The famous Santa Sophia, the Mosque of Sultan Ahmed with its six slender minarets, the Square of the Hippodrome, where the decadent emperors of Byzance held horse races nearly six centuries ago, even the famous bazaars are all within our range, almost within view of our house and we pass our first weeks after we have settled in visiting all these places, not as tourists, but for the purpose of knowing them, of communing with them so that we will feel that we have become one with our surroundings. We go time and again to the Old Seraglio, whose nooks and corners become as familiar to us as if we had lived there, the Old Seraglio whose every building, every kiosk, every room is still alive with the history of Turkey's past grandeur, whose garden still glows with the life of all the great Sultans and of their courtiers who lived and died there. From its outer court with its long alley of tall cypresses and poplars gently swaying to the breeze as if bewailing past splendours, from its outer Council Room where generations of grave Pashas robed in sable furs covered with silk brocades and with bejeweled turbans have discussed affairs of State and international policies while powerful Sultans were listening from behind the golden lattices of a small balcony, from the informal audience room from which a Sultan chased the Ambassador of Louis XIV, King of France, for having dared to sit in his presence, to the court where another Sultan was murdered by his Janissaries, to the Kiosk of the Lilacs to the laboratory where learned doctors prepared drugs for their august masters, to the very trunk of the old plane tree in the shade of which a resentful Sultan signed the decree condemning to death one of his generals who had failed to capture Vienna, and to the marble terrace of the Badgad kiosk where a poet Sultan improvised his immortal verses to his Sultana, the place seems to be full of living shadows and remembrances. It seems as if it were only asleep and semi-consciously waiting a signal to people again all its buildings and its gardens with Princes and soldiers continuing their interrupted earthly existence.