Dolmabahçe

Meet Dolmabahçe:

DolmabahçePalace has a very special status amongst the other palaces in Istanbul.Arguably, it signifies the transition from the old imperial past to the modernrepublican present as it was the home to the sultans of the late 19th centuryand also was the place that Atatürk spent his last years. The four-leaf cloversymbolizes the heyday of the imperial past, each leaf representing geographicalreach of the empire, from Europe to Caucasus, from North Africa to the MiddleEast. The black diamond in the middle is a testimony to both the imperial pastand to the idea of the young republic of the 1920s.