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Dolmabahce Palace
At the end of the park, where it descends towards the Bosphorus, your view of the water will be blocked by the Dolmabahce Palace (1852). No better monument to the spirit of the later Ottomans could be imagined. Abdulmecit, the reforming sultan of the Crimean War, was acutely aware of, and sensitive to, the growing backwardness of his nation, compared to the rest of Europe. To restore Turkey to its place in the sun, he emptied his treasury—literally putting the Ottoman Empire into receivership—not on armies, or railroads, or factories, but on this preposterous Versailles, all marble and only about half a block shorter than the Tunnel. Ahmet Fethi Pasa, the Ottoman ambassador to France, scoured the luxury workshops of Europe to furnish the place, and persuaded the stage designer of the Paris Opera to come to Istanbul and put it all together. Here Abdulmecit could receive ambassadors in a proper frock coat, hold grand balls, even indulging in a waltz or two himself, or treat his guests to a private performance of Donizetti Pasha's orchestra. The empire was now officially up to date.
The real tragedy is that to make room for this pile, Abdulmecit tore down a lovely expanse of gardens and pavilions that probably included some of the finest works of Tulip Period architecture, wood and tile pavilions like those at Topkapi and Yildiz Park. Eighteenth-century Sultans such as Ahmet II and Mahmut III spent much of their time here. Anyhow, take the tour; you'll never have seen anything like it before. More bad taste is concentrated in this one building than in Napoleon's Tomb, the Great Hall of the Soviets and the Vittorio Emanuele Memorial all combined, with still enough left over to balance all the funeral homes in Los Angeles. All the gold and silk and crystal are real, of course; there is plenty of Czech and Baccarat crystal, Venetian glass, Sevres vases, Belgian carpets (not Turkish!). No particular style predominates; probably early on it occurred to the architects and decorators that the sultan only desired that they lay it on thick. Czar Nicholas sent polar-bear rugs, and a present of elephant tusks came from the governor of the Hejaz. The British, though, knew what the Ottomans really liked; Queen Victoria sent him the biggest chandelier in the world.
The Dolmabahce has lots of clocks, and they've all been stopped at 9.05am, the hour that Ataturk died here on 10 November 1938. To his credit, the Turkish leader occupied only small room on his visits here; he converted the rest into a conference center and exhibition hall. Today, the city uses it to put up whatever kings, sheikhs, and presidents happen to visit.
