Sofa Art & Antiques
Istanbul art and antiques dealer founded in 1976, offering Ottoman calligraphy, jewellery, ceramics, textiles, prints, and collectible objects.
Sofa Art and Antiques is the kind of Istanbul shop that reminds you shopping can still be an education. Founded in 1976, Kashif Sofa has grown into one of the city’s notable dealers in Turkish art and antiques, with a collection that rewards slow looking.
The range is broad: engravings and other printed works, jewellery, glass, gold and silverware, miniatures, calligraphy, tiles, ceramics, mosaics, paintings, reproductions, seals, textiles, embroidery, and needlework. In other words, this is not a souvenir stop unless your idea of a souvenir comes with provenance, patina, and a strong opinion about Ottoman design.
The old Luxa Terra source rightly calls it a treasure box, but the better phrase might be “story box”. Each object carries context: the hand that made it, the room it once lived in, the material culture it belongs to, and the reason it has survived long enough to sit under glass in Istanbul waiting for its next custodian.
As ever with antiques, ask careful questions about age, origin, condition, export rules, and restoration. The right purchase here is not the one that looks expensive fastest; it is the one whose story you understand well enough to carry home. For design-literate travellers, Sofa is a quiet antidote to the bazaar blur: considered, collectible, and wonderfully dangerous for people who said they were “just browsing”.
