I Wanna Be A Sultan (And Other Unrelated Stories...)

Today we had a beautiful (late) breakfast on the terrace at the top of our hotel.  Also, Dad found all that paper work he lost at the start of the trip.  He had put it in the suitcase >_>.  Here's the view from the terrace:

After breakfast, we made our way to the Topkapi Palace.  On the way there we took some nice pictures of the locals:

We also ran into me and my Dad's favorite carpet salesman from yesterday.  He didn't try to sell us a carpet this time - he was apparently just trying to visit the palace.

The palace was absolutely gorgeous!  I want to be an Ottaman sultan when I grow up!  It was built in 1459 by Sultan Mehmed II to house himself, his advisors and his courtisans.  It consists of 3 layers of walls.  We started at the outermost wall, which contain the grounds of the palace:

We purchased a ticket to pass the second wall into the actual palace section:

The inner most layer was probably the nicest part.  It contained one of the sultan's quarters, the treasury (which stored many absolutely exquisite artifacts from the sultans), and a hall containing many sacred relics from the prophets.

The inner courtyard was very pretty:

The inner part of the palace contained one of the Sultan’s bedrooms.  It was a beautiful, large chamber with a huge bed.  Unfortunately, we were only able to get a picture of the outside of the building and some of the stone work:

Next, we went to the treasury of the palace.  It contained many very valuable artifacts.  It had the sultan’s gold armor and his swords.  It had massive gold candlesticks and beautiful pieces of jewelry.  Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to take pictures.

I was getting hungry so we stopped at this restaurant where we had lunch.  The view overlooking the Bosphorus was absolutely amazing and I had delicious, fresh made yogurt.

After lunch, we made our way to the sacred relic room, which contained religious relics like Moses’ staff and the Prophet’s sword.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t take pictures again.

Next, we visited the State Room, where the Viziers would meet with other counselors to discuss matters of state.  The Sultan would watch without speaking from behind a grate.  Whenever he knocked on the grate, the meeting would be over and he would meet with his Viziers individually.

Me Looking Silly

Our last stop in the palace was the Harem.  Contrary to popular belief, the harem was actually just the main living quarters of the Sultan.  It was mainly run by Eunuchs and housed the Sultan’s concubines, the princes of the Sultan and the Sultan himself.  It was very beautiful.

Dad was taking tooooo long to take pictures...

We then made our way out of the palace.

Our next stop was the Yerebatan Cistern, this massive underground cave that held water for the city.

On our way out of the Cistern, we were ambushed by a man who wanted to show us his cousin’s carpet “museum”.  Of course it turned out to be a carpet shop.  They sat us down, gave us tea and unrolled all of their carpets, trying to get us to buy one.  This lasted about an hour until we were able to escape.

After the carpet incident, we went to a restaurant and ate some kebobs.  Finally, we made our way back to our hotel for the night to get ready for another exciting day.