Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts

Most visitors walk straight past this museum on their way between the Blue Mosque and the Basilica Cistern, which is a shame, because it is the best place in Istanbul to understand the art of the Islamic world and the Turks in particular. The building is itself an exhibit: the palace of Ibrahim Pasha, the brilliant grand vizier and boyhood friend of Suleyman the Magnificent, who gave it to him and later had him executed in 1536. It is one of the very few private Ottoman palaces in the city to survive, built in stone around a great courtyard on the west side of the Hippodrome, and it has housed the museum since 1983. The carpets are the headline. The collection is regularly described as among the richest in the world, running from rare Seljuk carpets of the thirteenth century, among the oldest known, through Anatolian carpets of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, including the patterns European painters copied into their canvases, to Persian and Caucasian rugs. Around them are galleries of Seljuk and Ottoman art: carved wood and stone, tiles, metalwork, glass, illuminated Qurans and calligraphy, with the distinctive Seljuk tombstones and their very different script. Downstairs, the ethnography section turns to daily life, with room settings and costumes tracing how families lived over the last few centuries. It is calm, rarely crowded, closed on Mondays, and the upper windows give a fine view across the Hippodrome to the Blue Mosque.

Practicalities: the museum opens every day except Monday, with longer hours from mid-April to the end of October and shorter winter hours, and ticket counters close half an hour before the museum. It also closes on the day before and the first day of the major religious holidays and on New Year. Skip-the-line tickets with an audio guide from Tiqets let you walk in without queuing, though queues are rarely long here; holders of the official Museum Pass Istanbul should check the current list of covered sites, since it is a state museum. Allow an hour and a half for a good look, more if you care about carpets.

How to see it well: start upstairs with the early Islamic and Seljuk rooms to understand the story, then give the carpet halls proper time. Look for the oldest Seljuk fragments, with their bold, repeated geometric motifs, and then for the Anatolian carpets of the Ottoman golden age, many of them from mosques around the country, where they survived through centuries of use. The labels explain the knots, dyes and design families clearly. Then walk down to the ethnography rooms, which children tend to enjoy most, and finish in the courtyard, where there is a small cafe and a peaceful place to sit away from the square outside.

Why it belongs in your plan: the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia and Topkapi show you the monuments of empire, but this museum shows you the craft that filled them, the carpets that covered their floors, the tiles on their walls and the books read inside them. It also makes the Grand Bazaar more interesting: after an hour here you will look at carpet shops with a sharper eye, and you will know the difference between a museum piece and a tourist rug. It sits directly on the Hippodrome, so it slots easily between the Blue Mosque and the Basilica Cistern, and it is a good refuge on a hot afternoon or a wet morning. Toilets, a cloakroom and a small shop with good books on carpets and Ottoman art make it an easy stop.