Topkapı Palace

Topkapı Palace was built by Mehmed the Conqueror beginning in 1459, shortly after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, on the tip of the historic Seraglio Point between the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. For nearly 400 years it was the administrative centre of the Ottoman Empire and the primary residence of its sultans, only abandoned in 1853 when the imperial court moved to the European-style Dolmabahçe Palace further up the Bosphorus. The name means 'Cannon Gate' in Turkish, referring to the massive cannon positioned at the entrance during the siege of Constantinople.

The palace is organised as a sequence of four courtyards, each separated by a gate and each representing a progressively more restricted level of access into the imperial world. The first courtyard, entered through the Imperial Gate, was the public administrative zone — merchants, foreign ambassadors and petitioners waited here before being admitted. The second courtyard, through the Gate of Salutation, contained the imperial kitchens, the Treasury building and the chamber of the Divan, where the imperial council met to decide matters of state. The third courtyard, the Inner Palace, housed the School of the Pages, the Library of Ahmet III, and the treasury rooms that held the imperial collection.

The Harem — the section of the palace where the sultan's mother, wives, concubines and children lived — requires a separate ticket and is a separate architectural complex entered from the second courtyard. The architecture moves from the public formality of the outer courtyards into domestic spaces of exceptional intimacy: the marble corridor of the Harem with its geometric marble floors, the Queen Mother's suite with its elaborate tilework and stone latticework, the Imperial Hall where the sultan received visitors in private. The rooms are smaller than the palace's overall scale suggests, and the tilework is consistently beautiful in a way that the exterior does not prepare you for.

The Imperial Treasury occupies its own building at the edge of the second courtyard and holds objects of extraordinary value: the Topkapı Dagger with its diamond-encrusted sheath, the massive emerald tray presented by an Indian ambassador, the throne of Sultan Ahmed III inlaid with tortoiseshell and gold, the third-century BC serpentine column brought from Delphi as a trophy by Constantine. The collection is large enough to require three separate exhibition rooms and rewards an unhurried circuit. The fourth and most restricted courtyard, accessible only to the sultan, held the personal pavilions, the fruit gardens and the Baghdad Pavilion built by Murad IV to commemorate the capture of Baghdad in 1638.

The palace complex covers approximately 700,000 square metres and contains dozens of buildings across its four courtyards. Its collections include the largest single collection of Chinese porcelain in the world — some 10,000 pieces in the imperial kitchens — as well as collections of jewellery, textiles, clocks and Ottoman miniatures. The fourth courtyard pavilions, particularly the Baghdad Pavilion and the Revan Pavilion built to commemorate victories in the Caucasus, are the most elaborately tiled spaces in the entire complex and are well worth the walk through the restricted imperial garden.

Four hundred years of Ottoman imperial life, administration and art collecting are preserved in a single palace complex that is itself a masterwork of Ottoman residential architecture.

The Imperial Treasury contains objects of extraordinary historical and material value, including the Topkapı Dagger and the emerald tray.

The Harem gives the most intimate portrait available of the domestic life of an Ottoman imperial household, with tilework equal in quality to any in Istanbul.