5 Days in Istanbul

For almost a thousand years Hagia Sophia was the largest church in the world. Emperor Justinian had it built in just five years, from 532 to 537, by two mathematicians, Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles, and its dome, floating on a ring of windows, was something nobody had seen before. Mehmed II turned it into a mosque the day after he took the city in 1453. Atatürk's republic made it a museum in 1934, and in July 2020 it became a mosque again.

Since January 2024, the ground floor has been for prayer only, and visitors walk a separate route through the upper galleries. That's no great loss. The view down into the nave is the best in the building, and up here are the mosaics: Christ between the Virgin and John the Baptist in the south gallery, emperors and empresses offering gifts, and the tomb slab of Enrico Dandolo, the Venetian doge who led the Crusaders who looted the city in 1204.

Across the gardens stands the answer to Hagia Sophia. Sultan Ahmed I was only 19 when he ordered the Sultan Ahmed Mosque in 1609, to stand face to face with Justinian's church, and it was finished in 1617, the year he died. The architect was Sedefkâr Mehmed Ağa, a pupil of the great Sinan. A popular legend says the six minarets were a misunderstanding, the sultan asked for gold (altın) minarets and the architect heard six (altı), and that they caused a scandal because only the mosque in Mecca had as many. It's a good story, and nobody has found any evidence for it.

Inside, some 21,000 İznik tiles in blues and greens give the building its nickname. It reopened in 2023 after a five-year restoration, and it's an active mosque, so the visitors' entrance is on the side, shoes go in a bag, and the prayer area is roped off.

The long square next to the mosque was the Hippodrome, Constantinople's chariot-racing track and its political stage. Fans of the Blues and the Greens rioted here in 532, in the Nika revolt that nearly toppled Justinian, and according to the historian Procopius some 30,000 people were killed when the army trapped them inside. The church that burned in the riot was rebuilt as the Hagia Sophia you just saw.

Three monuments still mark the old central barrier, the spina. The Obelisk of Theodosius was carved for Pharaoh Thutmose III at Karnak around 1450 BC and set up here in 390. The bronze Serpent Column was made in 479 BC to celebrate the Greek victory over the Persians at Plataea and brought from Delphi by Constantine. The third is the Walled Obelisk, a rough stone column that was once covered in gilded bronze plates, until the Crusaders stripped them in 1204. At the north end of the square stands a much later addition, the German Fountain, built in 1900 to mark Kaiser Wilhelm II's visit of 1898.

On the west side of the Hippodrome stands the palace of İbrahim Pasha, Süleyman the Magnificent's grand vizier and childhood friend, who was strangled on the sultan's orders in 1536. It's now the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, and its carpet collection is one of the finest in the world, with huge Seljuk and Ottoman carpets hung like paintings, along with Qurans, calligraphy and woodwork. The upper rooms look straight out at the Blue Mosque.

Lunch is a block away, on Divanyolu. Tarihi Sultanahmet Köftecisi Selim Usta has been grilling the same small meatballs since 1920, and the menu is barely longer than that: köfte, a white bean salad called piyaz, a pickled chili or two and irmik helvası, a semolina dessert, to finish. It's quick, cheap by Sultanahmet standards and full of office workers as well as visitors.

Under the street opposite Hagia Sophia, Justinian built a reservoir for the Great Palace in 532: 336 marble columns in rows of 28, many of them taken from older buildings, standing in shallow water in a hall the size of a cathedral. The Turks called it Yerebatan, the "sunken palace". The Basilica Cistern was restored in 2022, with soft lighting and walkways just above the water, and it's one of the most atmospheric places in the city.

Head to the far corner for the two Medusa heads used as column bases, one on its side and one upside down. Nobody knows why they were placed like that. The story that it was done to cancel out her stare is a good one, but it's folklore.

Walk ten minutes downhill towards the sea for the antidote to the crowds. The Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, built by Justinian around 527-536, just before Hagia Sophia, became a mosque in about 1500 and has been known as Little Hagia Sophia ever since. It's an octagon under a dome, with a Byzantine inscription praising Justinian and his wife Theodora still running around the gallery. Few tourists come here, and the tea garden in the courtyard is the calmest place in Sultanahmet.

On the way, stop at the Sokollu Mehmet Pasha Mosque, which the architect Sinan built in 1571-72 for a grand vizier. Its İznik tiles are some of the finest in the city, and small fragments said to come from the Black Stone of the Kaaba are set over the entrance, above the mihrab and in the pulpit. It's often locked outside prayer times, so try your luck.

End the day the way Istanbul did for centuries, in a hamam. Çemberlitaş Hamamı, a few minutes up Divanyolu, takes its name from the Column of Constantine outside it, the porphyry column Constantine raised in 330 for his new capital, held together with iron hoops (çember). The hammam was built by Sinan in 1584 for Nurbanu Sultan, the wife of Selim II, said to have been born in Venetian Corfu or Venice itself, and still has separate halls for men and women under its domes. You lie on the heated marble platform, the göbek taşı, until you're properly warm, then an attendant scrubs you with a rough mitt called a kese and covers you in soap foam. You'll leave lighter and pinker than you came.

Prices at Çemberlitaş start at about 3,200 TL (57 EUR) for a self-service visit and around 4,050 TL (72 EUR) with the scrub and foam wash. The two other famous hammams in the old city cost more: Cağaloğlu (1741) from about 95 EUR, and Hürrem Sultan, Sinan's double bath of 1556 right between Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, from about 110 EUR.

Mehmed II started building Topkapı Palace in 1459, on the hill where the acropolis of Byzantium had stood, and for almost 400 years the Ottoman Empire was run from its courtyards. It isn't one grand building but a series of pavilions, kitchens and gardens behind gates that get more private as you go: the first court was open to anyone, the second to officials, and beyond the Gate of Felicity only the sultan's household could pass. The sultans moved out to Dolmabahçe in 1856, and the palace became a museum in 1924.

Don't skip the Harem. It wasn't the pleasure palace of Western paintings but the family quarters of the dynasty, run by the sultan's mother, with hundreds of tiled rooms where women like Hürrem and Kösem Sultan ran politics from behind the screens. Then see the Treasury, with the 86-carat Spoonmaker's Diamond and the emerald Topkapı Dagger, and the Pavilion of the Holy Mantle, with relics of the Prophet Muhammad. Finish at the terrace of the Fourth Court for the view over the Bosphorus.

On your way out, in the first court, step into Hagia Irene, the "Church of Holy Peace". Justinian rebuilt it after the Nika riot burned the first one, and the Second Ecumenical Council met in an earlier church on this spot in 381. It's the only big Byzantine church in the city that was never turned into a mosque. The Ottomans used it as an arsenal, which saved it, and inside it's bare and huge, with a simple black cross in the apse from the time when the church banned images.

Just below the palace walls, in Gülhane, are the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, three buildings founded in 1891 by the painter and archaeologist Osman Hamdi Bey. They reopened fully in 2026 after years of restoration, and they're one of the great collections of the ancient world. The star is the Alexander Sarcophagus, carved with Alexander the Great in battle, with traces of the original paint. Next door, the Museum of the Ancient Orient has a clay tablet with the Treaty of Kadesh, signed between the Egyptians and the Hittites around 1259 BC and often called the oldest surviving peace treaty.

The third building is the Tiled Kiosk, built for Mehmed II in 1472, one of the oldest Ottoman buildings in the city. Afterwards, walk through Gülhane Park, the old palace gardens. In April they're full of tulips.

Walk five minutes down from Gülhane to the back streets of Sirkeci for lunch at Hocapaşa Pidecisi, which has been baking pide in a wood oven since 1964. The boat-shaped flatbreads come out bubbling, topped with cheese, minced meat, egg or sucuk, and cut into strips at the table. It's tiny, quick and cheap. The lanes around it are full of esnaf lokantası, canteens where office workers point at trays of stews, beans and vegetables in olive oil, if you'd rather eat like that.

Take the tram from Sirkeci to Beyazıt, or walk up Divanyolu, for the Grand Bazaar (Kapalıçarşı). It grew around a domed stone hall, the Cevahir Bedesten, that Mehmed II built in the 1450s to keep valuable goods safe, and today it's a covered town of around 60 streets and 4,000 shops, with its own mosques, fountains and police station. Carpets, lamps, leather, gold and towels are the main business, and the sellers are as famous as the goods.

Wander, get lost, and let yourself be talked into a tea. If you're buying, bargain with a smile and walk away if the price doesn't move. For a break, look for the old caravanserais (hans) around the edges, where craftsmen still work in courtyards, or sit at Şark Kahvesi inside the bazaar for a Turkish coffee.

From the bazaar, walk uphill to the mosque that most Istanbullus would call the most beautiful in the city. The Süleymaniye Mosque was built in 1550-1557 for Süleyman the Magnificent by his chief architect Mimar Sinan, the man who designed more than 300 buildings for three sultans and is to Istanbul what Wren is to London. The prayer hall is a single huge space lit by over 200 windows, calmer and lighter than the Blue Mosque and much less crowded.

In the garden behind it are the tombs of Süleyman and of Hürrem Sultan, the slave girl from Ruthenia who became his wife and the most powerful woman of her age. Sinan himself is buried in a modest tomb just outside the walls, at the north corner. Then go to the terrace next to the mosque for the sunset over the Golden Horn, the Galata Tower and the hills of Beyoğlu.

The street facing the mosque has been serving the same dish for a century. Kuru fasulye, white beans stewed in tomato and butter, with rice pilaf and pickles, is Turkish comfort food, and Erzincanlı Ali Baba has been ladling it out here since 1924. It's simple, cheap and very good.

Then walk ten minutes west to Vefa Bozacısı, open since 1876. Boza is a thick, slightly sour drink made from fermented millet, served cold with cinnamon and roasted chickpeas on top, and it's been an Istanbul winter treat since Ottoman times. The glass Atatürk drank from in 1937 is on display in the shop.

Start the day with a proper Turkish breakfast in Beşiktaş, where two small streets behind the fish market, Çelebioğlu and Şair Veysi, are lined with breakfast cafés. Order a serpme kahvaltı: the table fills with small plates of white cheese, olives, tomatoes and cucumbers, kaymak (clotted cream) with honey, jams, menemen (eggs scrambled with tomatoes and peppers), sucuk sausage and baskets of bread, while the tea keeps coming until you put your spoon across the glass.

It takes an hour or more, and that's the point. Weekends are busiest, when half of Beşiktaş seems to be out with family.

Ten minutes' walk back along the water, Dolmabahçe Palace is what the Ottomans built when they wanted to look European. Sultan Abdülmecid had the Armenian architects Garabet and Nigoğayos Balyan put it up on reclaimed land between 1843 and 1856, with 285 rooms, 46 halls and a facade 600 m long on the Bosphorus. In the ceremonial hall hangs a 4.5-ton crystal chandelier with 750 lamps. It's often called a gift from Queen Victoria, but the palace paid for it.

The palace was the seat of the last six sultans, and then of the Republic's presidents when they were in Istanbul. Atatürk died here on 10 November 1938 at 9:05 in the morning, and all the clocks in the palace were stopped at that time. His small bedroom is the most visited room in the building, and every year on 10 November, at 9:05, the whole country stops for a minute of silence.

Take a bus or walk 25 minutes along the shore to Ortaköy, a former fishing village where a mosque, a synagogue and a Greek church stood within a few streets of each other. The small, frilly Ortaköy Mosque (officially the Büyük Mecidiye Mosque), finished in 1856 by the same Balyan family who built Dolmabahçe, sits right on the water under the first Bosphorus Bridge, and it's one of the most photographed views in the city.

Ortaköy's street food is kumpir: a huge baked potato mashed with butter and cheese in its skin and then loaded with whatever you point at, from olives and corn to sausage and Russian salad. The stalls by the square are touristy and not cheap, but a kumpir on the waterfront under the bridge is still a rite of passage.

Carry on north by bus or taxi to Arnavutköy and Bebek, the prettiest stretch of the European shore. Wooden waterfront mansions, the yalı of Ottoman pashas and merchant families, line the water, and the promenade at Bebek is where Istanbul comes to stroll on a sunny afternoon. Mini Dondurma, open since 1968, does the ice cream.

Walk 20 minutes further along the shore to Rumeli Hisarı, the fortress Mehmed II built in about four months in 1452, opposite an older Ottoman castle on the Asian side, to cut off the Bosphorus before his siege of Constantinople. The Ottomans called it Boğazkesen, which means both "strait cutter" and "throat cutter", and its towers and walls climb straight up the hillside at the narrowest point of the strait.

Head back to Beşiktaş and take the ferry across to Üsküdar on the Asian side, 15 minutes over the Bosphorus for the price of a bus ride. Walk south along the shore to Salacak, where Istanbullus sit on the sea wall with tea from the kiosks to watch the sun go down behind the old city. The skyline of minarets turning black against an orange sky is the postcard of Istanbul, and here you get it for free.

The little tower on its rock just offshore is the Maiden's Tower. Legend says a sultan locked his daughter in it to escape a prophecy that a snake would kill her, and the snake arrived in a basket of fruit. In reality it was a fort, a customs post and a lighthouse. It reopened as a small museum in 2023, with boats from Salacak, but it's at its best from the shore at sunset.

Walk back to Üsküdar's pier, past the Mihrimah Sultan Mosque that Sinan built for Süleyman's daughter, and stay for dinner. Kanaat Lokantası, an old lokanta near the square, has been serving home-style Turkish cooking for generations, and the kebab houses and fish restaurants around the pier have local prices and local customers. Üsküdar is one of the most conservative districts of the city, so many places don't serve alcohol. For a drink, take the ferry to Karaköy or Eminönü afterwards. The crossing at night, with the mosques lit up, is the best ride of the day.

The Spice Bazaar was finished in the 1660s as part of the complex of the New Mosque (Yeni Cami) next door, begun by one sultan's mother in 1597 and completed by another, Turhan Hatice Sultan, in 1665. Turks call it the Mısır Çarşısı, the Egyptian Bazaar, because it was paid for with taxes from Egypt. Inside it's an L-shaped hall of spices, dried fruit, nuts, teas and Turkish delight, and the sellers will hand you samples until you buy something.

The streets around it are where locals actually shop. Follow the smell of roasting coffee to Kurukahveci Mehmet Efendi on Tahmis Sokağı, grinding beans since 1871, and look for Ali Muhiddin Hacı Bekir on Hamidiye Caddesi, selling lokum (Turkish delight) since 1777. It didn't invent lokum, whatever you'll hear, but it's the oldest maker in the city.

A few minutes west, up a staircase between the shops of the market streets, is a small mosque with the most beautiful tiles in Istanbul. Sinan built the Rüstem Pasha Mosque around 1561-63 for Süleyman's grand vizier, who was married to the sultan's daughter Mihrimah, on a raised platform so the rents from the shops below could pay for its upkeep. Almost every surface inside, columns and porch included, is covered in İznik tiles of tulips, carnations and hyacinths, from the very best years of the workshops. Most tourists never find the stairs.

Lunch is the most Istanbul meal there is: balık ekmek, grilled fish in half a loaf of bread with lettuce and onion. At Eminönü it's cooked on boats rocking at the quay, and you eat it at low stools on the waterfront with a glass of pickle juice, turşu suyu. Locals will tell you the fish stalls by the Karaköy fish market, on the other side of the bridge, are better, and they may be right.

Then walk across the Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn. The present bridge opened in 1994, the fifth on this spot, and its upper deck is lined all day with men fishing for small fish with long rods, while the lower deck has restaurants.

On the Karaköy side, walk five minutes east to Karaköy Güllüoğlu, open here since 1949 and run by a family of baklava makers from Gaziantep, the city that does it best. Order a portion of pistachio baklava and a su böreği, layered pastry with cheese, if you're still hungry, and eat standing at the counter like everyone else. It's a better choice than the queues at the famous names in Sirkeci.

Next door, on the Galataport waterfront, Istanbul Modern moved into a new building by Renzo Piano in 2023, its facade covered in thousands of small reflective panels that shimmer with the water. The collection tells the story of Turkish art from the late Ottoman painters to today, and the temporary shows are some of the best in the region. The café terrace looks across the Bosphorus to the old city and is worth the visit on its own.

Walk up the steep lanes to the Galata Tower, built by the Genoese in 1348 as the high point of their walled trading colony across the water from Constantinople. Legend says that in the 1630s Hezarfen Ahmed Çelebi flew from the top with artificial wings and landed in Üsküdar, on the Asian side. The only source is the travel writer Evliya Çelebi, who liked a good story.

A lift takes you most of the way to the gallery at the top for the 360-degree view of the Golden Horn, the old city and the Bosphorus. The queue can be long and the ticket is pricey. Go early, or at least look at it from the little square at its foot, which is lovely at any hour.

From the tower, walk up to Tünel, the little underground funicular that opened in 1875, the second-oldest underground railway in the world after London's, and the start of İstiklal Avenue. This was the Grande Rue de Péra, the main street of Ottoman Istanbul's Levantine and European quarter, and it's still lined with 19th-century embassies, churches and passages. A restored red tram rattles its whole length to Taksim Square, and the Pera Museum, just off the avenue, has Osman Hamdi Bey's painting The Tortoise Trainer, the most famous picture in Turkey.

Then sit down for a meyhane dinner in the lanes of Asmalımescit, just off the avenue. A meyhane is a tavern where the evening is built around rakı, the aniseed spirit that turns white when you add water, and an endless parade of meze: white cheese and melon, stuffed mussels, fava, smoked eggplant, then fish or grilled meat. Asmalı Cavit is the classic. It's loud, it's long, and it's how Istanbul spends its nights.

Chora (Kariye in Turkish) is a small church by the city walls with the most beautiful Byzantine art in Istanbul. Between 1315 and 1321, the statesman and scholar Theodore Metochites paid for its mosaics and frescoes, and they tell the life of the Virgin and of Christ in gold, with faces as alive as anything in Renaissance Italy, which they predate. In the side chapel, the Anastasis fresco shows Christ pulling Adam and Eve out of their tombs, the doors of hell broken beneath his feet.

The church became a mosque around 1511, a museum in 1945 and a mosque again in May 2024. Visitors now use a separate route and pay a ticket, and the mosaics are still there to see.

Walk five minutes to the Theodosian Walls, the triple line of land walls built in the 5th century that kept Constantinople safe for a thousand years. On 29 May 1453 the Ottomans finally broke through them near here, and Mehmed rode into the city through the Edirnekapı gate. The fiercest fighting was a little to the south, at the Gate of St. Romanus, where the last emperor, Constantine XI, was last seen fighting. His body was never identified.

Right on the walls stands the Tekfur Palace, the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus, the only Byzantine palace in the city still standing to its full height, with its red brick and white marble facade. It was later an Ottoman tile workshop and is now a small museum, and you can climb up for a view along the walls.

Walk downhill to the Golden Horn and the neighborhoods of Fener and Balat, home for centuries to the city's Greeks, Jews and Armenians. Fener is still the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the spiritual center of the world's Orthodox Christians, in the modest Church of St. George. Its middle gate has stayed closed and painted black since 1821, when Patriarch Gregory V was hanged in it at the start of the Greek War of Independence. Above it towers the red-brick Phanar Greek Orthodox College of 1881-83, and by the water stands the Bulgarian Church of St. Stephen, made entirely of prefabricated iron shipped down the Danube from Vienna and consecrated in 1898.

Balat, next door, was the Jewish quarter, with the Ahrida Synagogue founded in the 15th century (visits by appointment only). Today its steep lanes of colorful houses are full of cafés, antique shops and people taking photos, but walk two streets back and it's still a neighborhood where washing hangs over the street.

Get back to Karaköy or Eminönü by taxi, or by the Golden Horn ferry, which calls at Balat and Fener, and catch the ferry across to Kadıköy on the Asian side. It's a 20-minute crossing, and it's the moment to buy a tea and a simit from the onboard café, stand at the back rail and feed the gulls like everybody else. On the way, the whole skyline of the old city slides past: Topkapı, Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque and Süleymaniye on its hill.

Kadıköy is where Istanbullus go out, and the streets of its market (çarşı), a few minutes from the pier, are the best food walk in the city: fishmongers, pickle shops, delis selling cheeses and cured meats from all over Turkey, and meze shops piled high with stuffed peppers and vine leaves.

Have a late lunch in the middle of it, at Çiya Sofrası, opened in 1998 by Musa Dağdeviren, a chef who has spent decades collecting recipes from villages all over Anatolia. Choose from the counter of the day: sour soups, stuffed vegetables, kebabs with fruit, dishes you won't see anywhere else in the city. For a sweet ending, try a Maraş-style ice cream at Ali Usta in Moda, open since 1969.

Walk south to Moda, a leafy neighborhood on a small cape, and join the crowd on the grass of the seafront park for the last sunset, looking back across the water to the old city you've spent five days in. Then end the trip on Kadife Sokak, the street everyone calls Barlar Sokak, "Bars Street", where the bars spill out onto the pavement and the music goes until late. If you'd rather sit down, the meyhanes of the market streets serve until midnight, and the ferries back to the European side run until late too.