We booked a private guided tour of the Topkapi Palace, but when we got to the meeting point, there seemed to be some problem with our booking, and in the end they had to rustle up a senior historian to take us around, which was fine by us.
In a similar way to Edinburgh castle, it’s more like a walled village than a giant palace that you imagine from fairy tales. The various buildings date from many different time periods, partly due to renovations but sometimes due to destruction from fires. It’s got lots of separate museums in many of the buildings now, but also included in our tour was a guided trip through the Harem, which is where the guards, eunuchs, concubines, wives, the sultan and his mother lived. Each tier of people had their own separate areas, getting more and more elaborate. The bathroom design was borrowed straight from the Romans – we call them Turkish baths but Rome is where they originally came from. The style was similar to what Rita and I had the day before.
Official business generally happened elsewhere. The Grand Vizier used to see delegates in the divan room, and sometimes the Sultan would sit above it in a separate room behind a screen listening in. If he wanted to interrupt he would knock on the wall and the meeting would be paused so that the Grand Vizier would rush round the back to see what the Sultan had to say.
The one museum we had a look at was the Royal Treasury. There was a bit of a queue but the wealth on display was mind blowing. I’ve never seen so much gold and jewel encrusted things.
We staggered out to the real world and had lunch en route to the Grand Bazaar. I’ve been looking for a gold necklace to replace one I use all the time where the cheap gold plating has worn off, and we had found a contact through Hakan to a shop located there. There were so many jewellery shops there, if we hadn’t had one recommended to us I probably never would have been able to choose one. Interestingly, the price they initially quoted and the super good deal price just for friends was not much different – only about 15%, and then he wouldn’t accept a credit card so that I had to go out and take some Turkish lira from the money machine at a fee of 8.5%, so really it wasn’t that impressive a saving. Note that 1200USD in lira is a wodge of paper about an inch thick. But the whole process was interesting anyway, and now I have a good story to tell when I wear it.