Mid-range · 12-hour walk · Istanbul
Istanbul in a day: the palace to the Asian shore
Topkapı at opening, Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, the cistern, the Grand Bazaar for lunch, Süleymaniye, the spice market and a ferry to Asia at sunset.
Istanbul's great monuments sit within a kilometre of each other on the Sultanahmet hill, and the day starts there before the crowds. Topkapı goes first because it is the largest and the slowest to see; the mosques and the cistern follow; the bazaars take the afternoon; and the day ends on a ferry across the Bosphorus to the Asian shore, which costs the same as a bus ride and is the best twenty minutes in the city. Mosques close to visitors at prayer times, and the Grand Bazaar is shut on Sundays.
The route, stop by stop
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Topkapı Palace
The Ottoman sultans' palace for four centuries. Give the Harem most of your time; the treasury's Spoonmaker's Diamond and the terrace over the Bosphorus are the rest.
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Hagia Sophia
Fifteen centuries old and a mosque again since 2020. Visitors now go in by a separate ticketed route to the upper gallery, which is where the Byzantine mosaics are anyway.
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Blue Mosque
Across the square, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque of 1616, with six minarets and more than twenty thousand İznik tiles. Free; cover shoulders and knees, and scarves for women are lent at the door.
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Basilica Cistern
A 6th-century reservoir of 336 columns lit low over the water, with two Medusa heads reused as column bases at the far end.
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Grand Bazaar
Lunch and bargaining. Some sixty covered streets and four thousand shops; eat at a lokanta in the inner lanes, and agree a price before you drink the tea.
90 min here Walk here → -
Süleymaniye Mosque
Sinan's masterpiece on the city's third hill, quieter and grander than the Blue Mosque. Sinan is buried in a small tomb beside the complex, and the terrace looks down on the Golden Horn.
40 min here Walk here → -
Spice Bazaar
Downhill through the market streets to the L-shaped spice market of the 1660s: Turkish delight, saffron and dried apricots, with the tiled Rüstem Paşa mosque in the lane beside it.
30 min here Walk here → -
Kadıköy
Arrive by ferry from the previous stop
From Eminönü, the ferry to Asia: twenty minutes on the Bosphorus with the old city's skyline behind you at sunset. Dinner in Kadıköy's market streets, then the ferry back.
60 min here Walk here →
More in Istanbul
Every walking route in Istanbul, or the full Istanbul guide for where to stay and what a day costs.