Kasr-ı Hümayun Palace Museum

About this place

The museum bills this as the one small imperial palace the late Ottomans built outside Istanbul: a hunting lodge on a hill above the Gulf of İzmit, given its final form around 1875 under Sultan Abdülaziz by Garabet Balyan, of the Armenian family of architects behind Dolmabahçe. Picture Dolmabahçe compressed to two storeys, a marble façade and a single reception hall and you have it: the same taste without the endless corridors. The painted ceilings, attributed to the French artist Sason, are the finest thing in the building, so look up before you look at the furniture. The surprise is that the palace's defining moments have nothing to do with sultans. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk received the French novelist Claude Farrère here on 18 June 1922, and on 16 January 1923 he held his first meeting with Istanbul's newspaper editors in these rooms, sketching the shape of the new state months before the Republic was declared. The Atatürk Room keeps his armchairs, telephone and chess table, brought over from the presidential yacht Savarona, alongside a symbolic table for that press meeting with the journalists' names engraved on it, and 1938 newspaper cuttings reporting his death. The rest is period rooms furnished in 19th-century palace style: the reception hall, the Mother-of-Pearl Room, the bedroom and the sultan's bath. Manage expectations: this is a small museum you finish in 30 to 45 minutes. It opened as a museum in 1967, closed after the 1999 earthquake and reopened in 2007 after a thorough restoration, so what you see is tidy rather than atmospheric. It does not justify a trip from Sapanca on its own, but it earns an hour if you are already in İzmit for the shops or passing through on the way to Istanbul. The Ottoman clock tower stands in the same park and the terrace looks out over the gulf. There is no lift, the upper floor means stairs, and the rooms are tight for a pushchair. Getting here from Sapanca is easy: about 40 km on the D100 or the TEM motorway, roughly 40 to 45 minutes by car, and the palace sits on the hill directly above İzmit railway station. Without a car, the regional train from Sapanca station stops at İzmit, and it is a short uphill walk from there. Foreigners pay around 3 euros, the museum closes on Mondays, and the ticket desk shuts at 16:30.