Sultanic Seat

After visiting the Sultan Ahmed mosque and Ayasofya, our last guided portion of our Turkey tour was a visit to Topkapi Palace. Topkapi is not a single, ornate European-style palace as one might imagine from its name. Rather, it is a large complex containing many buildings and mosques, which acted as a city within a city where the Sultan, his family, and his immediate retinue of several thousand servants and advisers lived. It is a short walk from Ayasofya and part of its grounds border the scenic and strategic Bosphorus strait that is the sole exit to the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and then to the Aegean.

The basic rule for photography at Topkapi is that, if it's inside, one cannot take pictures. So some of the neater things like Sultan's collection of armor, china, jewels, the Topkapi dagger (subject of the 1964 heist film Topkapi) and the large Spoonmaker diamond were off limits. Generally one can see a purported skull fragment and forearm of John the Baptist in the Topkapi Treasury with the other flashy Sultany baubles, but they were on loan elsewhere on 15 November. So if you're curious about such things, you'll have to settle for non-Greggy pictures from the web like these:


Dagger Pix

Spoonmaker Pix

Pieces of John


After the visit to the palace, we had our final group lunch at a restaurant with a beautiful view of the Bosphorus. After that, time to wander around the Grand Bazaar was scheduled, but I had too much work to do and too little interest, since I knew I was coming back to Istanbul in the near future.

Here are more pictures of my tour of Topkapi Palace.