Seraglio

A seraglio, serail, seray or saray is a castle, palace or government building which was considered to have particular administrative importance in various parts of the former Ottoman Empire.
"The Seraglio" may refer specifically to the Topkapı Palace, the residence of the former Ottoman sultans in Istanbul.
The term can also refer to other traditional Turkish palaces and other grand houses built around courtyards.

Etymology

The term seraglio, from Italian, has been used in English since 1581.
The Italian Treccani dictionary gives two derivations:

one via or saray, which comes from or, per derivation, the enclosed court for the wives and concubines of the harem of a house or palace ;
the other — in the sense of enclosure — from Late/, derived from Classical Latin serare,, which comes from sera,.

The term may also be spelt serail, via French influence, based on the Italian term.

Harem

Since the Topkapı Palace's harem grew in prominence and fame, the term saray/serail/seraglio began also being commonly used as a synonym of harem, the sequestered living quarters used by wives and concubines in an Ottoman household.

In Ottoman culture

Besides the Topkapı Palace, the most famous seray is the Grand Serail of Beirut in Lebanon, which is the headquarters of the prime minister. It is situated atop a hill in downtown Beirut a few blocks away from the Lebanese Parliament. The hill was the site of an Ottoman army base from the 1840s, which was built up, fortified, and expanded in the 1850s. At first it was known as al quishla, from the Turkish word kışla, meaning barracks.
Other examples include:

the Grand Serail of Aleppo, in Syria; a French construction inspired to the Ottoman tradition.
the Red Serail of Tripoli, in Libya. Located in central Tripoli, it also houses a museum.
the new presidential palace of Turkey, completed in 2014, popularly called Ak Saray.

Seventeen saraya were established in Palestine during Ottoman rule; most were established by regional officials and their families such as the Ridwan dynasty and Zahir al-Umar and his family.

In Italy

In modern Italian the word is spelled serraglio. It may refer to a wall or structure, either for defence — such as the Serraglio of Villafranca di Verona, a defensive wall built by the Scaligeri — or for containment, for example of caged wild animals. The ghettoes established in many Italian cities following the promulgation by Pope Paul IV in 1555 of the papal bull Cum nimis absurdum were initially called serraglio degli ebrei,.
Seraglio is also the name of the artificial island on which Mantua is located.

In literature and the arts

In the context of the turquerie fashion, the seraglio became the subject of works of art, the most famous perhaps being Mozart's 1782 Singspiel, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, based on Christoph Friedrich Bretzner's 1781 italic=no Belmont und Constanze, oder Die Entführung aus dem Serail. In Montesquieu's 1721 Persian Letters, one of the main characters, a Persian from the city of Isfahan, is described as an occupant of a seraglio.

Homophones

Saraya is also used as a military unit title in the Arab world. In this case, the Arabic is سرية, a different word from "saraya", as in a building. The etymology of the two terms also differs: سرية is from Arabic and communicates the idea of a "private group". However, the plural is سرايا, indistinguishable from the term "saraya" which is a variant of saray.
The normal translation for سرية is company, but in the case of the Lebanese Resistance Saraya the term is often arbitrarily translated as brigades.
Another example is the Syrian Defense Saraya.