperial decree (ferman) by Sultan Abdülmecid explicitly denying blood libel accusations against Jews; marriage documents, tallits, maps, letters, and recordings in Ladino — the Judeo-Spanish language the Sephardim carried from Spain and maintained for five centuries in Ottoman lands. In 2015, the museum relocated to the Neve Shalom Synagogue nearby, with expanded and updated exhibits. The Zülfaris building has hosted occasional exhibitions since then. Istanbul's Jewish community today numbers approximately 17,000 people — a fraction of the Ottoman-era peak, but a continuous presence spanning more than half a millennium.

The physical building is stone, Ottoman in character, with a plain exterior that gives little away from the street. Inside, the octagonal main hall rises to a central space that once served 500 years of weekly Shabbat prayers. The Ehal with its 1882 marble frame holds two Torah scrolls. A courtyard sculpture, The Soaring Flame by artist Nadia Arditti, memorializes Turkish Jews who died in the First World War and the Turkish War of Independence — soldiers who fought under different flags but whose descendants ended up in this same community. The name Zülfaris derives from Persian, the prestige language of the Ottoman court, which borrowed it from the same Persian tradition that gave rise to so much Ottoman poetry. Bridal curls. The fringe of a bride. That a synagogue in a trading district of Constantinople should bear a name this lyrical is not surprising once you understand the Sephardic tradition of naming places with care, in multiple languages, across a multilingual empire. The street still bears its matching Turkish name. The building is still there.