Beylerbeyi Palace
Ornate Ottoman summer palace on the Bosphorus, once host to Empress Eugénie, later a prison.
This guide to Beylerbeyi Palace on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus in Istanbul opens with Sultan Abdulhamid II's arrival under guard in 1912, exiled from Thessaloniki as the Balkan Wars closed in, and the line he is said to have spoken on seeing the place he'd end up in. It steps back to the 1860s, when Sultan Abdulaziz built the twenty-four-room palace to dazzle European royalty, and to Empress Eugénie of France's 1869 visit, when she admired it enough to copy one of its windows for her own bedroom in Paris. You'll also hear how Abdulhamid's daughter Ayşe Sultan watched these walls from across the water through binoculars, unable to reach her father inside.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.