The Eski Saray, also known formally as Sarây-ı Atîk-i Âmire, was designed on an ambitious scale. The historian Tursun Beg, a contemporary of Mehmed II, described a complex that included mansions, a harem, the Imperial Council chamber, a throne room for state business, and hunting grounds. It was a complete imperial apparatus in a single compound. Mehmed built it quickly, in the years immediately following the conquest — the urgency of the project reflecting the sultan's desire to transform Constantinople into a proper Ottoman capital as fast as possible. When Topkapı was complete in 1481, the shift in gravity was immediate: the Imperial Council and the administrative machinery of the empire moved to the new palace on the point, and Eski Saray was reassigned. Mehmed himself had decreed that no women should reside where government was conducted, so women of the imperial household who had lived in the Old Palace stayed there when the men departed.

For roughly sixty years after Topkapı opened, the Eski Saray functioned as the residence of the imperial harem — mothers, sisters, daughters, and consorts of sultans, excluded by decree from the new palace. It was a life that was comfortable in material terms and constrained in nearly every other way. Then, in 1541, a fire broke out in the Old Palace. Hurrem Sultan, the wife of Suleiman the Magnificent and one of the most politically astute women in Ottoman history, seized the moment. She arranged for the entire imperial harem to be transferred permanently to Topkapı, a move that, according to some accounts, she had long sought as a way to increase her direct influence over state affairs. The calculation worked. Hurrem settled at Topkapı, and what had been the New Palace now became the undisputed center of Ottoman power for the next several centuries. Eski Saray — the Old Palace — lost its primary function in a single decision.

Even stripped of the harem, the Old Palace did not stand empty. It became something more melancholy: a retirement compound for women whose active years at court were behind them — widowed queens, former favorites, elderly mothers of sultans who were no longer reigning. Safiye Sultan, Halime Sultan, Ayşe Sultan (wife of Murad IV), and Muazzez Sultan all spent their final years in the Old Palace's faded grandeur. It was a place for those the empire had used and then set aside. Under Murad IV, between 1625 and 1632, the palace was substantially restored, extending its life for another half-century.

The end came in 1687. A fire broke out — the palace had survived several blazes before, but this one was total. The Old Palace burned completely to the ground. Muazzez Sultan, mother of Ahmed II, was inside. She was so badly burned that she died from her injuries the following day; the other residents and servants escaped. Nothing of the palace survived. It was never rebuilt. Today, Istanbul University's central campus occupies much of the ground where the Eski Saray once stood, between the Süleymaniye and Bayezid mosques. There is no ruin to visit, no foundation exposed to the air. What remains is the shape of the city itself — the streets and hills of Beyazıt, carrying the outline of a palace that once held the first ambitions of a new empire and ended as the final refuge of its forgotten women.