Dolmabahçe took so much gold to build that historians count it among the reasons the Ottoman treasury ran dry. Sultan Abdülmecid commissioned it in the 1840s to replace old Topkapı, whose austere courtyards had begun to look provincial beside the palaces of Europe. The Armenian Balyan architects answered with over half a kilometre of pale stone along the Bosphorus — Baroque, Rococo and Neoclassical rooms behind one facade, on ground whose name, "filled-in garden", recalls the shallow bay reclaimed centuries earlier to hold it.
Inside, restraint disappears. Ceilings carry fourteen tons of gold leaf; a staircase climbs on balusters of cut Baccarat crystal; the domed Ceremonial Hall hangs one of the largest chandeliers in the world. You walk hall after hall past Hereke silk carpets, and in a plain bedroom near the end, a clock stands stopped at 9:05 — the minute Atatürk died here in 1938. Today the palace is a museum, its rooms kept furnished much as the last sultans left them, the gilding still doing exactly what it was built to do: overwhelm.