Topkapı Palace

Topkapı Palace is a vast palace complex on Seraglio Point in Istanbul, the promontory where the Bosphorus meets the Sea of Marmara beside the mouth of the Golden Horn. Mehmed II began it in 1459, a few years after he captured Constantinople, and for nearly four centuries it was the residence of the Ottoman sultans and the administrative heart of the Ottoman Empire. Since 1924 it has been a museum holding some of the richest collections of the Islamic world.

The hill had long been a seat of power. The acropolis of ancient Byzantion stood here, and some of the palace walls reuse Byzantine fortifications. Archaeologists have found the remains of a fifth-century church, now called the Palace Basilica, and in 2021 a Roman-period gallery near the main gate; the Byzantine church of Hagia Irene survives in the first courtyard, where the Ottomans used it as an arsenal and storehouse.

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 the old Great Palace of the Byzantine emperors lay largely in ruins, and the Ottoman court first settled in a palace near today's Beyazıt Square. Mehmed ordered work on a new residence in 1459, summoning the best craftsmen he could find. The contemporary historian Critobulus dates the core of the building to 1459–1465, though other sources place its completion in the later 1460s. Known at first simply as the New Palace, it received the name Topkapı, "Cannon Gate", much later; sources differ on whether this happened in the eighteenth or the nineteenth century, when the name of a burnt-out seaside palace was transferred to it.

Mehmed fixed the basic plan that later rulers respected: not one monumental building but a sequence of low pavilions, kitchens and halls set around four courtyards, each more private than the last. Visitors passed through the Imperial Gate into a public outer court, then on foot through the Gate of Salutation into the second courtyard, where the Imperial Council of the grand vizier and other ministers met beneath a dome. The sultan could follow their debates unseen from a grilled window above. Beyond the Gate of Felicity lay the inner palace, closed to all without his permission. Mehmed's law code of the 1470s and 1480s laid down the court's ranks and protocol, and silence was kept in the inner courtyards. The kitchens fed about 4,000 people.

Suleiman the Magnificent greatly enlarged the palace between 1520 and 1560 to match the empire's growing power. According to one account, after a fire at the Old Palace in 1541 his consort Hürrem Sultan moved the imperial harem to Topkapı, breaking with Mehmed's rule that women should not live where the state was governed. The harem wing grew into a maze of more than 400 rooms, largely shaped in the late sixteenth century. After a fire in 1574 the architect Mimar Sinan rebuilt the kitchens under Selim II and extended the harem, baths and other quarters. Sinan also built the Privy Chamber for Murad III, which houses relics associated with the Prophet Muhammad, including a mantle and swords. The palace largely reached its present appearance by the end of the sixteenth century. A great fire in 1665 forced much rebuilding, and later sultans added rooms in a Baroque and rococo style influenced by Europe.

After the seventeenth century Topkapı gradually lost its importance. In 1856 Sultan Abdulmejid I moved the court to the new, European-style Dolmabahçe Palace, though Topkapı kept the treasury, library and mint. In the late nineteenth century the railway to Sirkeci station cut through the seaside gardens and destroyed most of the shore pavilions.

After the end of the empire, a government decree of 3 April 1924 turned the palace into a museum, now run by Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Its collections include the treasury with the Spoonmaker's Diamond and the Topkapı Dagger, more than 10,000 pieces of Chinese porcelain, arms and armour, miniatures, manuscripts and the sacred relics. In 1985 the palace became part of the Historic Areas of Istanbul World Heritage Site in Turkey. Its thick walls protected it in the 1999 earthquake, but some experts have criticised the lack of climate-controlled storage and security.