History of Topkapı Palace

1. Foundation, 1460 – 1478

Construction of Topkapı Palace began in 1460, seven years after Sultan Mehmed II (Fatih Sultan Mehmed) captured Constantinople from the Byzantine emperor Constantine XI. Mehmed chose the tip of the historic peninsula — the ancient Sarayburnu, or “Palace Point” — for its command of the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn. The core of the palace, including the Middle Gate (Bab-üs Selâm) and the Council Chamber, was substantially complete by 1478.

The palace was originally called Yeni Saray (“New Palace”) to distinguish it from an earlier palace on the site of today’s Istanbul University. The name Topkapı — literally “Cannon Gate” — came later, from a shore-side artillery gate that no longer survives.

2. Imperial expansion, 1478 – 1600

Over the next century, successive sultans grafted new pavilions, kitchens, mosques, libraries and gardens onto Mehmed’s core plan. Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520 – 1566) enlarged the Harem into a permanent complex; before his reign, the sultan’s family lived at the Eski Saray (Old Palace) and only visited Topkapı for court business. Suleiman’s chief architect Sinan, best known for the Süleymaniye Mosque, worked repeatedly on the palace kitchens and baths.

By 1600 the palace employed something like 5,000 people — pages, cooks, gardeners, eunuchs, scribes, musicians, dwarfs, physicians, an imperial goldsmith and a small army of guards known as bostancı. It functioned as a self-contained city.

3. The Kafes and the “sultanate of women”, 1600 – 1700

Two seventeenth-century innovations shifted the palace’s politics decisively inward. The Kafes (“Cage”) system, formalised around 1617, confined potential heirs to guarded apartments within the Harem rather than sending them to govern provinces. And a succession of powerful queen mothers — most famously Kösem Sultan (d. 1651) and Turhan Hatice Sultan (d. 1683) — wielded real political power from the Harem itself, a period Ottoman historians call the Kadınlar Saltanatı or “sultanate of women”.

4. Decline as a working palace, 1700 – 1855

By the eighteenth century, the sultans were spending more time at summer palaces along the Bosphorus. Fires — most seriously in 1665 and 1856 — damaged sections of the Harem and the Divan; each was rebuilt in the fashion of its day, which is why the palace today is a patchwork of Ottoman baroque and rococo details laid over fifteenth-century foundations.

5. The move to Dolmabahçe, 1856

In 1856, Sultan Abdülmecid I moved the imperial residence to the brand-new Dolmabahçe Palace, a European neoclassical complex on the Bosphorus shore. Topkapı was retained for ceremonial functions — coronations, the reception of foreign envoys and the safeguarding of the Sacred Relics — but it ceased to be a working royal residence.

Why the change?

Dolmabahçe was closer to the diplomatic quarter of Pera, easier to heat by nineteenth-century standards, and — importantly — visibly European. The Ottoman state under the Tanzimat reforms was reinventing itself as a modern power, and the fifteenth-century layout of Topkapı, with its rigid ceremonial gates, no longer matched that image.

6. Museum, 1924 – present

On 3 April 1924, by decree of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Topkapı Palace opened as a public museum — one of the first acts of the new Republic of Türkiye to convert Ottoman patrimony into public heritage. The imperial collections of jewels, costumes, manuscripts, weapons and the Sacred Relics stayed in situ, which is why the museum feels less like a curated selection and more like the palace on the day the sultan left.

UNESCO inscribed the Historic Areas of Istanbul, including Topkapı, on the World Heritage List in 1985. A rolling programme of conservation continues to open, close and re-open individual rooms — see our visiting information page for the current status.

Topkapı Sarayı: four centuries of Ottoman power, in one hilltop city.