Today being the first fully sunny day, we nonetheless visited Topkapi, the Imperial Palace at the heart of Istanbul’s old town.

As the palace is surrounded by a huge park, and spread over many buildings, we enjoyed a good mix of visits of buildings and exhibitions and strolls through the park, sitting in the sun.

 

It’s an impressive, enormous complex. And you need to plan in a full day for it. From the Imperial council chambers to the harem, the private rooms of the sultan to the audience hall, the religious exhibition of items of the prophet to the imperial treasures, you can get lost in all the halls and rooms.

And get a bit dizzy looking up at all these magnificent domes, tiles, ornaments.

We did our best, and again took a ridiculous number of pictures, at least where it was permitted… The Museum Card we got at Hagia Sophia permitted us to jump many queues and walk into most parts without much waiting time.

 

Still, it took the best part of the day to visit. After that, we took the tram back to Beyoglu and had a coffee at Mums Café, then walked up the hill and got some groceries for a nice Mediterranean salad at home.

We rounded off the evening in Solera wine bar, with some dark Turkish Shiraz and some meze. We try to do less in a day, we were both quite flattened from yesterdays excursion…