Season 2 takes us to Topkapi Palace

We went to Istanbul, a city of mosques and bazaars, to find out the secrets of the splendid Topkapi Palace, the primary residence of the Ottoman Sultans during their reign in power for nearly 400 years from 1465-1856. Through the objects in the wonderful collection of the Topkapi we hope to find out the secrets of the Ottomans.

Declared a museum in 1924, in 2010 Topkapi got 3,588,730 visitors to its large collections of Ottoman miniatures, Islamic calligraphic documents, murals, treasure and jewelry. The buildings themselves are the most stunning examples of Ottoman architecture.

“Topkapi Palace is a living legacy of a particular way of life, and it was a challenge to bring alive a sense of what it would’ve been like to live there,” explained Director of the episode, Peter Findlay.

Findlay and the crew got some amazing footage from atop the walls that go around the old city, the same mighty walls that kept conquerors out for over a thousand years.

They visited several markets in the city, and got lots of colorful footage amidst spices, fabrics and delicacies, and spoke with local salespeople.

They shot at Hagia Sofia, which was built around 500 A.D. and was the largest building at the centre of the Holy Roman Empire for a thousand years, before it became an Ottoman mosque. Today, Hagia Sofia still stands as a gigantic building that out-sizes anything else of that period.

To top off the fantastic shoot, the team got aerial shots over the city from helicopter, capturing the entire palace and both the new and historical areas of the city.

For more news about our production of the upcoming episodes on season II, stay tuned to the blog.