Yıldız Palace
— — a palace built as a garden, kept behind its wall.
Not only on a wall.
“On the hill above Beşiktaş, the last Ottoman sultans built a palace that hides among trees. Yıldız was a hunting ground first, then a retreat, then under Abdülhamid II in the late nineteenth century the working seat of the empire, kept back from the water and the visible city. Pavilions in wood and stone are scattered through Yıldız Park, with the Şale Köşkü above and the porcelain factory below. The view down to the Bosphorus opens in pieces between cedars and plane trees. The whole place is quieter than its scale.
Yıldız Palace, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Yıldız Palace is a complex of pavilions and gardens on the European side of Istanbul, on a hill above the Bosphorus in the Beşiktaş district. Originally an imperial hunting ground from the seventeenth century, it was developed as an imperial retreat under Selim III and Mahmud II, and became the principal residence of Sultan Abdülhamid II from 1889 until his deposition in 1909. Its name means star palace. The grounds, Yıldız Park, were laid out as a landscape garden and remain a public park today.
Rather than a single monumental building, Yıldız is a scatter of köşks and pavilions in wood, stucco and stone, set into terraces among Lebanese cedars and Anatolian planes. The Şale Köşkü, an Ottoman chalet built in three phases between 1880 and 1898, was used to host visiting heads of state including Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1898. The Yıldız Porcelain Factory, founded in 1894 at the foot of the slope, produced wares for the court in a building modelled on a small medieval European castle.
Yıldız Park is open daily without charge, from morning into the evening. The pavilions inside the inner palace, including the Şale Köşkü, are run as museums by the National Palaces administration and have a separate ticket and reduced opening hours, typically Tuesday through Sunday. The walk up from Beşiktaş takes about twenty minutes and climbs steeply; many visitors come up by taxi and walk down. The Çadır Köşkü, on the lower pond, serves tea in the afternoons.