Dolmabahçe Palace

Palace · BeşiktaşIstanbul,Türkiye

Half a kilometre of pale stone along the Bosphorus, with fourteen tons of gold leaf on the ceilings, a crystal staircase and one stopped clock.

Dolmabahçe Palace runs for more than half a kilometre of pale stone along the Bosphorus, and inside it restraint disappears. Ceilings carry fourteen tons of gold leaf. A double staircase climbs on balusters of cut Baccarat crystal under a glass skylight. The domed Ceremonial Hall hangs one of the largest chandeliers in the world, and you walk hall after hall past Hereke silk carpets before reaching a plain bedroom where a clock stands stopped at five past nine. Sultan Abdülmecid commissioned the palace in the 1840s to replace Topkapı, whose austere courtyards had begun to look provincial beside the palaces of Europe. The Balyan architects gave him Baroque, Rococo and Neoclassical rooms behind a single facade, on ground whose name means filled-in garden, after the shallow bay reclaimed centuries earlier to hold it. The cost is counted among the reasons the Ottoman treasury ran dry. It is a museum now, kept furnished much as the last sultans left it, but it is not walked as one route. The state wing and the harem are entered separately, and the room where Atatürk died lies on the harem side.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Look down as much as up — the parquet floors are inlaid from dozens of woods and change pattern room to room; most visitors march straight over some of the finest craftwork in the building.
The chandelier hall is where everyone bunches — the great crystal draws every visitor to the same spot, so hang back, let the crush pass, then take the smaller sea-facing salons briefly for yourself.
Don't walk past the clock tower — the ornate four-faced tower outside the Treasury Gate is a late Balyan work in its own right; most people photograph the palace and never notice its small sibling.
Cameras stay in the bag indoors — no photography is allowed inside either wing, so the palace you take home is the marble quay, the gates and the clock tower outside.

Things to do

1
Cross into the crown prince's wing
Most visitors stop after the state rooms and the harem. The crown prince's block at the far end holds the National Palaces Painting Museum, opened in 2014, hung with the nineteenth-century canvases the sultans commissioned or bought. One wall carries a single desert hunting scene seven metres across, the largest Orientalist painting in the country.
2
Stand in the room where Atatürk died
Near the end of the harem route you reach room 71, plainer than every gilded hall before it. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk died here in November 1938. The room has been left as it stood: the bed under an embroidered silk flag, the clock a childhood friend gave him, the painting of the four seasons opposite. Let the group drift ahead and give it a minute of your own.
3
Climb the crystal staircase
Take the double-horseshoe Crystal Staircase slowly rather than in step with the crowd. Its balusters are cut Baccarat crystal, and under the glass skylight above you can watch the light move through them as you climb. This is the first grand space visitors reach, and it was built to impress them before they see a single hall.