In the autumn of 2008, Istanbul’s Sakıp Sabancı Museum opened “Salvador Dalí: A Surrealist in Istanbul.” The museum’s own record dates the exhibition from September 20, 2008, to February 1, 2009. It was a large retrospective bringing together roughly 270 paintings, drawings, prints and documentary materials from the Dalí Foundation’s collection.\n\nVisitors formed a physical, ordered line outside the venue. A contemporary account describes people joining the queue early in the morning, while a photograph dated November 15, 2008, records a queue at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum specifically for the Dalí exhibition. Contemporary reporting put attendance at 156,720 in roughly the first three months, and the run was extended in response to demand.\n\nThe people were not waiting for a generic “popular museum.” They were waiting to enter a particular temporary exhibition installed in a former mansion overlooking the Bosphorus—an unusually large presentation of Dalí’s work outside Spain. The exhibition’s scarcity and the capacity of the museum turned cultural interest into a visible order of arrival. This account separates official dates and object counts from the independent contemporary evidence that shows the line itself.