Topkapi Palace Harem

The Harem is sold two ways at the gate. On its own it costs 1,050 Turkish lira for foreign visitors and 300 lira for Turkish citizens, with a 150 lira discounted rate. It is also included in the combined ticket, which covers the palace, the Harem and the Hagia Irene church for 2,750 lira for foreigners and 500 lira for citizens. Since a palace visit without the Harem is no longer sold as a cheaper option to foreign visitors, the combined ticket is the standard purchase, and the separate Harem ticket mainly matters for Museum Pass and Müzekart holders.

That is the trap: Museum Pass Türkiye, Museum Pass Istanbul and the Turkish Müzekart admit you to the palace but explicitly exclude the Harem and Hagia Irene. Card holders queue again at the Harem entrance inside the Second Courtyard and pay the 1,050 lira there. Online skip-the-line tickets and guided tours sold by the resellers usually include the Harem; check the product title, because the cheapest entry-only tickets sometimes do not.

The Harem was the private household of the sultan: his mother, wives, concubines, children and the black eunuchs who guarded it, around 400 rooms built and rebuilt from the 16th to the 19th century, the finest of them by the court architect Mimar Sinan. The visitor route is a single one-way path of about 300 metres that opens and closes sections in rotation, so not every room is visible on every visit.

The sequence runs from the Carriage Gate through the Courtyard of the Eunuchs, past the apartments of the Queen Mother, into the Imperial Hall where the sultan received the household, and on to the Privy Chamber of Murad III, Sinan's masterpiece of 1578 with its Iznik tiles and bronze fireplace. The Twin Kiosks of the crown princes, the Courtyard of the Favourites and the Golden Road, the corridor the sultan walked between his quarters and the Harem, close the route.

Allow 45 to 60 minutes inside the Harem on top of the two to three hours the rest of the palace takes. The route is narrow and the Harem is the first place groups head for, so the queue at the Carriage Gate is longest from about 10:30 to 14:00. Either go in first, straight after the 09:00 opening, or leave it for the last ninety minutes before the 17:00 ticket-office closing, when the courtyards empty. The palace is closed on Tuesdays, and the Harem with it.

Yes, and it is the only part of the palace about which that answer is unanimous. The Treasury has the diamond and the dagger, the Sacred Relics have the atmosphere, but the Harem is where the palace stops being a museum of objects and becomes a building people lived in: the tilework is the best in Istanbul outside the Rüstem Pasha mosque, the rooms are intimate, and the architecture explains the politics. For a visitor who has to choose between a cheaper entry-only ticket and one with the Harem, the Harem ticket is the right one.