Up to 1 hour in Fatih, Istanbul — page 2

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

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

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