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Tour
Topkapi Palace
 Topkapi
Palace: An Illustrated Guide to Its Life and Personalities
This guide to the palace of the Ottoman sultans in Istanbul
takes the reader through all the rooms and gardens which are
open to the public, and some that are not. The text tells the
history of the buildings and the people who lived in them, particularly
the thousands in the "saray".
 Architecture,
Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and
Sixteenth Centuries (An Architectural History Foundation Book)
Today the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul seems a haphazard aggregate
of modest buildings no longer capable of conveying imperial
power. Yet it is one of the most celebrated of all Islamic palaces.
Gulru Necipoglu brings together largely unpublished sources,
both written and visual, along with information derived from
the architectural remains to uncover the processes through which
the meaning of the palace was once produced. She relocates the
Topkapi in its historical context, a context that included not
only the circumstances of its patronage, but the complex interaction
of cultural practices, ideologies, and social codes of recognition
Necipoglu focuses on the imperial iconography of palatial forms
that lack monumentality, axialaity, and rational-geometric planning
principles to decipher codes of grandeur that are no longer
obvious to the modern observer. She reconstructs the architectural
and ceremonial impact of the palace through a step-by-step tour
of its buildings, demonstrating how the palace was experienced
as a processional sequence of separate courts and seemingly
disjointed architectural elements that were nevertheless integrated
into a coherent whole by passage through time and space. In
addition, the book raises questions and provides answers to
fundamental concerns about the ideology of absolute sovereignty,
the interplay between architecture and ritual, and the changing
perceptions of a building through the centuries, a building
that drew upon a wide range of palatine traditions, mythical,
Islamic, Turco-Mongol, Romano-Byzantine and Italian Renaissance.
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