Bunel was able to explore the Dolmabahce Palace, which was still under construction and described the various sections of the building in considerable detail. The writer considered it to be magnificent, although its style was European. The part he admired most of all was the Throne Room (muayede salonu). He put the predominantly red, white and blue colour scheme down to the excessive nationalism of the French decorators working under the supervision of the person who had been in charge of the decorations in the Paris Opera. The name of this anonymous person was Sêchan Bunel considered that, in spite of certain discrepancies of proportion, the

Dolmabahce Palace was, in terms of art, superior to the Louvre and Tuilleries palaces in Paris. According to Bunel, there were three things worth seeing in Elskudar, which was populated entirely by Turks; these were the convent of the Rüfai dervishes, the Karacaahmed Graveyard and the Selimiye Barracks. He stated that the graveyard resembled a magnificent forest of cypresses, that I have never seen such a vast and impressive cypress wood in the whole of my life'; he went on to say that it was a favourite place for walks of the women of Istanbul. Bunel gives us a detailed description of the ceremony preceding the Friday services attended by Sultan Abdfllmecid, how he travelled from Dolmabahce to Sarayburnu by sea,and how the procession made its way to Ayasofia. He does not omit the street dogs of Istanbul and its famous fires, both of which are unfailingly mentioned by travellers. As the traveller describes the beauty of the Kagtthane pastures, he also mentions the unkempt state of the waterside palace. As it is known that this palace wasbuilt by Mahmut II toreplace the old Sadâbãd Palace, subsequently neglected by Abdülmecid and finally demolished by Abdhlaziz, who had the ca~layan Pavilion built on the same site, Bunel's description can be considered an accurate one.

Xavier Marmier (1809-1892), who was famous for his travelogues and also a member of the French Academy, sailed to Istanbul from the Black Sea shortly before the Crimean War in 1846. The beautiful views of the Bosphorus begin at BOyUkdere," hesays, and goes on to complete his observations with this sentence: "No painter's brush would be able to convey the harmonious combination of the displays of colour, layout and light, no writer would be able to express this boundless beauty.. .Those who have houses built here in order to enjoy this beauty do not adhere to any system like the one in Europe, but build their houses upon piles driven into the bed of the sea. A person who owns a house in this place has acted according to his own tastes and upon his own impulses".Marmier did not neglect to briefly mention the famous triple-deck galleon Mahmudiye,which belonged to the Ottoman navy, in his descriptions of the Bosphorus. "When the Sultan's gilded caique, rowed by twenty oarsmen with arrow-like swiftness from the Old Palace, drew level with Mahmudiye the applause of the white-uniformed sailors lined up along the booms mingled with the gun fired in salute from the ship and those fired from the Tophane barracks. And this was perhaps the only great and wonderful landscape in the whole world that represented pomp and magnificence." However, Marmier was disappointed by the inner city. Naturally, the street dogs of Istanbul, which the Turks could not bring themselves to destroy, occupy a large part of his narrative. The writer did not care much for Pera (Beyo~lu), the main street of which was full of potholes and the side streets extremely narrow and he considered that the palatial buildings of the foreign embassies did not beautify it, but, on the contrary, were an ugly contrast. His thoughts about the unkempt graveyards are expressed in these words: "The City of the Dead is no better maintained than that of the living." However, when the city is viewed not from its interior but from a little further afield the dazzling view materialises once more: "It is only then, when the large groups of buildings merge with the verdure of the trees, the picturesque hillsides covered with houses and gardens, the slender minarets rising from their peaks, the azure firmament that frames it all and the crystal-clear water in which it is reflected that this beauty reveals itself."

Charles Roland came to Turkey to manage the farm at Burgazovasi near lzmir that had been given to A. de Lamartine as a present. While he was staying in Istanbul in 1852 he made the acquaintance of a number of well-known Turks such as Ahmed Vefik Pa~a and was invited to stay in their homes as a guest. When the traveller saw the waterside residence of Re~id Pa~a at Baltalimani, which was being built at that time “in the Italian style”, he revealed that although this house would, when completed, be one of the most splendid to be found anywhere on the Bosphorus, he still preferred the Turkish mansions of old, in spite of their unassuming appearance. He wondered why the Ottomans preferred “a style inferior to that of their own national tastes”.