Beylerbeyi Palace

Palace · ÜsküdarIstanbul, Türkiye

Beylerbeyi Palace so charmed Empress Eugénie of France that she had one of its windows copied for her palace in Paris. Sultan Abdülaziz raised this white marble residence on the Asian shore in the 1860s, never as a full-time home but as a summer retreat and a guesthouse for visiting royalty. His architect, Sarkis Balyan, worked here at a compact, almost intimate scale, a step down in size from the vast Dolmabahçe downstream. Bohemian crystal weighs down the chandeliers, and painted ships sail across the ceilings, a nod to the sultan's passion for his navy. You enter a reception hall built around an indoor pool and fountain, the sound of water trailing you from room to room. Terraced gardens climb the hillside behind, past a magnolia grove and garden pavilions, while two small marble kiosks stand right on the sea wall, facing the current. A darker thread runs through the house: Abdülhamid II, the last sultan to wield real power, spent his final years here in guarded confinement and died in these rooms. Today the palace is a museum, and the first Bosphorus bridge passes just beyond its gardens, so traffic between the two continents crosses overhead while the nineteenth-century rooms below stay unchanged.

Worth knowing

Good to know

It was built to be seen from the water — the facade addresses the strait, not the street; from a passing boat the white palace and the bridge line up in a single frame.
The sea kiosks face the water, not the road — the two marble pavilions at the ends of the quay frame the strait and its passing tankers, and most visitors miss them by turning uphill first.
Check the edges of the carpets — reed matting shipped from Egypt lies beneath the Hereke silk, the palace's quiet defence against the Bosphorus damp and summer heat.
The garden terraces stay quiet — while groups cluster in the state rooms, the tiered gardens and the magnolia grove uphill are usually near-empty.

Things to do

1
Stand in the room with an indoor pool
Step into the central reception hall, where a marble pool and fountain sit indoors rather than in a garden. Stand still and listen to how the running water softens the whole room, then drift from doorway to doorway with your head tilted back, counting the ships painted across the ceilings.
2
Climb the terraces to the garden pavilions
Leave the state rooms and climb the terraced gardens behind the palace, up past the magnolia grove to the pool terrace and its garden pavilions. Sit where the household once took the evening air and watch tankers and ferries slide beneath the great bridge that now frames the view.
3
Find where the grandeur thins
Move slowly through the smaller upstairs quarters and notice where gilding gives way to plainer rooms — the quiet end of the palace where the deposed sultan spent his guarded last years. Stop at a sea-facing window and look out at the strait. For Abdülhamid II, who was not allowed to leave, this stretch of water was almost the whole of what he saw of the world before he died here in 1918.