Topkapı Palace & the Harem

A city inside a wall

Topkapı is not one building but a walled town of gates, courtyards, kitchens, barracks and pavilions on the first hill of Istanbul, where Byzantion's acropolis stood. Mehmed II began it in the 1460s, a few years after taking the city, and the Imperial Gate carries the date 1478. Sultans lived and ruled here until Abdülmecid moved to Dolmabahçe in 1856.

The plan is a sequence. Each of four courts is more private than the last, and each gate marks a line that fewer people were allowed to cross. Read the palace that way and the layout, which looks random, makes sense.

First court: the public

Anyone could enter the first court through the Imperial Gate, which opened after morning prayers and closed after the evening call. This was the service zone: bakeries, the mint, the infirmary, storehouses and the church of Hagia Eirene, which the Ottomans kept as an armory rather than converting it. The court was also where crowds gathered for processions and where the janissaries drew their pay.

Hagia Eirene predates Hagia Sophia and is the only Byzantine church in the city never turned into a mosque. It is now open as a museum and concert hall. The palace's own church aside, the older story of the site belongs to the Byzantine centuries.

Second court: the state

The Gate of Salutation, with its two pointed towers, is where the museum ticket is checked today and where every visitor except the sultan once dismounted. Its iron doors are signed by the smith Giyas bin Mehmed and dated 1524. Beyond it, the second court was the stage for the empire's business.

On the left, under a small tower, the Imperial Council met four times a week. The sultan did not sit with his viziers; he listened, when he chose to, from a grilled window above them. On the right, the palace kitchens ran the length of the court under a row of chimneys, feeding four to five thousand people a day and up to ten thousand on festivals.

The kitchens now hold the porcelain. The palace owns about 10,700 pieces of Chinese ware, from the Song and Yuan dynasties through the Ming to the Qing, plus a smaller Japanese group, the largest such collection outside China and Taiwan. Chinese celadon was prized at court partly because it was believed to change color if food was poisoned; the blue-and-white came in bulk with Selim I's campaigns to Tabriz in 1514 and Egypt in 1517.

The Harem

The Harem opens off the second court and is the best reason to visit. The word means "forbidden" and the complex was exactly that: about 300 rooms where the sultan's mother, wives, concubines, children and the eunuchs who guarded them lived. It was the only part of the palace where the sultan slept.

The head of the Harem was the Valide Sultan, the sultan's mother, not any wife. Below her, a hierarchy of women ran the household: the treasurer, the keeper of the pantry, the instructors who taught music, calligraphy, embroidery and court manners. Girls arrived young, mostly from the Caucasus after the sixteenth century, and were trained for years before any question of the sultan's attention arose.

The system was a school as much as anything else. A concubine who never caught the sultan's eye could leave after about nine years with a dowry and an arranged marriage to an official. One who bore a son became a haseki or, later, a kadın.

If that son became sultan she became Valide and, for a few reigns in the seventeenth century, the effective ruler of the empire. From Bayezid II onward, sultans stopped marrying foreign princesses at all; the dynasty reproduced itself through the Harem.

The visitor route runs from the eunuchs' quarters through the Valide's apartments to the Imperial Hall, the tiled Privy Chamber of Murad III by Sinan, and the so-called Cage, the rooms where princes were kept after the practice of fratricide ended around 1600.

Third court: the sultan's household

The Gate of Felicity leads to the Enderun, the inner school and residence. Directly inside is the Audience Chamber, where the sultan received ambassadors and viziers on a throne under a canopy. Around the court lived the pages, boys recruited from Christian families and educated here for careers as governors and generals.

The court holds the collections. The Treasury, in the pavilion Mehmed II built, shows the Topkapı Dagger with its three emeralds, the 86-carat Spoonmaker's Diamond, the throne sent by Nadir Shah, the Byzantine reliquary with the skull of John the Baptist and the sword attributed to Osman, founder of the dynasty.

Across the court, the Privy Chamber holds the Sacred Relics that Selim I brought from Cairo in 1517 with the caliphate: the Prophet's mantle, a letter in his name, swords of the early caliphs and the keys to the Kaaba. Forty guards once watched these rooms, and a reader recites the Quran continuously during opening hours.

Kaftans and textiles

The costume collection is the most direct contact you will have with the sultans themselves. Kaftans were stored under each sultan's name after his death, so the museum can date them reign by reign from Mehmed II onward. The best are sixteenth century: heavy silks and brocades woven in Bursa and Istanbul, patterned with crescents, tulips or the three-dot çintemani motif, often in a scale no European court would have dared.

Bursa cloth was an export. Popes wore vestments cut from Ottoman brocade, embroidered with crosses after purchase in Venice, and examples survive in the Hermitage and in monasteries across Europe. Children's kaftans, turbans, embroidered talismanic shirts covered in Quranic text and prayer rugs fill out the display.

Fourth court: the gardens

The last court is a terrace of pavilions and pools rather than a courtyard. The Revan Kiosk of 1636 and the Baghdad Kiosk of 1639 were built to celebrate Murad IV's campaigns and are the finest tiled rooms in the palace. Between them, the gilded canopy of the İftariye is where the sultan broke his Ramadan fast at sunset, looking over the Golden Horn.

The Circumcision Room, rebuilt under Sultan İbrahim in 1641, reuses sixteenth-century İznik panels on its facade. Below the terrace, the tulip gardens run down toward the sea walls and the Marmara. On a clear day this terrace is the best free view in the old city.

How to visit

Closed Tuesdays. Arrive at 9 a.m. and go straight to the Harem, then work backward through the third court before the tour groups reach it.

The palace ticket and the Harem ticket are separate, and half a day is realistic; an afternoon on its own is not enough for the Harem and the Treasury both.

The kitchens are worth thirty minutes on your way out, and not only for the porcelain. The scale of them explains a good deal about Turkish cuisine, which took its shape in these rooms: the palace ran separate kitchens for sweets and for helva, and the baklava procession to the janissaries once began here. Hacı Bekir, confectioner to the court from 1777, supplied the palace with lokum and still trades in Eminönü.

The tiles in the Harem and the kiosks came from İznik, covered on the Inner Anatolia sheet, and the kaftan silks from Bursa. For the dynasty behind the palace, see the history of Anatolia.

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