Why the palaces all face the strait

Stand on the coast road at Beşiktaş and Dolmabahçe Palace presents you with a wall and a gate. Sit on a boat two hundred metres off it and the same building unfolds into the thing it was designed to be: a three-hundred-metre marble façade with its own quay, arranged for an audience arriving by sea.

That is true of nearly everything along this strait, and it is worth understanding why before you look at any of it.

The century the court came down to the shore

For four hundred years the Ottoman sultans lived at Topkapı, on the point above Seraglio Head, in a compound of courtyards and low pavilions that turned inward. It was a fortress-palace in the old style: power expressed by how little of it you could see.

In the nineteenth century that changed completely. The empire was remaking itself along European lines — the reform era known as the Tanzimat — and the architecture followed the politics. In 1856 Sultan Abdülmecid moved the court out of Topkapı and into a brand-new palace on the shore at Dolmabahçe: symmetrical, colonnaded, faced in marble, and unmistakably addressed to the water.

His successors kept building along the same shoreline. So did the wealthy, in wooden waterfront mansions called yalı, which line the strait to this day and which are also, invariably, at their best from the front — that is, from a boat. The Bosphorus in the nineteenth century was the city's main avenue, and everyone who could afford to built facing it.

Going north: the European shore

First, out of the Golden Horn

Our own evening begins before the Bosphorus does. The boat boards at Cibali, on the old-city shore of the Golden Horn, and the first stretch is the inlet itself: out under the Atatürk Bridge and the Galata Bridge, with the Galata Tower above Karaköy on one side and Süleymaniye — Sinan's great mosque of the 1550s — on the skyline of the other. Then the boat rounds Sarayburnu, the point beneath Topkapı, and turns north into the strait. It is a useful prologue: the inward-looking old city on its hill, seen from the water just before the nineteenth century starts to unfold along the shore.

Dolmabahçe Palace

Opened in 1856 for Sultan Abdülmecid and built by the Balyans, the Armenian family who were the court's architects for most of the century. It cost an amount of money the treasury did not really have, which is part of its story. Baroque, rococo and neoclassical all at once, it was the seat of Ottoman power for the empire's last decades, and Atatürk died in a bedroom on the water side of it in 1938 — which is why clocks in the palace are traditionally set to 09:05.

From the water you get the whole length of it, plus the ornamental gate on the quay and the clock tower behind. At night it is lit, and the marble goes the colour of old paper.

Çırağan Palace

A kilometre further up, and the last imperial palace built on the Bosphorus: finished in 1871 for Sultan Abdülaziz, again by a Balyan. It burned out in 1910, stood as a shell for most of the twentieth century, and was rebuilt in the 1990s as a hotel. It is the one building on this route where the pretty story and the sad story are the same story — a sultan's palace that is now somewhere you can book a room.

Ortaköy Mosque

Officially the Büyük Mecidiye Mosque, finished in the mid-1850s by the same architects, in the same neo-baroque register as the palaces — which is unusual for a mosque and is exactly the point of it. It sits on its own small promontory with the Bosphorus Bridge directly behind, and the two together make the single most photographed composition in Istanbul. From the water you get it straight on, with its reflection, which is the version on the postcards.

The Bosphorus Bridge

The first bridge ever to span the strait, opened in 1973 and now officially the 15 July Martyrs Bridge. A little over a kilometre of suspended roadway joining Europe to Asia, lit at night in colours that change. Passing underneath it is the moment most people on deck stop talking.

Bebek

A curved bay of waterfront mansions, cafes and a promenade — the calm, expensive, residential Bosphorus rather than the monumental one. Worth a look because it is what most of this shoreline actually looks like when it is not being a palace.

Rumeli Fortress

And then the register changes completely. Rumeli Hisarı is not nineteenth-century and not decorative: Mehmed II threw it up in 1452, in about four months, at the narrowest point of the strait, in order to cut Constantinople off from the Black Sea. The city fell the following spring. Three enormous towers and a curtain wall running straight down the hillside into the water, floodlit at night, and from a boat you see it the way it was meant to be seen — from the position of a ship that is not going to be allowed past. It is the only building on the route designed to be seen from a boat as a threat.

The second bridge, and the fortress facing Rumeli

Above Rumeli Hisarı the strait passes under its second crossing, the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge, opened in 1988 and named for the sultan who built the fortress below it. Seeing the two in one glance is the point: a 1452 siege work and a 1988 suspension span, doing the same job of holding the narrows, five centuries apart.

On the Asian bank opposite stands the older and far smaller fortress of Anadolu Hisarı — put up around 1394 by Bayezid I, some sixty years before Rumeli was thrown up facing it. The boat comes about here rather than carrying on, so you see it across the water rather than alongside. Between them they close the channel at its narrowest point, which was exactly the intention.

The boat comes about up here, under the second bridge, and starts back down the Asian side. The city's lights are far behind by now and the two fortresses face each other across dark water — a good moment to step out onto one of the open decks.

Coming home: the Asian shore

Beylerbeyi Palace

The summer palace, finished in 1865 for Abdülaziz: smaller than Dolmabahçe, more restrained, and built for receiving guests rather than governing. The Empress Eugénie of France stayed here in 1869 on her way to open the Suez Canal, and reportedly had the windows of her room in Paris remade to match. It sits directly beneath the Bosphorus Bridge on the Asian side, which makes for an odd and rather good juxtaposition of 1865 and 1973 in one glance.

Üsküdar

The Asian heart of the city and much older than anything opposite it — this was Chrysopolis, a Greek town, before Constantinople existed. The waterfront is dense, low and busy, with Sinan's Mihrimah Sultan Mosque of 1548 standing right at the ferry landing. If the European shore is the nineteenth century performing, Üsküdar is the city getting on with it.

The Maiden's Tower

The small tower on its own islet just off Üsküdar, and the last landmark you pass before the boat rounds the old city's point and turns back into the Golden Horn. There has been something on that rock since antiquity — a toll post, a customs point, a lighthouse, a quarantine station — and the building there now is essentially eighteenth century. Every version of its legend involves a prophecy, a princess and a snake, and no two guides tell it the same way.

We pass close enough for it to be properly lit and far enough that it keeps the outline everybody recognises.

How to actually see them

Three practical notes, in descending order of usefulness.

• Go at night, and go once by day if you have time. These are lit buildings on a dark strait, which flatters the palaces enormously; daylight flatters the hills and the yalıs. They are genuinely different trips.
• Don't fight for a side of the boat. On a route that goes up one shore and down the other, the good side changes at the turn. Anywhere is the right seat if you are prepared to wait an hour.
• Northbound is the busy half. Dolmabahçe, Çırağan, Ortaköy and the bridge come close together, soon after the boat leaves the Golden Horn. If you want to be out on an open deck for anything, be out for that.

Our own sailing leaves Cibali Pier on the Golden Horn at 21:00 and runs this exact route — out under the Galata Bridge, north past the palaces, about under the second bridge, home down the Asian shore and back into the Golden Horn — with dinner and the stage programme going on inside the two salons. The hour-by-hour account of the evening sets out where you will be when, and the evening itself is here. Getting to the pier is covered in our Istanbul transport guide.

Frequently asked