Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum – Masterpieces Beside the Hippodrome
Standing directly beside
Sultanahmet Square,
opposite the great monuments of Istanbul's Historic Peninsula,
the
Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum
contains one of Turkey's richest collections of Islamic art.
The museum is housed inside the historic
İbrahim Pasha Palace,
one of the rare surviving examples of large-scale
16th-century Ottoman civil palace architecture.
From its elevated terraces,
visitors can look directly across the former Byzantine Hippodrome toward the
Blue Mosque.
Inside,
the collection moves across centuries and civilizations.
Visitors encounter objects from the
Umayyad,
Abbasid,
Seljuk,
Artuqid,
Ayyubid,
Mamluk,
Ilkhanid,
Timurid,
Safavid
and Ottoman worlds.
The museum is especially celebrated for its extraordinary
historic carpet collection.
Rare 13th-century Anatolian Seljuk carpets stand alongside animal carpets,
Holbein and Lotto types,
Uşak carpets,
prayer rugs
and later Ottoman examples.
Other galleries preserve
Qur'an manuscripts,
calligraphy,
woodwork,
metalwork,
stone carving,
ceramics,
glass,
religious objects
and ethnographic material
that reveal how Islamic artistic traditions developed across an enormous geographic area.
Allow approximately
1.5–2.5 hours
for a rewarding visit,
or considerably longer if you have a particular interest in carpets,
calligraphy,
Islamic manuscripts
or medieval decorative arts.
World-Class Carpets
See rare Seljuk, Ottoman, Holbein, Lotto and Uşak carpets from one of the world's most important historic collections.
Islamic Manuscripts
Discover Qur'ans, calligraphy and manuscripts representing centuries of Islamic book arts.
İbrahim Pasha Palace
Explore the museum inside an extraordinary Ottoman palace overlooking the ancient Hippodrome.
Centuries of Islamic Art
Follow artistic traditions from the early Islamic world through Seljuk, Mamluk, Timurid, Safavid and Ottoman periods.