The Institute of Pharmaceutical Botany and the scientific botanical garden were established in the neighbourhood of Fatih, above the Galata Bridge, in historic Stambul in the 1930s. This was carried out at the suggestion of the botanist Alfred Heilbronn (born 28 May 1885), whose authorisation to teach at the University of Münster was withdrawn in 1933 for ‘racial’ reasons. That same year Heilbronn was invited to take up a post as professor of pharmaceutical botany and genetics in Istanbul through the agency of the refugee organisation “Notgemeinschaft deutscher Wissenschaftler im Ausland” (Emergency Association of German Scientists) (Ludwig 2014; Raß [2014], 6). Shortly after his arrival, Heilbronn managed to convince the ministry of education of the necessity for a botanical garden, and the foundations of the Alfred Heilbronn Botanik Bahçesi were laid in 1935.

The Alfred Heilbronn Botanical Garden was created on a site with a constantly-changing history. During the Ottoman Empire it was occupied by the Ağakapısı, the headquarters of the leader (Ağa) of the Janissary Corps, the elite infantry unit of the Ottoman Sultan. The premises later housed the Bab-I Meşihat, the office of the Shaykh al-Islam, the administrative head of the ulema (organisation of religious scholars). After the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the Istanbul Girls High School was established on the same site, together with the Istanbul Muftiate, then a religious office without political power responsible for the city’s religious institutions, such as mosques, churches and synagogues. It was destroyed in a fire in 1926 (Aladağ/Aslan 2018). The site then remained undeveloped for almost a decade before the decision was made to establish the botanical garden. The garden offered views of the Galata Bridge and the Golden Horn and the pathways through it were arranged to make the most of these uplifting views. The Botanical Institute with its horizontal structure was designed by the Swiss-Austrian architect Ernst Egli in 1935/36 (Nicolai 1998, 32). A professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts, he designed a number of buildings in Ankara and Istanbul from 1927, including the Ragip Devres villa in Bebek. Heilbronn was responsible for the artistic and technical installation of the garden, helped design the greenhouses, planned the heating and cooling system, and arranged for a garden inspector from Germany to take personal charge of the garden (Namal et al. 2011, 197).

In the first edition of the Istanbul University Botanical Garden’s first seed catalogue in 1936, Heilbronn presented its request for plant seeds in four languages (Aladağ/Aslan 2018).  This was the beginning of a worldwide exchange with other botanical gardens who sent their plant seeds to Istanbul. Eventually, as many as 3,000 plant species were able to be planted in the terraced area.

With its wide diversity of plants, the botanical garden not only provided the public with an accessible refuge from the noise of the city, it was also a place of remembrance for the community of German emigrés to Istanbul. In 1946 Alfred Heilbronn was naturalised as a Turkish citizen. He returned to Münster in 1956, where he taught as a professor emeritus at the university. Just one year later, in 1957, the architecture of the Botanical Institute was radically changed during the prime ministership of Adnan Menderes. Arguing that the institute disturbed the silhouette of the nearby Süleymaniye Mosque, the upper two floors of the four-storey building were demolished – leaving only a torso (Nicolai 1998, 199).
Alfred Heilbronn died on 17 March 1961, at the age of 76, and for many years the Alfred Heilbronn Botanical Garden kept his memory alive as a legacy of the botanist in his city of exile.

Since 2015, when the Istanbul Muftiade laid claim to the property, the existence of the garden has been under threat. The Institute of Pharmaceutical Botany moved out of Egli’s building in 2018, and since 2019 it has been undergoing a process of deconstruction, as has the scientific botanical garden.

The Garden of (not) Forgetting artistic research project carried out by Dilşad Aladağ and Eda Aslan (2017–) is dedicated to the remaining traces of the Botanical Garden in the memory of the city of Istanbul. Aladağ and Aslan collected plants they found lying on the ground in the garden, made scans, compiled Botanical Institute seed catalogues (1934–2002) and devoted themselves to the political history of the botanical garden and the ground on which it was established. This entry also benefits from their outstanding research.