Hagia Sophia was completed in 537 and remained the largest enclosed space in the world for almost a thousand years. It has served as a cathedral, a mosque, a museum, and a mosque again, and each of those lives left something behind that was never removed. That is what makes the interior unusual. Byzantine mosaics […]

Sogukcesme Street runs between the outer wall of Topkapi Palace and the back of Hagia Sophia, and it is barely two hundred metres long. The wooden houses along it were built in the nineteenth century for palace staff, fell into ruin, and were restored in the 1980s. The result is a street with no traffic, […]

The Basilica Cistern was built in the sixth century to hold water for the Great Palace, and it has been holding it, in one form or another, ever since. Three hundred and thirty-six columns stand in rows under a low brick vault, most of them taken from older Roman buildings, which is why no two […]

Topkapi was the seat of the Ottoman court for nearly four hundred years. It is not a single building but a sequence of courtyards, each one more restricted than the last, so that walking through it means moving from public ground towards the private world of the sultan. The Harem is ticketed separately and worth […]

For four centuries this slope belonged to the palace. Gulhane was the outer garden of Topkapi, a place where the court walked and ordinary Istanbul did not. It became a public park in 1912, and the change is still legible: the wall along its eastern edge is the palace wall. What visitors notice first is […]

Dolmabahce was built between 1843 and 1856, when the court left Topkapi for a palace designed to look European. The scale is the point: 285 rooms, 46 halls, and a ceremonial hall whose chandelier weighs four and a half tonnes. The interior is largely Baroque and Rococo, with fourteen tonnes of gold used on the […]

The Sultan Ahmed Mosque was finished in 1617, after seven years of building, and it was the first mosque in the empire to be given six minarets. The decision caused enough comment at the time that a seventh minaret was added to the Kaaba in Mecca to preserve its precedence. Inside, more than twenty thousand […]

The square in front of the Blue Mosque was the Hippodrome of Constantinople, a chariot-racing arena that held around a hundred thousand spectators. The track is gone, but its shape survives in the outline of the park, and three of its monuments are still standing where they were placed. The Obelisk of Theodosius is the […]

The Istanbul Archaeological Museums stand beside Topkapi Palace and hold more than a million objects, which makes them one of the largest collections of their kind anywhere. The main building opened in 1891 and was the first purpose-built museum in the Ottoman Empire. The Alexander Sarcophagus is the piece people come for: fourth century BC, […]

The tomb of Sultan Ahmed I stands at the northern corner of the Blue Mosque complex, facing the square. He commissioned the mosque and died in 1617, a year after it was completed, aged twenty-seven. Inside, under a single dome, lie the sultan, his wife Kosem, and three of his sons, including Osman II and […]

The Fountain of Ahmed III stands in the open space between Hagia Sophia and the Imperial Gate of Topkapi Palace. It was built in 1728 and marks a deliberate break with earlier Ottoman taste: wide eaves, painted panels, tulip motifs and rounded forms rather than austere stone. The style belongs to the Tulip Period, a […]