Beylerbeyi Palace

Guide

Beylerbeyi Palace was an Ottoman summer palace on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, in the Üsküdar district of İstanbul, and takes its name from the Beylerbeyi quarter around it. It was built between 1863 and 1865 on the orders of Sultan Abdülaziz, to the design of the architect Sarkis Balyan, and it is one building in a complex of several. It is open today as a palace museum.

An earlier wooden summer palace stood here, built in 1832 for Sultan Mahmud II. A fire broke out in it in 1851 while Sultan Abdülmecid was staying there, and from that day the building was considered unlucky and left unused; Abdülaziz had it demolished in 1861. Construction of the present palace began on 6 August 1863 and the building was finished in 1864, but the choosing, making and placing of its furnishings took longer, and the formal opening was held on 21 April 1865.

The palace is masonry, two storeys over a high basement, built on the quay at the water's edge, in a manner that brings together Renaissance, Baroque and eastern and western taste. It is rectangular, with the roof hidden behind a parapet running round every face and a strongly marked string course dividing the ground floor from the one above; the middle sections of the sea and side faces project outward in three parts. The windows are rectangular and ornamented with arches, with single and paired columns between them and at the wall corners. The first floor is paved entirely in marble, the second in stone resembling it. Inside there are three entrances, six large halls, twenty-four rooms, a Turkish bath and a bathroom, divided into the Harem to the north and the Mabeyn-i Hümayun to the south.

Both floors are planned as rooms around a large central hall. On the ground floor is a pool fed with water from the sea and roofed with glass, with four rooms at the corners of the hall; a wide double-armed staircase facing the pool, or a service stair, leads up. The great hall above is the Reception Hall, and beside it are two smaller halls and small rooms facing the sea and the land. The interiors are worked with carved wood, gold embroidery, painting and calligraphy. Abdülaziz took a particular interest in the decoration and, out of his passion for the sea, had sea and ship motifs worked into some of the frames and cartouches of the ceilings; there are also verses written in the sülüs and ta'lik hands. The Harem is plainer.

The palace has held a long line of guests. Its first important foreign visitor was Eugénie de Montijo, wife of Napoleon III; others were King Nicholas I of Montenegro, Nasir al-Din Shah of Persia, Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich Ignatyev, who came to İstanbul to sign the Treaty of San Stefano, and the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Joseph. Abdülaziz used the palace each year, generally from the end of April, along with his other summer residences, and received here the heads of state who wished to return his European visit and to pay their respects on the opening of the Suez Canal. During the war of 1877–78 the palace housed and treated first refugees and then wounded soldiers. It was repaired in 1909 by the architect Vedat Tek. Abdülhamid II, brought from the Alatini mansion in Salonica after the Balkan wars for his safety, spent the last six years of his life here under house arrest and died in the palace on 10 February 1918.

Under the republic the palace passed to the National Palaces administration by a decree of 1925. Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran was received here in 1934 as the guest of Atatürk, and the Balkan Games festival was held here in 1936, Atatürk spending that night in the palace. Part of the large garden was given over to the highways authority and part to the naval petty officers' school, and the building of the Bosphorus Bridge close by in 1973 further broke up the setting; both the bridge and the use of its buildings by various institutions have told against the palace's original character.

Visit status for this record: open to visitors.