Istanbul Archaeological Museums

The Istanbul Archaeological Museums are really three museums in one: the Archaeological Museum, the Museum of the Ancient Orient and the Tiled Pavilion. Together they hold close to a million objects of many cultures, brought in from across the empire, and they form Türkiye's first museum.

The story began in 1869, when the Imperial Museum, Müze-i Hümayun, was founded around antiquities gathered in the church of Hagia Eirene. In 1881 Osman Hamdi Bey became director and gave Turkish museum work a new direction. He excavated at Nemrut Dağı, Myrina, Kyme and Lagina, and in 1887 to 1888 at Sidon, where he found the royal necropolis and brought back to Istanbul the world-famous Alexander Sarcophagus and many others.

Each building has its own history. The Tiled Pavilion (Çinili Köşk), begun in 1472, is the oldest of them and among the oldest Ottoman civil buildings in Istanbul; it now shows Turkish tiles and ceramics. The building for ancient Oriental works was built by Osman Hamdi in 1883 as the Academy of Fine Arts, designed by Alexander Vallaury, who later designed the main museum.

Plan on a long visit: there is far more here than one sitting takes in.