Yıldız Palace: the palace-city of Abdülhamid II
The last great Ottoman palace was a walled town on a hill, with a theatre, a library, workshops and its own porcelain factory. What survives, what opened in 2024 and how to visit.
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Most Ottoman palaces are a building. Yıldız is a landscape: some 500,000 square metres of pavilions, courtyards, gardens and workshops spread over the wooded slope between Beşiktaş and Ortaköy, looking out over the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara. It was the last great palace the Ottomans built in Istanbul, and for 33 years the place from which Sultan Abdülhamid II governed the empire.
Before Abdülhamid
The hillside began as a garden. The first pavilion here was built by Selim III for his mother, Mihrişah Sultan, and his rococo fountain, dated 1804–1805, still stands in the private garden. Mahmud II added a kiosk in 1834–1835 that has not survived; Abdülmecid built a new one for his own mother in 1842.
Sultan Abdülaziz gave the site its first large buildings: the two-storey Great Mabeyn Pavilion of 1866, the single-storey Çit Pavilion beside it, and, out in the park, the Malta and Çadır kiosks built by Sarkis Balyan and his brother.
A palace that became a town
After his accession in 1876, Abdülhamid II left Dolmabahçe for Yıldız and stayed for the rest of his reign. Around the older pavilions he added a harem, apartments for the princes, a theatre (completed in 1889), a library, a pharmacy, carpentry and repair workshops and a mosque at the gate, all inside walls about four metres high. Two barracks were built nearby for the palace guard. Counting everyone who served it directly or indirectly, the palace’s population is thought to have reached about 12,000.
The Çit Pavilion served as headquarters during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–1878 and the Greco-Turkish war of 1897. In 1900 the sultan built himself the Small Mabeyn Pavilion, his private residence, most likely designed by his chief architect Raimondo d’Aronco, with painted Bosphorus views on the ceilings and stained glass signed by the Parisian artist Bonet. It was here, on 15 May 1919, that Mehmed VI received Mustafa Kemal before his departure for Samsun.
From military academy to museum
Abdülhamid was deposed in 1909 and later sultans used Yıldız only now and then. In 1924 the palace was given to the army’s staff college, and from 1946 it housed the War Academies. It passed to the Ministry of Culture in 1978, to the Presidency in 2015 and to the National Palaces in 2018, which carried out the most thorough restoration in its history.
Yıldız opened as a museum on 19 July 2024. For the first time visitors could enter the Great Mabeyn Pavilion, where foreign statesmen were once received, the Çit Pavilion, the Small Mabeyn Pavilion and the Harem, along with the orangery, the bath, the Island Kiosk and the Cihannüma Kiosk in the private garden. Abdülhamid’s library, his carpentry workshop and photographs from the famous Yıldız albums went on show too. The garden itself, with a water channel winding through it like a small river, is one of the highlights.
In July 2025 the National Palaces announced four more museums for the site — the palace theatre, a carpet museum, a furniture museum and a rare-works museum — without giving opening dates.
Yıldız Park and its kiosks
Beyond a high wall lay the palace’s outer garden, today Yıldız Park, a public park run by the city. Of the kiosks that once stood among its trees, only three survive: Malta and Çadır from Abdülaziz’s reign, and the Şale, the grandest late addition, whose first section was built by Alexandre Vallaury for Kaiser Wilhelm II’s visit in 1889 and whose ceremonial wing was added by Raimondo d’Aronco for his second visit in 1898.
The park is free to walk in. Press reports in late 2025 said the Malta and Çadır kiosks had been closed for restoration for several years, so do not plan your visit around them.
The porcelain factory
In the early 1890s Abdülhamid founded a porcelain factory in the palace grounds, modelled on the court manufactories of Europe. Damaged in the 1894 earthquake, it was rebuilt that same year by d’Aronco. It made everything from large vases to dinner and coffee services for the palaces, and pieces sent as gifts to foreign dynasties; every one carries the factory’s crescent-and-star mark with its founding year and the year the piece was made.
Production stopped when Abdülhamid fell in 1909, resumed in 1910 through the efforts of Osman Hamdi Bey and ran until the occupation of Istanbul in 1920. After decades under the state industrial holding Sümerbank, the factory returned to the National Palaces in 1995. It still produces porcelain today, and sells it in its shop.
Visiting Yıldız
Yıldız closes on Wednesdays, not Mondays like the other National Palaces — a change made in September 2024. The ticket office is open from 09:00 to 17:00, and a ticket bought there is valid only on the day of purchase. Tickets are also sold on the National Palaces e-ticket system, whose English menu offers foreign visitors a combined Dolmabahçe + Yıldız ticket.
The Turkish version of the official page adds that the Müzekart is not valid for the Harem, the Hasbahçe garden and the Small Mabeyn Pavilion. Children up to six enter free. Pushchairs are not allowed inside, large bags go to the cloakroom, and indoors you may take photos with a phone, without flash.
Because it closes on a different day from its neighbours, Yıldız is easy to pair with Dolmabahçe and the Ihlamur Pavilions on a Tuesday or between Thursday and Sunday.