The Bosphorus - Strolling Through Istanbul: The Classic Guide to the City - page 465

is over 60 metres long, mostly of one storey only but with a central
part of two. The rooms are arranged with great symmetry around
three, rather than the usual two, great halls: of these the eastern one is
perhaps the most beautiful, paved in marble with a marble fountain in
the centre under a vaulted ceiling decorated with exquisite mouldings
and painted panels of bowls of flowers; to north and south slender
wooden columns with Corinthian columns divide the central space
from two bays, one giving directly onto the sea, the other providing
the entrance from the garden. Four superbly proportioned rooms
open from this hall, two overlooking the Bosphorus, two the garden
Still farther to the east is an enormous ballroom and a charming
greenhouse with a pebble-mosaic pavement and a great marble pool
with a curious fountain. The harem occupied the western wing of the
house and was the oldest part of it: unfortunately it was demolished
in the early 1970s.
KANDİLLİ TO ÇENGELKÖY
We are now in the village of Kandilli, where there are several charming
yalıs, of which perhaps the handsomest as well as the best preserved
is that of the Counts Ostrorog, built about 1790, distinguished by
its rust-red colour. It is named after the Ostrorogs, a noble French-
Polish family who moved to Turkey in the late eighteenth century.
The last of the line, Count Jean Ostrorog, died in 1975. On the hill
above is the palace of Adile Sultan, sister of Sultan Abdül Aziz. The
palace was built in 1856 and restored after a fire in the 1980s; it is
now a secondary school for girls.
The next ferry stop is the adjacent village of Vaniköy. Above
Vaniköy we can see the tower of the Istanbul Rasathane, an
astronomical observatory and seismological research centre. The
Rasathane has a small but interesting astronomy museum, with
a collection of the instruments and manuscripts of the sixteenth-
century Turkish astronomer Takiuddin.
The large and imposing building on the shore south of Vaniköy
is the Kuleli Officers Training College. The original building here
was a barracks erected in 1828 by Mahmut II; Sultan Abdül Aziz
replaced this in 1863 with the present Empire- style building, whose