So I woke up today and set the clock forward one hour (again [AGAIN]). Sigh. Today the big plan was the palace of Topkapi! I couldn't have asked for a better day to spend sightseeing: gloriously sunny, but cool, and the crowds were blissfully small. When I walked in, at about ten or ten thirty, I only had to wait in line for my ticket for about ten minutes. When I walked out, at one o'clock, the queue to get in had tripled in size! Good timing! It's hard to overstate just how immense Topkapi is. Although the core of the palace was built I believe in the 15th century, a great deal of the most iconic buildings are additions and expansions from the 16th and 17th centuries. They kept adding new pavilions and annexes, to the point where it became a small city housing up to 4,000 people and covering a huge expanse of land on a hill. Topkapi is a palace built in the Eastern fashion: whereas Western palaces like Versailles are enormous buildings with gardens all around, I've no
Comments
Post a Comment