Dynastic History | Tekfur Sarayı — The Last Palace, Then Five Tile Kilns

The building is wedged between the inner and outer lines of the Theodosian walls at the northern end of the circuit, an annex of the Blachernae palace where the later emperors actually lived. It went up in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, and it is named for Constantine Palaiologos, a son of Michael VIII — not for the tenth-century Constantine VII whose epithet the name suggests. Three storeys, faced in bands of red brick and white marble laid in geometric patterns, a four-arched arcade at ground level and an audience hall at the top.

What happened afterwards is the longer half of its history. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Ottoman court kept part of the sultan's menagerie in the shell and in a cistern beside it. From 1719 a tile works operated inside, with five kilns and craftsmen brought from İznik. It produced tiles in the İznik manner but with European colours and patterns, and its output went into the fountain of Ahmed III in 1728 and the Hekimoğlu Ali Paşa mosque in 1734; it ran for roughly a century. After that a glass and bottle works, then a poorhouse for the city's Jewish poor, until a fire in 1864 ended that use.

The walls were consolidated between 1955 and 1970, then a project begun in 2010 rebuilt the interior — new floors, a roof and lifts inside a shell that had stood open to the sky for generations. It opened as a museum in 2019, and a good deal of what it displays is the pottery its own kilns made.

📸 Cover: the inner courtyard after the rebuilding, Antoloji, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons — the walls are original fabric; the decking, glazing and railings are not