Tekfur Palace: The Palace of the Porphyrogenitus
Why is it significant?
There it is, set right against the city walls: a three-storey façade of red brick and white marble laid in chequerboards and stripes, a row of arched windows on the top floor, the ghost of a balcony.
Key Facts
| Place | Tekfur Palace: The Palace of the Porphyrogenitus |
|---|---|
| Address | Şişhane Caddesi, Ayvansaray, 34087 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.03390, 28.94070 |
| Part of Walk | Neighbours of the Golden Horn: Fener, Balat and Istanbul's Greek, Jewish, Armenian and Bulgarian Quarters |
| Generated | Generated |
There it is, set right against the city walls: a three-storey façade of red brick and white marble laid in chequerboards and stripes, a row of arched windows on the top floor, the ghost of a balcony. This is Tekfur Palace, the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus, the best-preserved Byzantine palace in Istanbul.
It was built in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century as part of the Blachernae palace complex, when the emperors preferred living up here by the land walls to the crumbling Great Palace by the sea. Porphyrogenitus means born in the purple, the title of children born to a reigning emperor in the purple chamber of the palace. Its Turkish name comes from tekfur, the word the Ottomans used for Byzantine rulers and lords. In 1453 the final assault raged along these same walls.
And then the palace began a long, strange afterlife. At one point, it is said, it housed the sultan's menagerie, with an elephant and a giraffe. In the early eighteenth century the grand vizier Nevşehirli İbrahim Pasha set up a tile workshop here to revive the lost glory of İznik, and the blue-and-white Tekfur Palace tiles still decorate mosques around the city. Later it served as a poorhouse for Jewish families, and then as a bottle factory.
By the late twentieth century the palace was a roofless shell, with houses and workshops pressed against it. A long restoration followed, and in 2019 it reopened as a museum, telling its whole story from Byzantine court to Ottoman kiln. Stand back from the façade and imagine the windows lit for a court feast, with the whole Golden Horn glittering below.
One building, and almost every chapter of this city has passed through it: emperors, sultans, potters, the poor and the glassblowers. Now walk south, away from the walls and slightly downhill, through the lanes of Edirnekapı, to a small square with a cluster of domes. Inside them waits one of the greatest picture-books ever made.