Dolmabahçe Palace: tickets, highlights and visitor guide

Built

1843–1856, for Sultan Abdülmecid I

Architects

Garabet and Nigoğayos Balyan

Famous for

The crystal staircase and a 4.5-tonne Bohemian chandelier

Also here

The room where Atatürk died, 10 November 1938

Closed

Mondays

Time needed

2 hours for the Selamlık and Harem sections

Why the sultans left Topkapı

By the 1840s Topkapı Palace was three hundred years old and, to a nineteenth-century sultan trying to present the Ottoman Empire as a modern European power, it looked medieval. Sultan Abdülmecid I commissioned a new palace on reclaimed land on the Bosphorus shore — dolma bahçe means "filled-in garden", because the site was once a bay that had been gradually filled to make an imperial garden.

The result cost a fortune the empire did not really have. It is often cited as one of the expenditures that pushed the Ottoman treasury towards the debt crisis of the 1870s. Whether or not that is fair, the ambition is unmistakable the moment you walk in.

What to see inside

The Crystal Staircase

A double horseshoe staircase with balusters of Baccarat crystal, lit from above by a glass dome. It is the single most photographed interior in the palace and it deserves to be.

The Ceremonial Hall

The Muayede Salonu is the showpiece: a vast hall under a fifty-six-column dome, hung with a Bohemian crystal chandelier of some seven hundred and fifty lamps weighing around four and a half tonnes — commonly described as the largest of its kind in the world, and a gift from Queen Victoria. The hall was heated from beneath the floor and used for the sultan's ceremonial receptions.

The Harem

Quieter and, for many visitors, more interesting than the state rooms — the private family apartments, decorated in a mixture of European and Ottoman taste. It is ticketed together with or separately from the main Selamlık section depending on the current arrangement.

Atatürk's room

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish Republic, used Dolmabahçe as a presidential residence in Istanbul and died here on 10 November 1938 at five past nine in the morning. His bedroom is preserved, the bed draped with a Turkish flag, and every clock in the palace was traditionally stopped at 09:05. For Turkish visitors this room is the emotional centre of the whole building, and watching how quietly people move through it tells you a great deal about modern Turkey.

Tickets, hours and the practical warnings

Dolmabahçe is closed on Mondays. The palace is divided into ticketed sections — typically the Selamlık (state rooms) and the Harem, sometimes sold as a combined ticket — and there are usually additional small museums in the grounds. Prices change periodically, so we check the current arrangement and buy in advance rather than quoting a figure that will age badly.

Two things catch visitors out. First, photography inside the state rooms is generally not permitted, and this is enforced. Second, you tour the interior with a palace guide on a fixed route — outside guides, including ours, are not permitted to guide inside the building. Our approach is to explain everything thoroughly in the gardens beforehand, so that you walk the fixed route already knowing what you are looking at, and then answer questions afterwards over coffee by the water.

Allow two hours. The queue can be long in high season, and it moves in batches because of the guided-route system.

Seeing Dolmabahçe from the water

The palace was designed to be approached by boat, and its six-hundred-metre marble façade with the ornamental gate at the centre is genuinely more impressive from the Bosphorus than from the road behind it. If your time in Istanbul is short, seeing it from a cruise and skipping the interior is a perfectly respectable choice — and one we sometimes recommend.

On land it sits a short walk from Ortaköy and the first Bosphorus bridge, which makes a natural afternoon on a private tailor-made Istanbul tour.

Dolmabahçe Palace — frequently asked questions