🇹🇷Fatih

Bosphorus cruise from Eminönü

The Long Bosphorus Tour is Şehir Hatları's own scenic ferry, running the full length of the strait from Eminönü, on the historic peninsula, north to Anadolu Kavağı near the mouth of the Black Sea, then back the same way.

• Must see
• Activity

Sultan Ahmed Mosque

Sultanahmet Camii

The Blue Mosque was built for Ahmed I between 1609 and 1617, and it is the only imperial mosque in Istanbul that faces Hagia Sophia across open ground rather than standing apart from it.

• Must see
• Historic monument

Süleymaniye Mosque

Süleymaniye Camii

The Süleymaniye is Sinan's imperial mosque for Süleyman the Magnificent, founded in 1550 and inaugurated in 1557, and it is the one to see if you only see one.

• Must see
• Place of worship

Topkapı Palace

Topkapi Sarayı

Topkapı was the seat of the Ottoman empire for nearly four centuries.

• Must see
• Museum

Spice Bazaar

Mısır Çarşısı

The Spice Bazaar is a covered market hall in Eminönü that was paid for by an empire's tax farm and built to keep a mosque solvent.

• Must see
• Market

Main Building of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums

İstanbul Arkeoloji Müzesi

This is the main building of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums, the oldest purpose-built museum in Turkey and the one the whole complex is named after.

• Must see
• Museum

Hippodrome of Constantinople

Sultanahmet Meydanı

The Hippodrome was where Constantinople did its politics.

• Must see
• Historic monument

Grand Bazaar

Kapalı Çarşı

The Grand Bazaar is a covered city of shops that Mehmed II began building in the winter of 1455/56, within three years of taking Constantinople.

• Must see
• Historic monument

Basilica Cistern

Yerebatan Sarnıcı

The Basilica Cistern is a sixth-century water store the size of a cathedral, under a street in Sultanahmet, built for Justinian I. Historical texts say 7,000 enslaved people built it.

• Must see
• Historic monument

Chora Church

Kariye Camii

The Chora holds the best late Byzantine mosaic and fresco cycle anywhere, and it is a long way from the tram, which is why the people who go are the people who came for it.

• Must see
• Historic monument

Hagia Irene

Aya İrini Kilisesi

Hagia Irene is the Byzantine church that was never made into a mosque, and it is the reason it still looks like a Byzantine church inside.

• Must see
• Museum

Obelisk of Theodosius

Theodosius Dikilitaşı

Older than almost everything around it by two thousand years, the Obelisk of Theodosius is a piece of pharaonic Egypt standing in the middle of a Turkish square.

• Must see
• Historic monument

Aqueduct of Valens

Bozdoğan Su Kemeri

Bozdoğan Kemeri, the Aqueduct of Valens, is the surviving bridge of the water system that made a city of a million people possible on a peninsula with almost no rivers.

• Must see
• Historic monument

Column of Constantine

Çemberlitaş Sütunu

A single shaft of Egyptian porphyry stands in the middle of Çemberlitaş Square on Divan Yolu, banded with iron and blackened along one side.

• Must see
• Historic monument

Fatih Istanbul Mosque

Fatih Camii

The Fatih Mosque is where Mehmed the Conqueror is buried, and it stands on the site of the Church of the Holy Apostles — the mausoleum of the Roman emperors, Constantine the Great among them.

• Must see
• Historic monument

Şehzade Mosque

Şehzadebaşı Camii

The Şehzade is the mosque Süleyman the Magnificent built for a dead son, and it is where Sinan learned to build the ones that followed.

• Must see
• Historic monument

Yedikule Fortress

Yedikule Zindanları

Yedikule is a fortress built out of an older monument.

• Must see
• Historic monument

Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople

İstanbul Rum Ortodoks Patrikhanesi

The Ecumenical Patriarchate is the senior see of the Eastern Orthodox world, and it occupies a walled compound in Fener on the Golden Horn.

• Must see
• Place of worship

Walled Obelisk

Örme Dikilitaş

The Walled Obelisk, Örme Dikilitaş in Turkish and literally the masonry obelisk, stands 32 m tall on the spine of the old Hippodrome in what is now Sultanahmet Square, west of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque.

• Must see
• Historic monument

Rüstem Pasha Mosque

Rüstem Paşa Camii

Rüstem Pasha Mosque does not sit on the street.

• Must see
• Historic monument

Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum

Türk ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi

The Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum is housed in the Ibrahim Pasha Palace, a stone mansion of 1524 that belonged to Pargalı Ibrahim Pasha, the second grand vizier of Suleiman the Magnificent.

• Must see
• Museum

Bulgarian St. Stephen Church

Sveti Stefan Bulgar Kilisesi

Bulgarian St. Stephen Church is the cast-iron Bulgarian Orthodox church on the Golden Horn shore in Balat. Istanbul’s official visitor portal dates the present building to 1898 and identifies Hovsep Aznavur as its architect.

• Must see
• Place of worship

Palace of the Porphyrogenitus

Tekfur Sarayı is the last Byzantine palace in Istanbul still standing to its full height, and it survives because it was never important enough to be worth demolishing.

• Must see
• Museum

Serpent Column

Yılanlı Sütun

A battle trophy from 479 BC, standing in a hole in a square in Istanbul.

• Must see
• Historic monument

The Stone of Million

Milyon Taşı

What survives is a single weathered pillar fragment standing in a sunken plot beside the street, and it is the remnant of the Milion — the point from which the Eastern Roman Empire measured itself.

• Must see
• Historic monument

Zeyrek Mosque

Zeyrek Molla Camii

Zeyrek Camii was the Monastery of Christ Pantokrator, and after Hagia Sophia it is the largest Byzantine religious building still standing in Istanbul.

• Must see
• Historic monument

Nuruosmaniye Mosque

Nuruosmaniye Camisi

The Nuruosmaniye is where Ottoman architecture stopped being Ottoman in the classical sense. Begun in 1748 under Mahmud I and finished in 1755 under his brother Osman III, it is the first monumental Ottoman baroque building.

• Must see
• Historic monument

Theodosius Cistern

Şerefiye Sarnıcı

Şerefiye Sarnıcı is a Roman water tank that spent most of the last three centuries with a building sitting on top of it.

• Must see
• Museum

Yavuz Selim Mosque

Yavuz Sultan Selim Cami

Yavuz Selim Mosque crowns the top of the fifth hill of the historic peninsula, above the Golden Horn, and it is a memorial as much as it is a mosque.

• Must see
• Historic monument

Column of the Goths

Gotlar Sütunu

Near the Sarayburnu end of Gülhane Park, well away from the gate most visitors use, a single fluted shaft with a Corinthian capital stands among the trees carrying a Latin inscription: FORTVNAE REDVCI OB DEVICTOS GOTHOS — to Fortuna, who…

• Must see
• Historic monument

Column of Marcian

Kıztaşı

A single granite column stands in a small railed square off Kıztaşı Caddesi in Fatih, and almost everybody who has heard of Istanbul has never heard of it.

• Must see
• Historic monument

Gülhane Park

Gülhane Parkı

Gülhane Park is 9.7 hectares of shaded slope below Topkapı Palace, and for most of its life it was not a park at all but the palace's outer garden — ground the public did not enter.

• Must see
• Nature site

Tiled Kiosk

Çinili Köşk

The Tiled Kiosk, Çinili Köşk, is the oldest non-religious Ottoman building in Istanbul and the odd one out among the city's Ottoman monuments: it does not look Ottoman.

• High
• Museum

Great Palace Mosaic Museum

Büyük Saray Mozaikleri Müzesi

Beneath the Arasta Bazaar, the row of shops behind the Blue Mosque, lies a strip of floor that belonged to the Great Palace of Constantinople.

• High
• Museum

Fenari Isa Mosque

Molla Fenari İsa Camii

Fenari Isa Mosque is two Byzantine churches joined into one building, and understanding that is most of understanding the place.

• High
• Place of worship

Cistern of Philoxenos

Binbirdirek Sarnıcı

Turks call it Binbirdirek, "a thousand and one columns", which is a way of saying "a great many" rather than a count. The real figure is 224.

• High
• Museum

Column of Arcadius

Arkadyos Sütunu

The Column of Arcadius is one of Constantinople's lost monuments, and what is left of it is the reason to come: a stump of imperial propaganda wedged between apartment blocks in Fatih.

• High
• Historic monument

Bodrum Mosque

Bodrum Camii

Bodrum Mosque is the church of the Myrelaion, built around 920 by Romanos I Lekapenos as the chapel of his own palace, and it is one of the very few tenth-century churches of Constantinople still standing.

• High
• Place of worship

Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı

Haseki Hürrem Hamamı

The Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamam is a twin bathhouse commissioned by Hürrem Sultan, wife of Suleiman the Magnificent, and designed by the imperial architect Mimar Sinan, built starting in 1556 between the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque.

• High
• Historic monument

Bulgarian Exarchate

Eksarhhane

Eksarhhane is a historic building in the Fener district that housed the seat of the Bulgarian Exarchate, the autocephalous Bulgarian Orthodox church established in 1870 and centred in Istanbul until the Ottoman Empire's Bulgarian population and administration shifted after the…

• High
• Historic monument

German Fountain

Alman Çeşmesi

The German Fountain is an octagonal, neo-Byzantine gazebo fountain standing in Sultanahmet Square, a gift from German Emperor Wilhelm II to Sultan Abdul Hamid II to mark the Kaiser's 1898 state visit to Istanbul.

• High
• Historic monument

Kalenderhane Mosque

Kalenderhane Camii

Kalenderhane Camii is a Byzantine church that became a mosque, standing in Fatih immediately beside the Valens Aqueduct.

• High
• Place of worship

Fountain of Ahmed III

III. Ahmet Çeşmesi

The Fountain of Ahmed III stands just outside the Imperial Gate of Topkapı Palace, built in 1728 by Sultan Ahmed III during the Tulip Period, the era of Ottoman architecture known for its ornate, floral Baroque-influenced style.

• High
• Historic monument

New Mosque

Yeni Camii

The New Mosque at Eminönü took sixty-six years to build, most of them spent as a ruin. Safiye Sultan — wife of Murad III and later Valide Sultan — ordered it in 1597.

• Notable
• Place of worship

Church of St. Polyeuctus

Ayios Polieuktos Kilisesi

For a few years in the sixth century this was the largest church in Constantinople, and it was built by a woman making a point.

• Notable
• Historic monument

Atik Mustafa Pasha Mosque

Hz. Cabir Cami

A working neighbourhood mosque in Ayvansaray that began as a Byzantine church, and nobody is entirely sure which one.

• Notable
• Historic monument

Church of St. George

Aya Yorgi Patrikhane Kilisesi

The Church of St George in Fener is the cathedral of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the senior see of the Orthodox Christian world, and from the street it is deliberately unassuming.

• Notable
• Place of worship

Little Hagia Sophia

Küçük Ayasofya Camii

The Little Hagia Sophia is the church Justinian built before the great one, and it is where the idea was tried out. It went up between 527 and 536, dedicated to Saints Sergius and Bacchus.

• Notable
• Place of worship

Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam

İslam bilim ve teknoloji tarihi müzesi

The museum occupies the Has Ahırlar, the former imperial stables, a long low range on the edge of Gülhane Park below the Topkapı walls, and it opened on 25 May 2008 under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

• Notable
• Museum

Prison of Anemas

The Prison of Anemas is a historic Byzantine structure located within the walls of Istanbul, Turkey. It forms part of the larger Blachernae Palace complex in the northwestern section of the city.

• Notable
• Historic monument

Aviation Martyrs' Monument

Hava Şehitleri Anıtı

The Aviation Martyrs' Monument, known locally as Hava Şehitleri Anıtı, stands as a memorial dedicated to aviators who lost their lives in service.

• Notable
• Historic monument

Gazi Atik Ali Pasha Mosque

Gazi Atik Ali Paşa Camii

Gazi Atik Ali Pasha Mosque is an Ottoman mosque in Istanbul, Turkey. Its local name is Gazi Atik Ali Paşa Camii. The structure represents historical Islamic architecture within the urban fabric of the city.

• Notable
• Historic monument

Pammakaristos Church

Fethiye Camii

The Pammakaristos was the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate for 131 years after the fall of Constantinople, and its side chapel holds mosaics second only to the Chora's.

• Notable
• Place of worship

Museum of the Ancient Orient

Eski Şark Eserleri Müzesi

The Museum of the Ancient Orient, known locally as Eski Şark Eserleri Müzesi, is an archaeological museum in Istanbul. It forms part of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums complex.

• Notable
• Museum

Yenikapı Square

Yenikapı Şehir Parkı

• High
• Nature site

Muhsine Hatun Mescidi ve Tekkesi

İbrahim Paşa Muhsine Hatum Cami

• Notable
• Place of worship