Büyük Valide Han (Grand Caravanserai)

The Büyük Valide Han in Istanbul is the city's largest caravanserai, commissioned in 1651 by the powerful Ottoman Regent Kösem Sultan to fund her charitable endowments. Built with three separate courtyards and a 55-meter main courtyard, it accommodated up to 3,000 travelers nightly. The site previously housed a palace with an early 1567 printing press, later becoming a 19th-century hub for Iranian traders and a filming location for Skyfall.

Istanbul · from the walk “Sultans, Spices & Hidden Streets” · audio ~4 min · Generated

Büyük Valide Han, Çakmakçılar Yokuşu No:36, Fatih, İstanbul

Who commissioned the construction of the Büyük Valide Han in Istanbul?

You are standing before one of Istanbul's best-kept secrets... the Büyük Valide Han, the largest caravanserai ever built in this city. Take a breath. Listen to the hum of workshops behind these crumbling walls. Now step through the archway... and let four centuries swallow you whole.......... This colossal han was commissioned in sixteen fifty-one by Kösem Sultan... a woman born as Anastasya, likely of Greek origin, who was sent to the imperial harem as a teenage slave. She rose to become the single most powerful woman in Ottoman history. Not just a queen mother... but a Regent, ruling the empire openly on behalf of her son Murat the Fourth, then her grandson Mehmet the Fourth. She controlled viziers, commanded Janissaries, and managed the state treasury from behind a curtain at council meetings.......... She built this massive han as a Waqf, a charitable endowment. All the revenue it generated funded the upkeep of her exquisite Çinili Mosque across the Bosporus in Üsküdar. But here is where the story turns dark. The very same year this han was completed... Kösem was strangled in her chambers at Topkapi Palace on the night of September second, sixteen fifty-one, in a coup organized by her own daughter-in-law, Turhan Hatice Sultan. According to some accounts, they used her own braids as the murder weapon. The city mourned for three days.......... Now, look around this vast courtyard... fifty-five meters on each side. This was no ordinary inn. It housed up to Three Thousand travelers and their animals every single night! And the building you're standing in may have been the First han in Istanbul to feature three separate courtyards.......... But did you know what stood here Before the han was built? A sixteenth-century palace belonging to Cerrah Mehmet Pasha. And inside that palace, in fifteen sixty-seven, an Armenian printer named Apkar of Tokat set up one of the first printing presses in the city, publishing calendars and liturgical books years before most of the Ottoman world had ever seen moveable type.......... By the nineteenth century, this han became the beating heart of Istanbul's Iranian merchant community. After the Treaties of Erzurum reopened trade between the Ottomans and Qajar Iran, wealthy Persian families, especially Azerbaijani carpet and silk traders, filled these rooms with their offices. Shi'a rituals and celebrations of Ashura took place right here, in this very courtyard.......... And one more thing... according to an urban legend, Kösem Sultan hid twenty chests of gold coins and her most precious jewels somewhere deep inside one of this building's towers. They have never been found. Treasure hunters... take note.......... Oh, and if these walls look familiar from the movies... they should. The motorcycle chase in the twenty twelve James Bond film Skyfall tore right through this han and across the rooftops of the Grand Bazaar. Even double-oh-seven couldn't resist this place.

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