Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires has opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. The exhibition runs from 7 November 2026 until 9 May 2027 in galleries 38 and 39. The V&A presents it as the first show in the United Kingdom to tell, in full, the 1,600-year story of a city that served as capital of both the Byzantine Empire (AD 330–1453) and the Ottoman Empire (1453–1922).
More than two hundred objects, four rooms of a city
More than two hundred works have been brought together: silks and historical dress, ceramic tiles, mosaics and tableware, metalwork and jewellery, sculpture and architectural fittings, manuscripts, prints and paintings. Loans come from Turkish institutions including the Topkapı Palace Museum. Among the rarities is the Lincoln Typikon, an illustrated fourteenth-century manuscript from the Convent of the Virgin of Sure Hope, belonging to Lincoln College, Oxford, and now on public view for the first time in sixty years.
The display is arranged in four chapters. Roman Beginnings returns to AD 330, when Constantine the Great refounded the city as capital of a unified Roman Empire. It dwells on the strategic site between Europe and Asia, on walls strengthened by icons and relics, and on the Hippodrome, where chariot races doubled as imperial theatre. Heaven and Earth follows the ways Byzantine emperors placed art and architecture in the service of Christianity while keeping classical forms alive; Hagia Sophia, consecrated in 537 under Justinian, stands at the centre of that story. After the Ottoman conquest in 1453 the great church became a mosque, with only modest changes to its fabric.
Power and Reach looks at how the Ottoman court projected authority in peace and war through visual spectacle, and at the role of silk, precious stones, ivory, silver and gold in shaping an imperial image. Life in the City turns to everyday Istanbul as a place of many languages, faiths and crafts — coffee houses, bathhouses, music and leisure — and to the nineteenth century, when Parisian and other European styles began to reshape local fashion and design. The exhibition closes with the imprint of Byzantine and Ottoman art on nineteenth-century Europe, including work by William Morris drawn from the V&A’s own collection.
Gold, ivory and a portrait painted from life
Early visitors have found the rooms unusually rich in specific encounters. A marble icon of the abbess St Eudokia, inlaid with coloured glass, turns a human figure into a surface of jewels. A sixteenth-century kaftan, thought to have been worn by Sultan Selim II, is made of zerbaft, a cloth described as woven from gold. Blue-and-white tiles from a hamam hang near a red silk bath wrap and wooden bath clogs inlaid with mother-of-pearl. A fragment of mosaic from Constantine’s Great Palace preserves a large, moustached face of unsettling calm. Nearby are a bronze serpent’s head from the Serpent Column that once stood in the Hippodrome, ivory reliefs of consuls holding the mappa they dropped to start the races, and Gentile Bellini’s portrait of Sultan Mehmed II, painted from life in 1480 — the Venetian image of the ruler who had taken the city less than three decades earlier.
Who shaped the show
The exhibition has been curated by senior curator Tim Stanley and project curator Bella Radenovic. The main sponsor is Koç Group, Turkey’s largest industrial conglomerate and a long-standing patron of the arts in Istanbul. Tickets are priced at £25 on weekdays and £27 at weekends; concessions apply, and the museum recommends booking ahead. For a few months the V&A asks a simple, ambitious question of London audiences: what happens if one city is allowed to hold two empires in the same set of rooms, without forcing visitors to choose between them?