İbrahim Pasha Palace, Istanbul

İbrahim Pasha Sarayı stands directly opposite the entrance of the Sultan Ahmet I mosque, on the site of the ancient Hippodrome; it is believed to have been built by Süleyman at the beginning of his reign in 1520, replacing an earlier wooden structure ¹. In 1524 it passed to grand vezir İbrahim Pasha — a Greek convert who had married Süleyman's sister Hatice — who served as grand vezir until Süleyman had him executed in 1536 ².

It is the largest palace the Ottomans ever built, far greater than any building in Topkapı Sarayı ³. Its great hall overlooking the Hippodrome was the grand vezir's office and probably later the High Court of Justice; afterwards it became a janissary barracks, part of it a prison, and by the early twentieth century an abandoned ruin whose north-eastern wing was demolished in 1937 for the Adliye law courts ³. Restoration began in 1965 and the palace now houses the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art, formerly in the Süleymaniye imaret ³.

The restored south-east wing stands two storeys around three sides of a courtyard, over splendid vaulted substructures ⁴. Collections include Umayyad, Abbasid, Mamluk, Seljuk, Beylik and Ottoman works — carpets, manuscripts, calligraphy, miniatures, woodwork, stonework, ceramics, glass and metalwork — the rarest in the great hall, including the carpets depicted by Holbein and other western painters ⁵. Beneath the great hall an ethnological collection displays objects of the Yürük, the semi-nomadic Turcomans of Anatolia ⁶.

• Source read: Freely, A History of Ottoman Architecture (2011), pp. 230–233 (Ibrahim Pasha Sarayı).
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