But over the last decade or so, interest in Buyukada has revived. A number of old Istanbul families are returning to their summer houses, well-heeled investors are renovating old properties, and a handful of academics, artists, writers and foreigners (like my host) have come here to retreat from modernity, setting up stakes in Arcadia. The place is a time capsule, an hour by sea and a hundred years in time from the bustling Bosporus.

I didn’t hesitate to accept the party invitation, and so it was that I got my first glimpse of Buyukada on a blue-skied summer morning from the deck of a ferry that a friend and I caught at Istanbul’s Kabatas ferry dock. On the horizon, a cream-and-turquoise terminal rose, domed, with pillared archways. Soon we were proceeding through those arches along with throngs of day-trippers who bought wildflower coronets from vendors and sauntered off in their daisy chain headdresses up a street that led to a clock tower ruffled with bougainvillea. Nearly all the island’s shops, restaurants and hotels are clustered there, at Buyukada’s northern tip. As we strolled, faytons hurried past, bearing women in headscarves, the drivers chirruping, the horses whinnying. Eventually we found ourselves on Recep Koc, the colorful market street, and shopped for our evening’s costumes. For my friend; a bunch of bananas (Fruit); for me a garland of orange roses (Flowers). Hailing a carriage to the party, trailing flora, we fell under the spell of this fairytale island. That was when I knew I would come back: Buyukada deserved a second look, and a deeper exploration.

And so, this spring, I returned. My party host, Owen Matthews, agreed to show me the island’s attractions, along with his tireless sons, Ted and Nikita, ages 5 and 8, and their brisk little dogs. Our plan was to explore Buyukada in a convoy of bicycles, with a dog or two as mascot. On Owen’s recommendation, I stayed two blocks from the clock tower, at an Art Nouveau-flavored wedding cake of a hotel called the Splendid Palas. Built in 1908, the hotel is double-domed, white as icing and grandly down-at-heel, with four tiers of balconied rooms and creaky crimson shutters. Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII once stayed there, and when I ascended the marble staircase and entered the entry hall, I almost expected to see the Duke and Duchess appear in the hotel’s fountained atrium, dancing a ghostly tango. In Istanbul proper, I had stayed at hotels that looked out on stirring monuments of antiquity, like the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sofia. But on Buyukada, the hotel itself exhaled the mystery of another age. So did the street below where a queue of buggies — green, yellow, pink and candy red — waited for passengers. With their wicker seats and fringed tops they looked like Easter baskets on wheels.

Soon, Owen, Ted and dog, Martha, appeared on the terrace, and off we went to fortify ourselves with lunch. We had to walk only a couple of blocks to the restaurant, but the walk reminded me of the 19th-century panoramas you might stroll past in a museum exhibition. Wisteria tickled our heads as we edged alongside konaks with buttressed terraces, carved moldings and louvered shutters. Some had been gleamingly restored. Others were frail, stripped of paint, their sagging wooden bones laid bare, shutters hanging by one nail. They leaned against overgrown trees like exhausted brown pelicans. To me those derelict buildings breathed the romance of history, whispering, the present decays; the past remains. It was a whisper I would hear often over the next few days. Somehow, it suited my goal as a traveler: to be shaken from my routine, to discover new pleasures in an unfamiliar context. On my first trip, Buyukada had tantalized me with that promise. Now, on longer acquaintance, it intoxicated me, enveloping me in the extraordinary life of a place whose everyday reality differed so delectably from my own.

Ted had chosen an outdoor restaurant called Ucler Tasfirin, facing the wharf building, and as we took our seats, I watched new arrivals make their way up from the ferry, pausing to treat themselves to hot, crunchy glazed doughnuts (lokma) or Turkish dondurma ice cream, which has an almost taffy-like consistency. We ordered pide — the Turkish version of pizza, shaped like a flattened canoe, stuffed with spicy crumbled sausage, cheese, green pepper and tomato — and lahmacun, which is like a Turkish tostada, a flat, crispy circle of baked dough dotted with ground beef. Ted showed me how to sprinkle the lahmacun with shredded lettuce, roll it up, and eat it in crunching mouthfuls, and then he lapped up his dessert, “sutlac” rice pudding, slightly scorched (a Turkish favorite). As Martha lobbied at our feet for scraps, schoolgirls in headscarves and trench coats whizzed by on bikes at breakneck pace, as if they’d fallen behind on a sightseer’s Tour de France. I felt as if we had fallen into the Tintin cartoon “King Ottokar’s Sceptre,” in which the boy hero visits an “enchanting region” whose fezzed and kerchiefed inhabitants keep up old customs.