An Unusual Place to Stay--Bar None

ISTANBUL — Some hotels are so wonderful you just never want to leave. But for guests in the old days of Istanbul’s latest luxury establishment, checking out wasn’t an option. The building was the city’s central jail.

A few iron bars, in fact, still decorate some outside windows at the Four Seasons Hotel Istanbul, which opened last week. But the cells are just a memory, with little more than their pointed arch windows surviving the interior’s redesign into 65 sumptuous rooms.

Glassed-in restaurants rise from the jail’s former exercise yard. The 19th century neoclassical facade has a fresh coat of ochre paint. Thick pile carpets silence the corridors.

Having a hotel associated with a jail initially made the hotel’s management somewhat nervous, given reports of human rights abuses in Turkey’s prisons. The building functioned as a jail until 1980. But now, manager Marcus Bekhit, 47, makes a point of showing off a marble pillar where a prisoner scratched his name, “Niyazi the Chauffeur, 1935.”

The hotel is in the Sultanahmet tourist center. Room rates begin at $195 plus value-added tax for a single-occupancy room and $225 for a double. Reservations: (800) 332-3442.