The Istanbul Marathon is the one marathon in the world that crosses a continental boundary on foot, and the Bosphorus bridge is closed to pedestrians on every other day of the year. 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: it is the Türkiye İş Bankası İstanbul Marathon now, not the N Kolay one that most listings are still named after. The World Masters Marathon Championships is being hosted alongside it.
If you are entering through the race’s charity partner, TEGV, its own 2026 page gives an entry deadline of 13 October 2026.
Do not trust an English race-day schedule you find for this race
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 does not appear to have been published yet. At the same point in the calendar last year the Turkish race-day page said, in so many words, that it would be announced later. That is the ordinary position for this race eight weeks out.
So: a start time you find for Istanbul today is almost certainly the 2022 one. Wait for the organiser to publish, and check the edition number on whatever page you are reading.