The Most Beautiful Medieval Places in Turkey
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful medieval places in Turkey are Hagia Sophia, Chora Church (Kariye) and Topkapı Palace. The list covers 5 medieval places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Medieval Turkey is two empires in one city and beyond it. Istanbul was the Byzantine capital for more than a thousand years before the Ottomans took it in 1453, and each power built to show that it ruled the strait between two continents, so domes, mosaics, walls and palaces still face each other across the Bosphorus.
Hagia Sophia, completed under Justinian in 537, raised a dome over a nave so vast that it remained the largest church in the world for nearly a thousand years. The Chora Church preserves early 14th-century mosaics and frescoes, among them the Anastasis, Christ pulling Adam and Eve from their tombs. Topkapı Palace was the seat of the Ottoman sultans for about four centuries, a sequence of courts and pavilions on the point above the Golden Horn. Rumeli Hisarı was raised by Mehmed II in 1452 in a matter of months to cut off Constantinople from the Black Sea. The Maiden's Tower stands on an islet off Üsküdar, a site fortified since Byzantine times.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hagia Sophia | Mosque | ✓ |
| 2 | Chora Church (Kariye) | Church building | ✓ |
| 3 | Topkapı Palace | Palace | ✓ |
| 4 | Rumeli Hisarı | Fortress | |
| 5 | Maiden's Tower | Lighthouse |
01 Hagia Sophia
Ayasofya
Turkey · 1.1 km from Istanbul41.008° N 28.980° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by edibejko from Pixabay The building that stands today was put up in barely five years. In January 532 the Nika riots burned down the previous church on the site, and within weeks Emperor Justinian I had started a far more ambitious replacement, designed by two scholars rather than master masons: Anthemius of Tralles, a mathematician, and Isidore of Miletus, a geometer. It was dedicated in 537.
Did you know? In 1054 a papal legate laid a bull excommunicating Patriarch Michael Cerularius on the altar here, a moment usually taken as the start of the East–West Schism.
02 Chora Church (Kariye)
Kariye Camii
Turkey · 3.3 km from Istanbul41.031° N 28.939° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Tadam · CC0 From the street in Edirnekapı the Chora looks modest: a cluster of brick domes and banded walls tucked just inside the land walls of Istanbul.
Did you know? During the final Ottoman siege of 1453, the Hodegetria icon, revered as the protector of Constantinople, was carried to the Chora to help the defenders.
03 Topkapı Palace
Turkey · 1 km from Istanbul41.013° N 28.984° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by falco from Pixabay For almost four centuries the Ottoman Empire was governed from a headland at the very tip of old Istanbul. Mehmed II began Topkapı Palace in 1459, a few years after taking Constantinople, on Seraglio Point, where the Golden Horn opens into the Bosphorus and both meet the Sea of Marmara.
Did you know? Palace records show the Chinese porcelain holdings grew from about 400 pieces in the 16th century to 16,566 by the 18th century.
04 Rumeli Hisarı
Turkey · 10.1 km from Istanbul41.085° N 29.056° E
Image by 12019 from Pixabay Rumelihisarı was built for a single purpose, and it achieved it. In 1452 the young Ottoman sultan Mehmed II was preparing to take Constantinople, and his father's earlier attempt had shown that a Byzantine fleet on the Bosphorus could make a siege fail.
Did you know? The whole fortress was finished in about four and a half months, completed on 31 August 1452 by a workforce numbering in the thousands.
05 Maiden's Tower
Kız Kulesi
Turkey · 2.5 km from Istanbul41.021° N 29.004° E
Image by Ben_Kerckx from Pixabay The Maiden's Tower stands on a tiny islet in the Bosphorus, about 200 metres off the Asian shore at Üsküdar, where the strait opens into the Sea of Marmara.
Did you know? During the Ottoman conquest of 1453, the tower was held by a Byzantine garrison under the Venetian commander Gabriele Trevisano.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful medieval places in Turkey?
- On our list, Hagia Sophia ranks first, followed by Chora Church (Kariye) and Topkapı Palace.
- Who built Rumeli Hisarı?
- Sultan Mehmed II built it in 1452, a year before the conquest of Constantinople, on the narrowest point of the Bosphorus. With Anadolu Hisarı on the opposite shore it controlled shipping through the strait.
- What is inside the Chora Church?
- Its inner and outer narthexes and side chapel hold mosaics and frescoes commissioned by the statesman Theodore Metochites around 1315 to 1321. They are among the finest surviving works of late Byzantine art.
- How many medieval places are on this list in Turkey?
- The list covers 5 medieval places.