Fatih & Historic Peninsula

This is the tip of the peninsula where the city began — Sarayburnu, where the Golden Horn meets the Sea of Marmara, and where two empires built their capitals on the same hill. Everything is here, within a few minutes' walk: Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque facing each other across a park, Topkapı Palace behind them in its gardens, the Basilica Cistern underground, the Archaeological Museums, the Grand Bazaar. It is not a gallery district and never will be. It is the densest concentration of world heritage in Istanbul — Byzantine, Ottoman and Roman fingerprints on the same stones — and the art you come for is fifteen hundred years old.