MANZARA Istanbul started 15 years ago with 7 apartments. At that time, the company was the only agency renting apartments to travelers in the Galata district. Istanbul was booming and the idea of living in architecturally designed apartments in authentic houses, door to door with locals, was very popular.
The story started about 9 years earlier when Erdogan Altindis bought the first apartment (Bosporus) and started commuting between Istanbul and Munich. Soon word had spread about the fantastic views to be discovered. So about 5 years later, rather casually, the idea of founding an agency for renting vacation apartments was born. Under the name “over the roofs of Istanbul”, guests could already rent the first apartments. AirBnb was still a long way off at that point.
With the official start of MANZARA Istanbul, on 15.10.2006, the togetherness of Erdogan and Gabi also began. Consequently, this date also has a very special meaning for the two of them. Gabi jumped right in, because Istanbul offered plenty of new opportunities. Thus the success story, which follows the well-known saying “Start like a Turk, finish like a German”, took its course. The two complement and support each other perfectly! They really got going and the demand was so great that MANZARA Istanbul had about 50 apartments in its portfolio at the beginning of 2015, more than 30,000 guests have been welcomed by the MANZARA Istanbul team in the last 15 years.
As a German-Turkish architect couple, Gabi and Erdogan, already from the beginning, have pursued their visions with full passion:
- Creating spaces that offer guests the possibility to perceive their senses in a new way and to strengthen their needs and awareness.
- To create a dialogue between cultures that shows everyone how exciting other ways of life, customs and traditions are.

Every encounter with another way of life allows us to gain multi-layered, new insights, and at the same time we feel where our own roots are. Ultimately, respect, tolerance and self-confidence can grow in this way. This is more important today than ever before…
Also since the beginning of the crisis times, they want to make visible again the other picture of Turkey: to show beautiful, positive and common perspectives. Much of this seems to have obviously already disappeared from the minds of people in Europe. The pool from which the two networkers may draw is immeasurably diverse and large. Everyone can continue to be excited…