Sultans' Gates: Topkapı, Gülhane & the Sublime Porte in Istanbul

Through the Imperial Gate into the outer court of Topkapı Palace, down the old palace gardens of Gülhane to the shore, then back up past the Orient Express terminus and the grand vizier's door: how the Ottoman Empire was ruled from one hill in Istanbul

Istanbul · 11 stops · 25 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Fountain of Ahmed III & the Imperial Gate

Cankurtaran, Bab-ı Hümayun Caddesi, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

Walk around the little square pavilion behind Hagia Sophia, with its wide overhanging roof and every surface carved with flowers, fruit bowls and gilded verses. It looks like a jewellery box that somebody set down in the street. Behind it rises a tall, plain gate set into a fortress wall.

The box is the Fountain of Ahmed the Third, built in 1728, at the height of what Turks later called the Tulip Era. Under Ahmed the Third, the court fell in love with gardens, poetry, tulip bulbs that cost a fortune, and evening festivals lit by candles carried on the backs of tortoises... at least, so the chroniclers tell it. At each corner of the fountain is a sebil, a grilled window where attendants once handed out cups of water, and in summer sherbet, to anyone who passed.

The Tulip Era did not end gently. In 1730 a revolt led by a former Janissary called Patrona Halil swept through the city, the sultan's pleasure pavilions were wrecked, and Ahmed the Third was forced to give up his throne. Elegance, the rebels felt, had been paid for by them.

Now turn to the gate: Bab-ı Hümayun, the Imperial Gate, the outer entrance to Topkapı Palace. Mehmed the Second built it in 1478, twenty-five years after he took Constantinople, and the inscription above the arch carries his name. For almost four centuries every ambassador, every vizier and every petitioner walked through this opening into the world of the sultan.

Look at the niches on either side of the gate. People like to say that the heads of fallen officials were displayed in them as a warning, though the famous warning stones actually stood further in, at the palace's second gate. Walk through the Imperial Gate now. The first court beyond it was always open to the public... and the first building on your left is a church that never became a mosque.
2. Hagia Irene: The Church That Became an Arsenal

Cankurtaran, Topkapı Sarayı Birinci Avlu, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

In the first court of the palace, among the plane trees, stand in front of the red-brick church sunk below the level of the path, its dome low and its walls patched in many centuries. Hagia Irene, the Church of Holy Peace, is one of the very few Byzantine churches in Istanbul that was never turned into a mosque.

A church stood here even before Constantine built Hagia Sophia next door, and in 381 an earlier Hagia Irene hosted the second great council of the Christian Church, the Council of Constantinople. Like its big neighbour, it burned in the Nika riot of 532, and Justinian rebuilt it. After an earthquake in 740 it was rebuilt again, and that is largely the building you see.

Inside, in the half-dome of the apse, there is a simple black cross on a gold ground and nothing else. That is a rare survivor of the age of Iconoclasm, when the emperors banned images of Christ and the saints, and only the cross was allowed. Most such decoration was replaced when the images came back. Here, because the church soon became something else, it was simply left alone.

When Mehmed the Second built his palace around it, Hagia Irene sat inside the first court, and the Ottomans used it as an arsenal for weapons and armour. In the nineteenth century those old weapons and a growing collection of antiquities were put on display here, and this storeroom became the seed of the first museum of the Ottoman Empire... the ancestor of the great archaeological museum you will see in a few minutes.

Today it is a museum again, and its acoustics are famous: it often hosts concerts, especially during the city's music festival. Continue along the first court, a long, slightly rising avenue, to the gate with two pointed towers at the end. That gate was where the sultan's private world began.
3. Gate of Salutation: Topkapı's Second Court & the Harem

Cankurtaran, Topkapı Sarayı, Babüsselam, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

Stop in front of the gate with two slim octagonal towers capped by pointed cones, like a castle from a fairy tale. This is Babüsselam, the Gate of Salutation, the middle gate of Topkapı Palace. For centuries, only the sultan rode through it on horseback. Everyone else, however grand, dismounted and walked.

Look for the place beside the gate where the so-called example stones stood. On them, the heads of disgraced officials were sometimes put on show, a warning to anyone passing in or out. And in the first court behind you, tradition says, the executioner washed his hands and his sword at a small fountain. The palace was a place of gardens and poetry... and of sudden, quiet death.

Beyond this gate lies the second court, a park of cypresses with peacocks once wandering on the grass. On the left is the Imperial Council hall under a tall tower, the Tower of Justice, visible from far across the city. The grand vizier and his ministers met there, and above them was a gilded grille. The sultan could sit behind it and listen without being seen. Nobody ever knew whether the ruler was there, so everybody spoke as if he was.

Behind that hall begins the Harem, the private quarters of the sultan's family: his mother, the valide sultan, his wives and concubines, his children, and the eunuchs who guarded them. It was not the playground of Western fantasy but a hard school of power. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, women such as Hürrem and Kösem shaped the empire from these rooms, and princes were kept in a guarded apartment known as the kafes, the cage, sometimes for decades.

The sultans lived here for nearly four centuries, until they moved to the new waterfront palace of Dolmabahçe in the 1850s, and in 1924 Topkapı became a museum. Now turn back from the gate and take the path that slopes down to the left, towards the buildings that hold the treasures of a dozen lost civilisations.
4. Istanbul Archaeology Museums & Osman Hamdi Bey

Cankurtaran, Osman Hamdi Bey Yokuşu Sokağı, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

Follow the path down to the courtyard where ancient columns, sarcophagi and broken statues lie scattered among the trees, and face the long neoclassical building with its temple-like front. You are in front of the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, and the man who made them was a painter.

Osman Hamdi Bey trained in Paris, painted scenes of Ottoman life that now sell for record sums, and in 1881 became director of the imperial museum, then still crowded into the old church of Hagia Irene. He set out to give the empire a museum worthy of the British Museum or the Louvre. His best-known canvas, The Tortoise Trainer, painted in 1906, shows an old man in a robe trying to teach tortoises... a gentle joke, many think, about how slowly reform moves. He also pushed through a law in 1884 that made it much harder for foreign archaeologists to carry finds out of Ottoman lands.

In 1887 he led an excavation himself at Sidon, in today's Lebanon, and opened a royal burial chamber full of marble sarcophagi. The most spectacular is called the Alexander Sarcophagus, because its reliefs show Alexander the Great on horseback in battle against the Persians, with traces of the original paint still visible. It was carved in the late fourth century before Christ, probably for a king of Sidon, and this museum building was opened in 1891 largely to give it a home.

Across the courtyard stands the Tiled Kiosk, built for Mehmed the Second in 1472, one of the oldest Ottoman buildings in the city, its entrance blazing with blue and turquoise tiles. Sultans once sat in it to watch games of polo-like sport in the palace grounds.

The collections run from early Mesopotamia to Byzantium. Among them is a clay tablet with a Hittite copy of the treaty of Kadesh, often called the oldest known peace treaty, and a fragment of one of the serpent heads from the Hippodrome. Now leave by the lower gate into the park. These lawns were once the sultan's own garden.
5. Gülhane Park: The Rose Garden and the Edict of 1839

Cankurtaran, Gülhane Parkı, Alemdar Caddesi, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

Walk down the broad avenue under the plane trees, between lawns and flower beds, with the palace walls rising on your right. Families picnic, cats patrol the benches, and in spring the beds fill with tulips. For most of its history, though, almost nobody was allowed in here at all.

Gülhane means the house of roses. These were the outer gardens of Topkapı Palace, sloping down towards the meeting of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, with orchards, pavilions and the palace's own rose garden. Ordinary people of the city mostly glimpsed them from boats on the water, and the palace gardeners, the bostancı, who also served as the sultan's guards and boatmen, kept everyone else out.

On the 3rd of November 1839, a crowd of ministers, religious scholars, foreign ambassadors and representatives of the empire's communities gathered in these gardens. The foreign minister Mustafa Reşid Paşa read out a decree in the name of the young Sultan Abdülmecid. It promised every subject security of life, honour and property, fair taxation and an orderly system of military service, regardless of religion. It is called the Edict of Gülhane, and it opened the reform era known as the Tanzimat.

Promises on paper were one thing, and the reforms met resistance and moved slowly. But the edict reshaped the empire's laws, schools and army over the following decades, and it is remembered as the first great charter of modern Turkish history.

In 1912 the gardens were opened to the public as a park, and in August 1928 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk presented the new Turkish alphabet in Latin letters at an evening gathering in Gülhane... a reform as sweeping as anything this garden had heard before. Keep walking to the far end of the park, where the land drops towards the water, and look for a lonely column among the trees.
6. Column of the Goths: Byzantion's Oldest Monument

Cankurtaran, Gülhane Parkı, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

At the far end of the park, near the tea gardens that look out over the water, find a single grey granite column standing on a high base, with a weathered Corinthian capital and nothing on top. It is older than Constantinople, older than any emperor of Byzantium, and almost nobody stops to look at it. Whatever once stood on top of it is long gone.

On its base is a short Latin inscription, worn but still readable, dedicated to Fortune who returns, for the defeat of the Goths. Historians still argue over which victory it means. Some link it to Claudius the Second, who beat the Goths around 269 and was nicknamed Gothicus for it; others to Constantine himself. Either way, it is one of the oldest Roman monuments still standing in the city.

And it stands on the oldest ground. This promontory, between the Golden Horn, the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara, was the acropolis of Byzantion, the Greek town founded according to tradition by colonists from Megara, led by a man called Byzas, in the seventh century before Christ. Temples stood here when Rome was still a village of huts, and the whole later story of the city grew out from this point.

Legend says Byzas asked the oracle at Delphi where to build, and was told to settle opposite the land of the blind. When he arrived he saw the earlier colony of Chalcedon on the Asian shore, where Kadıköy is now, and understood: only blind men could have ignored this perfect harbour and settled over there instead.

Byzantion, Constantinople, İstanbul: three names, one rock. Now leave the park by the gate near the sea and walk west along the shore road towards the Golden Horn, to a wooden-eaved pavilion sitting on the old palace wall.
7. Sepetçiler Kasrı: The Sultan's Pavilion on the Shore

Hocapaşa, Kennedy Caddesi, Sarayburnu, 34110 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

Stop by the road where the old palace wall runs along the shore and look at the pavilion perched on top of it, with wide eaves, rows of windows and a terrace looking out over the water. Once the sea washed the foot of this wall. Now there is a road, a strip of park and the ferries of the Golden Horn passing behind.

This is Sepetçiler Kasrı, the Basket Makers' Pavilion, built in 1643 for Sultan İbrahim. It takes its unusual name, it is usually said, from the guild of palace basket makers who worked nearby. From its windows the sultan and his court could watch ceremonies on the water, and above all the departure and return of the imperial fleet.

Imagine the scene: the galleys of the admiral rowing out from the arsenal on the Golden Horn, banners flying, cannon firing salutes, the whole shoreline crowded, and behind these windows the sultan watching his navy head out towards the Aegean and the Mediterranean. Stand beside the pavilion on a quiet day and you see what he saw: the mouth of the Golden Horn, the far shore of Galata and the Bosphorus opening to your right.

The man who built it is remembered as İbrahim the Mad. He came to the throne after years locked in the kafes, the princes' cage of the Harem, terrified of the brother who had executed his other brothers. His reign was erratic, and in 1648 he was deposed and executed. His mother, Kösem Sultan, one of the most powerful women in Ottoman history, did not save him.

The pavilion is one of the very few buildings left from the waterfront of Topkapı. Its neighbours, kiosks and boathouses, disappeared, many of them when the railway was laid along this shore in the 1870s, straight through the old palace gardens. Follow the line of that railway west now, past the wall, to the station that made it all worth doing.
8. Sirkeci Station: Last Stop of the Orient Express

Hocapaşa, Ankara Caddesi, Sirkeci Garı, 34110 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

Walk round to the old station front facing the street and look at the clock tower, the big rose windows and the horseshoe arches in bands of stone and brick. It looks like a European railway station dressed up for a costume ball as an oriental palace. That is exactly what it is.

Sirkeci Station was designed by the German architect August Jasmund and opened in 1890, in the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid the Second. It was the end of the line from Europe. The famous Orient Express, launched from Paris in 1883, could by then run all the way to Constantinople by rail, and passengers stepped off here, at the edge of Asia, after days in their sleeping cars.

The luxury traffic changed this part of the city. The Pera Palace Hotel was opened across the Golden Horn in 1892 largely for these travellers, and kings, spies, diplomats and writers passed through this hall. Agatha Christie set the opening of Murder on the Orient Express in Istanbul, with Poirot boarding the train here, and the novel came out in 1934.

There was a price. To bring the railway into the heart of the city, the line along the shore was laid straight through the outer gardens of Topkapı Palace, with the sultan's approval, at a time when the empire was racing to modernise and was deep in debt to European creditors. The old palace lost part of its gardens to a railway.

The long-distance trains are gone now. Since 2013 the Marmaray tunnel has run commuter trains deep underground and under the Bosphorus to Asia, and the old terminus keeps its waiting room, a small railway museum and the faint smell of history. From the station, turn uphill away from the water and climb the steep streets of Hocapaşa towards Cağaloğlu. A bath built by a sultan is waiting at the top.
9. Cağaloğlu Hamamı: A Sultan's Bath of 1741

Alemdar, Prof. Kazım İsmail Gürkan Caddesi No:24, 34110 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

Catch your breath after the climb and look at the low domed building on the corner, its roof dotted with little glass eyes that let light fall into the steam below. This is Cağaloğlu Hamamı, and it has been washing Istanbul since 1741.

It was built by Sultan Mahmud the First, but not for himself. An Ottoman sultan who wanted to found a mosque, a school or a library also had to pay for it forever, so he endowed it with income-producing property. Mahmud had just opened a library inside Hagia Sophia, and the fees paid by bathers here were meant to keep that library running. Every scrub and every soak helped pay for books.

Inside, men and women have entirely separate sections, each with its own entrance. You pass from the domed changing hall to the warm room and on to the hot room, where a large heated marble platform, the göbek taşı, sits under a dome pierced by those star-shaped skylights. It is one of the last of the great monumental bathhouses built in the city in the Ottoman centuries. There, an attendant scrubs you with a rough mitt called a kese, then rinses you with bowls of warm water poured from marble basins.

For Istanbul families the hamam was never only about washing. Brides came here with their friends before a wedding, mothers looked over potential daughters-in-law, and news, gossip and arrangements passed between the marble basins. The neighbourhood bath was as much a social club as a bathroom.

Cağaloğlu itself became the street of newspapers in the twentieth century, when the presses of the Turkish dailies crowded along these slopes around the government buildings. Writers and editors who made and unmade governments in print lived and worked within a few streets of this steam. Walk east now, along the old street towards the great gate of the government, the one the whole world once called the Sublime Porte.
10. Alay Köşkü & the Sublime Porte

Alemdar, Alemdar Caddesi, Bab-ı Âli, 34110 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

Stand on the street where two buildings face each other across a few metres of asphalt. On one side, a grand gate with a deep, curving roof of carved wood and a gilded inscription. On the other, set into the corner of the palace wall, a many-windowed pavilion looking down on the street. Between them ran the line where the sultan watched his government.

The gate is Bab-ı Âli, the High Gate, known in the languages of Europe as the Sublime Porte. It was the entrance to the palace and offices of the grand vizier, and from the seventeenth century onwards the government of the empire worked here rather than inside Topkapı. So completely did the gate stand for that government that ambassadors wrote they had been received by the Porte, and treaties were signed with the Sublime Porte, not with the sultan's palace. Today the building houses the Governorship of Istanbul.

Across the street is the Alay Köşkü, the Parade Pavilion, rebuilt in its present form under Mahmud the Second. From its windows the sultan watched the great processions of the guilds and the army pass along this street, and, behind latticed windows, he could keep an eye on who came and went through his vizier's gate.

On the 23rd of January 1913, in the middle of the Balkan Wars, a group of officers of the Committee of Union and Progress led by Enver Bey burst into the building. The minister of war, Nazım Paşa, was shot dead, and the grand vizier was forced to resign. The raid on the Sublime Porte opened the way to the rule of a small group of Unionist leaders who would take the empire into the First World War.

Today the pavilion is a quieter place, a literature museum and library named after the writer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. From here, walk along the outer wall of the palace and turn up the narrow cobbled lane to your right, which climbs between the wall and a row of painted wooden houses.
11. Soğukçeşme Sokağı: The Lane Between Palace and Hagia Sophia

Cankurtaran, Soğukçeşme Sokağı, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

Climb the cobbled lane slowly. On your left runs the high stone wall of Topkapı Palace; on your right a row of wooden houses painted in pale yellow, pink, green and blue, with bay windows leaning over the street. Ahead, over the rooftops, the buttresses of Hagia Sophia appear.

Soğukçeşme Sokağı means the Street of the Cold Fountain, after an Ottoman fountain that still stands at its lower end. For centuries it was an ordinary residential lane where people lived right up against the palace wall. By the twentieth century its old houses were crumbling and some were gone.

In the mid-1980s the Turkish Touring and Automobile Club, led by the writer and preservationist Çelik Gülersoy, rebuilt the lane as a row of guesthouses in the old style. Some called it a stage set, others called it a rescue, and the argument about how to restore Istanbul's wooden houses has never really ended. The club also restored an old Byzantine cistern below the street, a reminder that even here there is another city underneath.

Stand still for a moment and listen. On one side of you is the wall behind which sultans, viziers, eunuchs and princes lived and plotted for four centuries. On the other, a church built by an emperor a thousand years before them. Between the two, in this narrow gap, ordinary people hung their washing and raised their children.

At the top of the lane you come out again by Bab-ı Hümayun and the fountain where this walk began. You have crossed the palace's public court, followed its gardens to the sea, passed the station that brought Europe to the sultan's door, and stood at the gate from which the empire was ruled. All of it fits on one hill... and from this hill, for almost five hundred years, an empire on three continents was governed.