Palace of the Porphyrogenitus, 34050 Avcıbey
Palace of the Porphyrogenitus, 34050 Avcıbey, Turkey
About
Tekfur Palace, one of the few structures that remain from the Byzantine Empire to today. The Palace reaches to this day from Edirnekapı as concealment with its lives hidden in the pages of history and still adored architecture. Lying between the Theodosios walls in Balat with the load of the centuries, the four walls remained Tekfur Palace watches a large landscape stretching from Pera to Yedikule and from the Prince Islands to Kadıköy. It is not known, since there is no epigraph on it, who built the Tekfur Palace which is a part of Blahernai Palace Complex one of the Byzantine Era structures –the other one is the Bukoleon Palace- and it is not known what the original name of it was. The name 'Tekfur' comes from the Ottomans. Although the name lost its meaning with the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, the governors of the Byzantine were called 'tekfur' by the Ottomans. The palace, where the lives were buried in history as its name, is called Tekfur Palace since the tekfurs once inhabited it. Life in Tekfur Palace Tekfur Palace, which is important for world art history since it represents the first civilian architecture style of the Byzantine, is a part of the Blahernai Palace Complex where the Byzantine Emperors settled after leaving the palace in Sultanahmet in the 11th century. As in Ottoman palaces, Byzantine palaces were comprised of many manor houses. Tekfur palace too, was one of the manor houses belonging to the Blahernai Palace Complex. According to the information we obtained from the Hayri Fehmi Yılmaz, an art historian and the coordinator of Foundation for Developing Cultural Consciousness, the middle floor of the three storey palace was reserved to the palace dwellers. This floor had a beautiful panorama of the city. Ground and top floors were used for services. A private devotion room The frontage of the palace built in the 14th century opens to a small courtyard. Tekfur Palace which was built as a two building structure has another manor house in its courtyard. Also there is a chapel on the city-side front of the structure. Although it is partially collapsed, this chapel, which we can describe as a 'private devotion room', is extant to today. Hayri Fehmi Yılmaz defines this chapel where all the religious motifs and elements in a church can be found, as a 'one-man devotion cell'. Yılmaz, who says that 'for the Blahernai Palace Complex which spans a 100–180 thousand square meters area, one should dream of a huge palace', denotes that t
