About - Access Istanbul

The Yeni Mosque and the Eminonu waterfront seen from Galata: the domes and minarets at the centre, the hills of the old city behind, and ferries at the piers along the bottom of the frame — Photograph by Jpbazard Jean-Pierre Bazard, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

What this site is

Access Istanbul is a guide to the practical half of visiting Istanbul: how the card works, what is actually free, when things are shut, and which of the famous names is worth the ticket price it now carries. It is written for visitors rather than for residents.

The argument it makes

Istanbul’s greatest buildings are free and still in use. You walk into a working mosque, not a museum, and the price of entry is behaving like a guest. What is ticketed is priced for foreign visitors in euros and is among the most expensive sightseeing in Europe. And the best view of the city costs a bus fare, because the ferry is not a tour — it is the commute. Ten of the sixteen sight pages here cost nothing.

The Suleymaniye Mosque on its terrace, the great dome stepping down to half-domes, with visitors on the path — Photograph by MilenaBal, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

How it is written — including the part about AI

Articles on this site are drafted with the help of a large language model and reviewed before they are published. We say so plainly because you are entitled to know how what you are reading was made.

What that means in practice: the structure, the argument and the editorial judgement are ours; a model does a share of the drafting; and every factual claim that a reader might act on is checked against a primary source before it goes up. Where we cannot verify something, we say we cannot rather than writing around it.

Why there are almost no prices here

Turkish state museums price foreign visitors separately, in euros, and those prices have moved repeatedly. Turkish inflation has been high for years. A price published today would be wrong within months, and a wrong price is worse than none, so the pages describe the mechanism — timed entry, separate Harem tickets, what a pass covers — and send you to the operator for the number.

A commuter ferry crossing in front of Hagia Sophia, the old city rising behind it — Photograph by Moonik, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Photographs

The photographs are from Wikimedia Commons, used under their licences, and each one carries its photographer and licence beneath it. Where a picture would have needed a caption to explain why it is here, we found a different picture.

Corrections

Everything is dated. If something here is wrong — particularly if we have described a mechanism wrongly rather than just quoted a stale figure — we would rather know. Corrections are made on the page and noted.

How it earns

Advertising, and a small number of affiliate links which are marked as such. An affiliate link never changes what we recommend or what we say about it; the sight pages carry none at all.

A terrace of Balat houses painted in bright blue, yellow and orange, stepping up the hill — Photograph by Antoloji, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Last checked 5 September 2026.