This paper aims to focus on the negotiation processes involved in re-arranging the Holy Relics Department in the Topkapi Palace Museum in 2007. The section includes “sacred” items that were dispatched to Istanbul from Mecca during the 16th-18th centuries for the sake of “protection” under the Ottoman caliphate. The museumification of the Topkapi Palace under the new secular Republican government in 1924 endowed the section with a dual duty of protecting and exhibiting the Holy Relics. Since 1924, the Holy Relics Department has been re-organized only twice, in 1996 and in 2007: both during times of political flux in Turkey arising primarily from Islamic politics of identity and Neo-Ottomanist zeal expressed in the nostalgia for the multi-ethnic and Islamic Ottoman imperial past (Sen 2010: 62). While the first re-organization of the section in 1996 was limited to a renewal of display cases, the 2007 re-organization was more elaborate. It was by all accounts a “political show” marked by the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s opening speech, which highlighted that the Holy Relics Department was a reflection of “our elegant line of civilization” and “faith…in the service of all humanity”. Focusing on the 2007 renovation, the paper asks how the notion of “sacredness” is represented, challenged and contested through the re-organization of this section in the “neo-Islamic” (Keyder 2004) politics of the present. The paper scrutinizes the ways in which competing claims define the “sacred” in a “profane” palace-museum at a time when there is a greater tendency to re-link the contested notion of “Turkishness” with the long forgotten Ottoman past. This paper is the product of a nine-month ethnographic study, where semi-structured interviews with museum curators, architects, and museum experts were conducted in addition to a review of museum catalogues and publications by museum staff. The fieldwork has yielded information that suggests the new organization of the exhibit was driven by the desire to find a smooth balance between protecting “sacred” items and narrating “profane” stories that question the “Turkishness” of these items. While the Ottoman tradition to take care of the Holy Relics was inherited once again, the worldliness of these items was conveyed. This simultaneous sacralisation and de-sacralisation of the Holy Relics department highlights Talal Asad’s (2003) argument on the inextricability and multiplicity of the “sacred” and the “secular,” and questions the place of the Topkapi Palace; and consequently, Ottoman history within “Turkishness”.