The Istanbul Marathon starts in Asia and finishes in Europe, across the Bosphorus Bridge, a bridge nobody may walk, run on race morning. It is worth getting to. The first thing to get right is the address.
The official site is maraton.istanbul
Search results, older guides and a great many links still point at
istanbulmarathon.org. That domain is no longer the organiser’s. Today it redirects
away from the race entirely, and its HTTPS certificate does not validate, so a modern
browser will refuse to open it and warn you first. Nothing you find at that address is
the organiser’s information.
The organiser’s own site is maraton.istanbul, Turkish by default, with an English
version at ?lang=en. The race is run by Spor İstanbul for the İstanbul metropolitan
municipality.
The date, and the name
Sunday 1 November 2026. The 48th edition.
The title sponsor changed too, so most listings still carry the old name. Results from this race also count toward qualifying for the 2028 World Masters Marathon Championships, for runners aged 40 and over.
Entries closed on 13 October 2026 and the marathon is sold out.
Check the year on any race-day schedule you find
There is a specific trap here. The organiser’s English “Race Day Program” page carried the programme from the 2022 race, start times, wave times, road closures, the lot, verbatim, more than two years later, under a heading that did not say which year it was.
The 2026 programme is on the organiser’s Turkish race-day page, maraton.istanbul/yaris-gunu-programi/,
which names the new 15.5K run, so you know it is this year’s. The 2026 start is 09:00 on the Sunday morning,
on the Asian side of the Bosphorus Bridge: the organiser’s own Turkish 42K page counts its cut-off
table from 09:00 and closes the course at 15:20, six hours and twenty minutes later. Check the edition number on whatever page you are reading.