Visit Istanbul GuideAbout Visitistanbul Guide
An independent, unofficial guide to visiting Istanbul — what to see, which ticket to buy for which building, and how to spend one, two or three days without queueing for things that do not need queueing for. We are not the city authority, the museums, or a tour operator, and we sell nothing. TODO: name the specific bodies this site is NOT (Istanbul's comune/council, its main galleries, its cathedral works office). The whole guide starts on the Istanbul city guide homepage, and every figure on the site carries the date it was last read.
Why this site exists
TODO: the problem this city poses to a visitor with a normal amount of planning time.
So every price, hour and closed day here is read off the official page of the building itself and stamped with the date it was read. Where the official source does not state a figure, the page says not stated instead of borrowing a plausible one.
Where the information comes from
Opening hours, closed days, ticket names and admission prices come from the official sites of the institutions themselves — TODO: official-domain-1, official-domain-2, official-domain-3 — plus TODO: city tourism site for city information and TODO: transport operator sites for the transport that reaches the day trips covered here. Each page prints the source and the check date in its freshness box.
Tour prices, durations, ratings and review counts are the booking platform's own published numbers, read on the date shown on the card. Practical detail about the city — which entrance moves fastest, where the free viewpoints are, what a bar charges you extra to sit down — is cross-checked against several published sources and recent visitor reports rather than taken from any one of them.
What we do not claim
There is no invented author here, no character who lives in a particular quarter and no claim that someone from this site stood in a particular queue on a particular morning. We do not operate or personally conduct these tours, and we do not inspect museums or audit any operator.
We also hold no bookings. Every Check Availability button hands you to the platform the tour is sold on, where the price, the terms and the cancellation window are theirs. Official ticket offices are linked plainly, without any tracking on the link, whenever buying direct is the better move — which for several of the Istanbul tickets covered here it is.
How the site pays for itself
Tour and activity links on this site are affiliate links: book through one and the platform pays us a commission, at the same price you would have paid going there yourself. That pays for the research and buys nothing else — not placement, not a rating, not the wording of a recommendation. Where the official ticket office is cheaper or the only sensible option, the page says so even though that link earns nothing.
The mechanics are set out on the affiliate disclosure page.
Corrections
Museum hours in Istanbul change with the season, ticket systems get renamed and prices move every year. If a number here is out of date, write to us with what you found and when you were there. A corrected figure is worth more than a defended one.