Topkapı Palace audio guide,
five stops, free.

Stop for a moment before you walk through, because this is where the palace proper begins. Two octagonal towers with pointed caps, a line of battlements between them, and a gilded inscription over the arch. The Turks call it Bâb-üs Selâm, the Gate of Salutation, or simply the Middle Gate. It looks like a castle gate and was never meant to be one: the towers were added under Süleyman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century to say something about the man inside, not to keep an army out.

Everyone who came this way had to get off their horse here. Grand viziers, ambassadors, generals: everyone dismounted. Only the sultan rode through. Inside the towers were the rooms of the chief gatekeeper, where foreign envoys waited until word came that they could enter. To your right, before you go in, is a small fountain that guides call the Executioner's Fountain, where the executioner is said to have washed his hands and his sword. Historians are not sure he ever did, but the story has outlived the doubt.

Now go through. The court in front of you is the Divan Square, the operator also calls it Justice Square, laid out around 1465 and finished in the 1520s. It was the working heart of the state, and the strangest thing about it, for a place of government, was the quiet. Silence was the rule in the inner courts. Gazelles and peacocks wandered the lawns while the council sat, and on feast days the sultan received homage here on a throne plated with gold. Under your feet is a Byzantine cistern; the stone sarcophagi laid out along the right-hand side were dug up on this site. Look at the big plane trees, too: several have been hollowed out by fungus and are still alive.

Then turn to the right, towards the row of chimneys above the colonnade. Those are the Palace Kitchens, the largest in the empire, rebuilt by Mimar Sinan after a fire in 1574. The kitchen block runs ninety-five metres, with ten domed units, and it fed about four thousand people a day with a staff of more than eight hundred. Inside now are the cauldrons and, in the rooms beyond, a selection from the palace's 10,700 pieces of Chinese porcelain, from the Song dynasty to the Qing, one of the finest collections anywhere. The sultans prized the green celadon in particular, and not only for its colour: it was believed to change colour if it touched poisoned food. By the eighteenth century the palace owned more than sixteen thousand Chinese pieces, up from four hundred two centuries before. Somebody in this courtyard was ordering porcelain for three hundred years.

You are at the threshold the whole palace was built around. The Gate of Felicity, Bâbüssaâde, is a dome on slender marble columns with a painted and gilded ceiling, and if you look up into it you will find a golden ball hanging from the centre. It is not much of a wall, and it did not have to be: this gate stood for the sultan's presence in the palace, and nobody passed it without his permission. Even the grand vizier came through only on set days and under set conditions. Beyond it was the Enderûn, the inner court, the sultan's household and school, guarded by white eunuchs.

What happened in front of the gate mattered as much as what lay behind it. On religious feast days and at an accession the sultan sat here on the Bayram throne, and the whole court paid homage standing. Sultans' funerals were held here. Look down at the pavement. There is a small indented stone in front of the gate, and it marks the place where the banner of the Prophet was unfurled and handed to the grand vizier or the commander going to war. A painting in the palace's own portrait collection shows the enthronement of Selim the Third in 1789 on exactly this spot. Most of the rococo painting around you dates from a redecoration of 1774, under Mustafa the Third.

Walk through, and the building right in front of you is the Audience Chamber, the Arz Odası. It is a square kiosk ringed by twenty-two columns under eaves so deep they almost meet you. This is where the empire met the outside world. The grand vizier came here in the afternoon, after the council, to report. Ambassadors were brought here, and their gifts were carried to the big grilled window between the two doors, where the sultan could inspect them as they passed. The door on the left is still called the gift door.

Inside, the sultan received them enthroned. An envoy who came in 1533 wrote that the throne was covered in gold cloth strewn with precious stones, the walls spangled with azure and gold, and that from a fountain water gushed forth from a wall. The throne you see today, shaped like a canopy bed, is later, made for Mehmed the Third in the 1590s. The fountain is still there, beside the door, with a Persian inscription that calls the sultan the fountainhead of generosity, justice and the sea of beneficence. The chamber burned in 1856 and was rebuilt, but the plan is Süleyman's, from 1526 to 1528, and directly behind it, in the middle of the court, stands the small marble library that Ahmed the Third built in 1719.

Before you join the queue, walk to the arcade and look out. The Sea of Marmara is below you, and that view is why this building is here. Mehmed the Conqueror put this pavilion on the highest point of the promontory around 1460, when the palace was new, as a place to receive people: two floors on a terrace, four domed rooms upstairs behind a loggia, all of them opening onto the garden through the arcade you are standing in. Under Selim the First it became the strongroom for the revenues of Egypt, and it has been the Treasury ever since. The rooms were shut for restoration from 2014 until the operator reopened them in 2023, with the display spread across this pavilion and two neighbouring buildings.

The display was rearranged for the reopening, so take the old room order that follows as a guide, not a map. The first holds the mail armour of Mustafa the Third, worked with gold and jewels, and the ebony throne of Murad the Fourth inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl. The second is the one most people have come for. Look for a curved dagger with three large emeralds down the hilt and a fourth emerald at the pommel that lifts to reveal a small English watch. This is the Topkapı Dagger. Mahmud the First had it made in 1746 as a peace offering for Nader Shah of Persia, and sent it east with an embassy of a thousand men. On the road they heard the Shah had been murdered, on the twentieth of June 1747, so they turned round and brought it home. It has never been given to anyone. In 1964 Jules Dassin made a film about stealing it, called Topkapi, which is how many visitors first heard of this palace. In the same room stands the walnut throne of Ahmed the First, inlaid with tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl by Sedefkar Mehmed Ağa, the architect of the Blue Mosque.

Then the diamond. The Spoonmaker's Diamond, Kaşıkçı in Turkish, is eighty-six carats, pear-shaped, set in silver and ringed by two rows of forty-nine smaller diamonds, and it hangs in a glass case on the wall. Nobody knows where it came from. One story says a fisherman found it on the shore and traded it to a jeweller for three spoons. Another says it belonged to Ali Pasha of Tepelena, the near-independent governor of Albania and Greece, and came to the sultan when he was executed and his goods confiscated. A third has Napoleon's mother sending it to ransom a lover. The museum's own records mention a ring stone of the same name under Mehmed the Fourth, but it was far smaller than this one. The honest answer is that the most valuable object in the palace has no provenance at all.

In the same room are two solid gold candleholders, each weighing forty-eight kilograms and set with six thousand six hundred and sixty-six diamonds. Abdülmecid the First sent them to the Kaaba in Mecca, and they were brought back to Istanbul shortly before the empire lost the city. Beside them is the Bayram throne, gold set with tourmalines, made in 1585 for Murad the Third; it is the throne that was carried out and set up in front of the Gate of Felicity on feast days, the one you heard about two stops ago. A throne of a different kind is here too, Indian in style, gold over wood with pearls and emeralds: Nader Shah's gift to Mahmud the First. The dagger was meant to be the answer to it, and never arrived.