Wednesday 13 May 2026 – Today was our final day of the trip, and the main part of it was spent exploring the Topkapı Palace, which was the Sultans’ main residence and centre of administration of the Ottoman Empire from the 1460s until the 1853 completion of the Dolmabahçe Palace. In Turkish, it’s called a “Sarayi”, meaning “castle” or “palace”, which made its way into Italian as “seraglio”, which is specifically the women’s apartments in a palace – the harem. Much more on this topic later, as that was the most educational part of the day.

We started the day, though, looking at a lump of porphyry. Not just any old lump, though; this was the Column of Constantine, a monumental column; the use of purple porphyry was part practical, as it was the hardest stone known at the time, and part symbolic, as purple was the Imperial colour.

Through this column, the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great gave his name to the city. The column was completed in around 328AD, towards the end of his reign, and is the oldest Constantinian monument to survive in Istanbul. It stood in the centre of the Forum of Constantine, marking the centre of the city, and was a central point along the Mese, the main ceremonial road through the city. It marks the boundary between the old Byzantium city to the east and the new Constantinople city to the west.

The column is constructed from drums of porphyry – cylinders, hollowed out to reduce the overall weight – which were initially cemented together with decorative bronze sculptured laurel wreaths (later nicked by Crusaders) so that you couldn’t see the joins; its structure was then reinforced with iron hoops by the Ottomans in the early 16th century, and it’s unsurprisingly had various renovations over the centuries since. Initially a bronze statue stood on the top; opinions are divided about it, but it was likely a bronze statue of Constantine, probably nude, possibly in the guise of Apollo, which lasted until the early 12th century when a gale knocked it off. Its replacement, a cross, lasted until an earthquake unseated it, since when the top has been unadorned.

The Mese, by the way, now has trams running along it.

We walked down the Mese towards the palace, past The Pudding Shop, popular in the 1960s as a meeting place for beatniks and, later on, travellers on overland routes between Europe and India, Nepal, and elsewhere in Asia: the “hippie trail”.

Among the restaurant’s variety of well-known dishes and desserts was tavuk göğsü, made from pounded chicken breast, rice flour, milk and sugar, and topped with cinnamon. The restaurant still apparently offers this dish, catering to customers with appetites for traditional Turkish cuisine.

The walk took us past a decent view of the Blue Mosque,

which is the unofficial name for the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, and also past the Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamam, a historic Ottoman-era bathhouse, commissioned by Haseki Hürrem Sultan (the wife of Suleiman the Magnificent); another design by imperial architect Mimar Sinan which was completed in 1556.

The Topkapı Palace, as befits a grand place, has a grand entrance.

Just outside it is another grand construction.

Grand as it is, it is actually “just” a drinking water fountain, ordered by Sultan Ahmed III, and built in 1728. It allegedly still provides drinking water today, though I’m not sure I would want to test out its potability. It’s something of a symbol of Ahmed’s reign – very elaborate and costly. Although he left the finances of the Ottoman Empire in good order, he became unpopular because of the excessive pomp and luxury in which he and his officers indulged themselves. Ahmed III was not one to do things by halves; I read that he had at least 21 consorts, 21 sons and 36 daughters – Seçkin said that he had as many as 103 children. In the end, he was deposed and died after six years’ confinement in the Palace.

The Palace has four courtyards. Crossing the first one, we walked past Hagia Eirene,

to which we would pay a disappointingly brief visit later, as we exited the palace. I had been looking forward to seeing inside it, as it is the oldest known church structure in the city and one that was never converted into a mosque. See later for how that went.

In the interim, we went through another grand entry to the second courtyard, a substantial portal

with a decorative ceiling in the arch.

In this courtyard we could see the back side of the kitchens

which were, as usual, on the seaward side of the palace; this was a way of demonstrating to sailing vessels that there was life in the palace. Also in this courtyard were the hall that was used as the main government assembly

and several parrots

which have their home at the palace.

There’s yet another imposing portal into the third courtyard.

The entry is flanked by a couple of guards in traditional costumes.

It required much patience on my part to get these photos, as there were hordes of punters perpetually trotting in to get bloody selfies of themselves standing or seated next to these guys who, to their credit, never rolled their eyeballs once. I can’t say the same of myself.

The third courtyard

has many very decorative buildings, such as the Sultan’s Library – another lavish construction by Ahmed III,

some lovely cloister-style passages,

and some significant chambers: the treasury, which a few of our group joined the queue to visit; and one for “holy relics”

to enter which the ladies must cover their hair, as it is a religious site.  It contains, according to the board outside, “numerous key items such as Prophet Muhammad’s (p.b.u.h.) sacred mantel and beard hairs, also fragments of His teeth broken during the Battle of Uhud, His swords, bow, seal, and foot imprint, plus letters by Him inviting presidents of various countries to accept Islam and His sacred standard”; and the Sultan’s chambers

including his throne.

The courtyard leads to terraces offering views over the Bosporus and the Golden Horn, too; but you’ve seen those views already, so I don’t feel the need to show them here.

Going back through into the second courtyard, we visited the Government Assembly (“Divan”) building

with its stylish door and windows

 

and then went on to explore something that I thought might be rather dull, and Jane definitely wanted to see, but which actually turned out to be fascinating and a great deal different from either of our expectations: the harem.

Many ignorant westerners, such as myself, have completely the wrong image in their minds about harems, formed, I suspect, from watching Hollywood epics and the like – perhaps a room filled with desirable ladies decorously draping themselves around on, well, ottomans and the like, waiting for some fortunate male to wander in so that they could all have some fun together.

It is absolutely not that.

For a start, the word “harem” is derived from the Arabic harim or haram, which connotes the sacred and forbidden. The term further emphasizes that only women household members, and some related male family members, were able to enter.

Secondly, it was a significantly large area within the palace, consisting of several apartments, other accommodation and bathing areas – it is almost a village unto itself within the palace. It came about as the result of the official move of members of the Ottoman dynasty to the Palace in the sixteenth century, which gradually transformed the imperial harem into a well-organized, hierarchical, and institutionalized social and political structure, with rigid protocols and training.

Over the course of the sultans’ residences at Topkapı Palace, the harem was first a residence for slave girls, then became an area run by the sultan’s favourite wife, and finally a spacious area focused on the sultan’s family run by the Queen Mother, the Valide Sultan. The rank of individuals residing in the harem was reflected in its architecture: comfortable apartments for the Valide Sultan and favoured ladies, but cramped underground quarters for those less favoured, who were little more than servants. It is worth noting that the women were almost always slaves, either purchased or spoils of war. Quarters were continuously remodelled according to new requirements and changing fashions. This resulted in harem space being a collection of ever more fragmented units. The power of the Queen Mother extended beyond the palace into the empire itself, depending on whether the sultan was strong enough to impose his own will. The wranglings and intrigues that went on were, apparently, extraordinary, as favoured women vied to become wives, as the Queen Mother decided who the sultan would sleep with, and so forth.  The harem buildings themselves were very crowded when we went through, so it was difficult to get photos. Here are a few.

At various times, the tiling work within the harems (here and at the Dolmabahçe Palace, which had a similarly complex harem area, apparently) was very ornate and colourful. The way out led through a Tile Gallery, where beautiful examples of the tiling from different centuries were on display.

For someone like me, with my ill-formed idea of what a harem could be, the visit was utterly mind-boggling. It’s amazing that the harem and its concomitant lifestyles for all those people, lasted into the early part of the 20th century, when the dissoluteness ended in the Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

Before exiting the Palace, we visited Hagia Eirene, the sister church to Hagia Sophia; Hagia Eirene means Holy Peace and Hagia Sophia means Holy Wisdom. I had high hopes for this mainly because of its age (it was built before Hagia Sophia) and because it had never been converted to a mosque. I suppose I should have known better. Its presence in the palace grounds was quoted as a reason it was never converted, but actually it was used for that very un-churchlike purpose, an arsenal. I hadn’t realised this and so was unrealistically expecting it still to be a church. My expectations lowered even further when we went in to find that virtually the whole interior was swathed in protective sheeting, which made it all but impossible to see the inside of the building. Like Hagia Sophia, it’s all full of scaffolding, but we couldn’t even see that. We could just make out a detail of the roof by peering carefully.

Part of the building is now used as an exhibition or performance space and it was being kitted out as we were there, so we couldn’t even see that. Jim, however, spotted one thing squirreled away among all the venue furnishings which he found really exciting – a porphyry sarcophagus!

The possibilities are exciting. No, really.

Carved into the lid is an ankh, an ancient Egyptian symbol of life. But note – there’s a chi-rho carved within it, so religiously speaking, it’s ambiguous. Constantine, for all his apparent conversion to Christianity, still cleaved to a few of his previous pagan beliefs (for example there are questions about whether the figure on top of his Column might actually have represented the Sun God), and, what with one thing and another, it is possible that this is actually the sarcophagus that contained Constantine’s body.  There’s all sorts of learned discussion on the matter, concerning areas like the original Church of the Holy Apostles, where he was supposed to have been buried but which was looted by Crusaders and then destroyed by Mehmed II, and so on.  But there’s a small frisson in considering the sarcophagus’s possible significance. Did it make up for the general disappointment with Hagia Eirene (and, for that matter, Hagia Sophia)? No, not really; I found Hagia Sophia sad and Eirene frustrating; they’re both better viewed simply from the outside at the moment.

Anyhoo….

The Naval Museum was our next port of call (see what I did there?). This is up by the Dolmabahçe Palace, where we’d started our cruise a couple of days earlier, and hence would have been a logical place to visit then – had it not been closed that day. The practical upshot of squeezing this visit in is that it was very rushed; but we did see some interesting exhibits there. The ground floor is largely taken up, for example, with various caiques that were used to transport the Sultans. And it’s an impressive display of impressive craft.

There’s also a section of the original iron chain that was strung across the entrance to the Golden Horn and which was one of the key’s to Constantinople’s defendability from the 8th century, as it prevented a sea-based attack from that side of the peninsula.

Well, it did until the Ottomans got round it by dragging their boats across the land north of the Golden Horn, but it was pretty effective otherwise. But the most interesting item for us was something we were ushered past and which we specifically went back to take a look at, much to the displeasure of the officialdom who were trying to close the museum at that point. You get a first glimpse of it, dead ahead, as you go in.

It was actually too big to photograph in any sensible way.

The whole exhibit is a bit of a mystery to me.  It is the Tarihi Kadırga, or “Historical Galley,” constructed in the late 16th or early 17th century for the use of Ottoman sultans (like the caiques pictured above) on inshore waters. It is the only surviving original galley in the world, and has the world’s oldest continuously maintained wooden hull. It has a length of over 39 metres (130 ft) and has a beam of nearly 6 metres (19ft). It was equipped with 24 pairs of oars, and crewed by 144 oarsmen – three to each oar, therefore. It also originally had two masts.

One would have thought that (a) it was worth spending a little time talking about it and (b) that there would be an info board about it beside it. Wrong on both counts, frustratingly.

The rest of the museum had all sorts of models of boats, and, apparently, quite a lot on the Cyprus Situation of 1974, but we didn’t have time to linger, being chased through by disgruntled people in suits. It was also time to rush to our next appointment which, as if we hadn’t already eaten enough, was for tea and cakes at the Pera Palace Hotel. This is Istanbul’s first hotel for the modern era, having been constructed to host the passengers of the original Orient Express. Apparently, passengers were ferried from the railway station in sedan chairs! It was the first hotel in the city to have electricity and the first to have an electric lift. Reading the website reveals an amusing cognitive dissonance. A room in the hotel is a museum to keep alive the memory of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who, as any fule kno, was the founder of the Turkish Republic. The hotel was his favourite and he stayed there many times between 1915 and 1917.

The room number? Room 101.

It’s a very elegant hotel, with posh service and an elegant array of posh cakes,

and an elegant lounge in which the piano was being played, elegantly.

I failed to notice the signs saying “No Photography”. Oops! Sorry. But no-one told me off, so the picture stays.

Having over-eaten at lunch and then been fed tea and cakes, the group was then whisked off to the final dinner, which was in the Beyoğlu area of the city, up the hill from the hotel. It’s a nice place, but doesn’t have a website for me to point you at.

Jane and I overcame the overeating problem by simply not eating anything. The restaurant, thankfully, offered G&Ts, so we had one of them each; it also offered us a chance to try a local poison called Rakı. Like Pernod in France and Ouzo in Greece, it’s an anise drink, which goes cloudy when you add water,

a characteristic which tells you that caution is needed in your approach to it. I had a couple of sips but then passed it over to John in our group, who was avidly hoovering up everyone’s unwanted glasses.  It is A Thing in Istanbul these days to pair it with Şalgam suyu – turnip juice, a non-alcoholic but fermented drink. I didn’t even get to my second sip of that. It’s, how shall I describe it? Disgusting, that’s how I shall describe it.

We had a jolly evening and stumbled back to the hotel later on to get some sleep before the journey home the next day, which I’ll describe in the next and final post for this trip.