National Palaces Painting Museum

The Crown Prince's Apartment (Veliahd Dairesi) was built under Sultan Abdülmecid as part of Dolmabahçe Palace. Abdülaziz, Murad V, Abdülhamid II, Mehmed V Reşad, Yusuf İzzeddin, Mehmed VI and Abdülmecid Efendi all lived in it as heirs to the throne.

Part of the building opened as the National Palaces Painting Museum on 22 March 2014, and between 2014 and 2020 it showed 200 works. After the second part of the apartment was restored, the museum was rearranged across both: it now shows 553 works dated from the 16th to the 20th century, in 34 themed sections instead of the earlier 11. The Administration names Félix-Auguste Clément's gazelle hunt of Prince Halim in the Gatah desert as the largest Orientalist painting in Turkey. Like the palace, the museum is run by the National Palaces Administration, and its visiting rules apply here.

The palace and the museum are one line along the shore. Measured on OpenStreetMap, the Painting Museum stands about 100 m beyond the Harem at the Beşiktaş end, and about 270 m from the middle of the Selamlık. A visit that follows the palace route, Selamlık first and Harem second, therefore ends close to the museum, and that is the order that saves walking: Selamlık, Harem, Painting Museum.

The visiting rules list a single Dolmabahçe ticket for the Selamlık, the Harem and the Painting Museum together, so a group holding the palace ticket needs nothing more here. The Administration also sells a ticket for the Painting Museum alone, which lets it stand as a visit of its own.

The Palace Collections Museum is the next National Palaces site along the same line, about 200 m further towards Beşiktaş as the crow flies. On the street side, a gateway on Dolmabahçe Caddesi carries the museum's name. Ask at the ticket office which door your group should use, rather than assuming it is the one you came in by.

The sections are arranged by painter or by theme: rooms for Ivan Aivazovsky, Osman Hamdi Bey, Hoca Ali Rıza and Hüseyin Zekâi Paşa, the studio of Abdülmecid Efendi, the Ottoman navy, wars and victories, Çanakkale, Ottoman ladies, the Turkish bath, landscape at the Ottoman court. Each of them is a talk on its own.

Pick four or five sections before the day and say why you chose them. Four centuries of painting cannot be surveyed at the end of a palace visit; a reason to stop in front of a particular canvas can be given.

The visiting rules forbid visitors to take photographs or video in the indoor spaces of every National Palaces site. Outdoors, in gardens and on the waterfront, non-professional photographs are allowed.

In a painting museum this rule meets the reflex it is written for. Say it before the door, not at the first painting, and leave a few minutes outside for the façade instead.

The National Palaces visiting rules make a headset system mandatory once a group with a licensed guide is larger than eight people, and they do not allow guides to narrate loudly indoors without one. The rule is the same in the palace next door and at Topkapı Palace. Staff may remove visitors who do not follow the visiting rules from the site.

The rules do not name a type of system. If you plan to use anything other than the familiar rented sets, a phone-based system like ours included, confirm with the Administration that it is accepted before the day. The article texts and every site the rule covers are on our National Palaces headset rule page.