In 2024 the Museum was closed for restoration.
Opening hours: 9am-5pm
Closed: Mondays
Ticket price: TL8 (2014)
Location: Beside Arasta Bazaar, Sultanahmet, İstanbul
Much less visited than it deserves to be, the Great Palace Mosaics Museum offers the best opportunity for visitors to imagine the splendour of the long lost Byzantine palace complex that used to stand here.
Before the coming of the Ottoman Topkapı Palace, the area that is now Sultanahmet was the site of the Great Palace, home to the Byzantine emperors. Like Topkapı, this was not so much one big building as a collection of brick-and-stone mansions and pavilions linked by corridors and open spaces. Because the Ottomans chose to base themselves on the same site, most of the Great Palace was lost beneath more recent monuments. However, one remarkable reminder did come to light back in the 1930s when a giant mosaic from the Magnaura Palace, one of the constituent parts of the Great Palace, was discovered.
Today visitors to the Great Palace Mosaics Museum get the chance to gaze down on a carpet of tiny pieces of stone, glass and coloured marble depicting scenes of everyday life in Byzantine times. Look out in particular for a bear up a tree, a monkey trying to catch birds, and two boys playing with a hoop the colour of whose clothing (green and blue) may have been chosen to evoke the colours of the most popular chariot teams of the day.
“…a huge puzzle box of royal residences, offices, state chambers, baths, gardens, shrines, churches, barracks, dormitories, workshops, kitchens, stables, museums, a university, art galleries and even a zoo.”
