Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
4
Topkapı Sarayı
Topkapı Sarayı, the Great Palace of the Osmanlı Sultans, is the most
extensive and fascinating monument of Ottoman civil architecture
in existence. In addition to its architectural and historical interest, it
contains, as a museum, superb and unrivalled collections of porcelains,
armour, fabrics, jewels, illuminated manuscripts, calligraphy, and
many objects of art formerly belonging to the sultans. A cursory visit
requires several hours; to know it thoroughly many weeks would
hardly suffice.
When Mehmet the Conqueror, known to the Turks as Fatih
Sultan Mehmet, captured Constantinople in 1453, he found the
former palaces of the Byzantine Emperors in such ruins as to be
uninhabitable. He therefore selected a large overgrown area on the
Third Hill as the site of his palace, the district where now stand the
central buildings of the University of Istanbul and the great complex
of the Süleymaniye. Here he erected an extensive palace which later
came to be known as Eski Saray, or the Old Palace. For only a few
years later, in 1459, he decided to build a new palace at the northern
end of the First Hill; the area once occupied by the ancient acropolis
of Byzantium. To do so he cut of the point of the Constantinopolitan
triangle by building a massive defence-wall, guarded by towers,
which extended from the Byzantine sea-walls along the Golden Horn
to those along the Marmara. (The palace eventually took its name
from the main sea-gate in these defence-walls; this was Topkapı,
the Cannon Gate, so-called because it bristled with armaments.
This twin-towered gateway formerly stood at Saray Point, but it was
destroyed in the nineteenth century.) The area thus enclosed must be
approximately identical with the ancient city of Byzantium before
its successive enlargements. Fatih Mehmet constructed his palace on
the high ground, or acropolis; on the slopes of the hill and along the
seashore he laid out extensive parks and gardens. He could not have
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