Sabancı University Sakıp Sabancı Museum is situated in Emirgan, one of the oldest settlements along the Bosphorus shoreline in Istanbul. The mansion known as the Atlı Köşk, which houses the museum’s main building, was commissioned in 1925 by Prince Mehmed Ali Hasan of Egypt’s Khedival family, who entrusted its design to the Italian architect Edoardo De Nari. Completed in 1927, it served for many years as a residence for different members of the Khedival family.

Following Mehmed Ali Hasan’s death in 1945, the mansion passed to his sons, Prince Mehmed İzzeddin Hasan and Prince İsmail İzzeddin Hasan. In 1951, the businessman Hacı Ömer Sabancı purchased the property together with its valuable furnishings and household contents. As he reorganised the garden while spending the summer months here with his large family, a bronze horse sculpture commissioned from Italy was installed at the entrance in 1955. A year later, in 1956, another horse sculpture—acquired at an auction held at the Mahmud Muhtar Paşa Mansion in Moda—was placed in front of the house. Over time, these two horses, each with its own rich provenance, became inseparable from the mansion’s identity.

Upon entering, visitors encounter an unusual continuity: traces of a family’s everyday life alongside an art collection shaped with care over decades, together forming a coherent whole. On the ground floor, the “Family Rooms,” preserved in their original character, reflect the nineteenth-century Ottoman elite’s westward-leaning aesthetic preferences. Gilt mirrors, silk-upholstered seating, vases bearing Napoleonic emblems, French Gobelins sets, Persian carpets, and finely chosen paintings offer tangible clues to how interior decoration was transformed within Istanbul’s broader cultural modernisation. The reception rooms known, by virtue of their colour, as the “Pink Room” and the “Blue Room,” together with the opulent Dining Room, once hosted not only the Sabancı family but also diplomats and cultural representatives visiting Turkey.

Among the most striking contemporary works on this floor is Ai Weiwei’s porcelain installation Pillar (2006–2007), a monumental work produced in Jingdezhen, China’s historic porcelain centre. Bringing traditional craft into dialogue with contemporary interpretation, the artist probes questions of scale, serial production, and formal complexity. Acquired for the collection following the 2017–2018 exhibition Ai Weiwei on Porcelain, Pillar invites visitors to reconsider porcelain’s historical and symbolic force through a distinctly contemporary register.

The upper floor houses the Arts of the Book and Calligraphy Collection, comprising outstanding examples of Turkish and Islamic art. Spanning from the late fourteenth century to the twentieth, the collection includes manuscript Qur’ans, prayer books, single-sheet works by illuminators and calligraphers, diplomatically issued documents bearing the tughra, and elegant writing implements fashioned from precious materials such as silver, coral, and ivory. Key figures who shaped the development of Ottoman calligraphy are represented throughout: Şeyh Hamdullah (d. 1520), Derviş Ali (d. 1673), Hafız Osman (d. 1698), Şekerzade Mehmed (d. 1753), Mahmud Celaleddin (d. 1829), Sami Efendi (d. 1912), and Necmeddin Okyay (d. 1976).

Forging a bridge between this collection and contemporary art is Kutluğ Ataman’s video installation Mesopotamian Dramaturgies: Water, no. 5. Reconstructing symmetrical calligraphic compositions through a digital lens, the work proposes a new visual language poised between tradition and contemporaneity. QR codes on the labels also enable visitors to examine the manuscripts in full through a digital interface.

In the garden, Anish Kapoor’s granite sculpture Double invites a renewed attention to spatial perception by foregrounding the permeability between light and void. Added to the collection following the artist’s solo exhibition Anish Kapoor in Istanbul (2013–2014), this reflective work introduces a contemporary stratum within the mansion’s historic fabric.