Fountain of Ahmed III & the Imperial Gate

Why is it significant?

Walk around the little square pavilion behind Hagia Sophia, with its wide overhanging roof and every surface carved with flowers, fruit bowls and gilded verses. It looks like a jewellery box that somebody set down in the street. Behind it rises a tall, plain gate set into a fortress wall.

Key Facts

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Walk around the little square pavilion behind Hagia Sophia, with its wide overhanging roof and every surface carved with flowers, fruit bowls and gilded verses. It looks like a jewellery box that somebody set down in the street. Behind it rises a tall, plain gate set into a fortress wall. The box is the Fountain of Ahmed the Third, built in 1728, at the height of what Turks later called the Tulip Era. Under Ahmed the Third, the court fell in love with gardens, poetry, tulip bulbs that cost a fortune, and evening festivals lit by candles carried on the backs of tortoises... at least, so the chroniclers tell it. At each corner of the fountain is a sebil, a grilled window where attendants once handed out cups of water, and in summer sherbet, to anyone who passed. The Tulip Era did not end gently. In 1730 a revolt led by a former Janissary called Patrona Halil swept through the city, the sultan's pleasure pavilions were wrecked, and Ahmed the Third was forced to give up his throne. Elegance, the rebels felt, had been paid for by them. Now turn to the gate: Bab-ı Hümayun, the Imperial Gate, the outer entrance to Topkapı Palace. Mehmed the Second built it in 1478, twenty-five years after he took Constantinople, and the inscription above the arch carries his name. For almost four centuries every ambassador, every vizier and every petitioner walked through this opening into the world of the sultan. Look at the niches on either side of the gate. People like to say that the heads of fallen officials were displayed in them as a warning, though the famous warning stones actually stood further in, at the palace's second gate. Walk through the Imperial Gate now. The first court beyond it was always open to the public... and the first building on your left is a church that never became a mosque.