İstanbul's other palaces Küçüksu and Beylerbeyi

Largest and finest of all the secondary palaces is Beylerbeyi, which sits right beside the Bosporus on the road out of Çengelköy to Kandilli. It's particularly easy to pick out if you take a cruise along the Bosporus because it sits almost underneath the Bosporus Bridge (the only bad news) and has a long landing-stage flanked by a pair of pretty bathing stations that look like Ottoman tents reconstructed in stone. Both have recently been restored and repainted although for the time being the public is not allowed inside them.

That waterside view is the one that would have greeted the sultans as they arrived at Beylerbeyi, but modern visitors are not so lucky and have to be satisfied with approaching from the back, where the modern coastal road runs right past the palace.

Beylerbeyi was the brainchild of Sultan Abdülaziz (r.1861-76) who commissioned Sarkis Balyan, the brother of Nicoğos who had designed Dolmabahçe, to take charge of the project. The new palace was built on the site of an older mansion that had burnt down and favored the extravagant decorative style that appealed to the later sultans, although Beylerbeyi is actually more restrained, at least externally, than Dolmabahçe. Like Dolmabahçe, it was also built as a single entity like the palaces of Western Europe. Compare this, of course, with Topkapı Palace, which is a collection of buildings in a variety of shapes and sizes that came together over the years to form a whole.

Beylerbeyi was mainly used as a grand guesthouse, where such luminaries as Empress Eugenie of France were put up on state visits; the empress was purportedly so impressed by what she saw that she had copies of the palace windows made to be installed in the Tuileries in Paris. Eventually, however, it became a gilded prison where Sultan Abdülhamid II lived after his return from exile in Salonica in 1912 until his death in 1918.

Beylerbeyi has a fairly manageable 26 rooms to look at, but the single most breath-taking room is the one on the ground floor that was designed with an enormous marble pool in the middle of it. From the center rises a fountain, which means that the sound of running water would have provided a constant backdrop on the hottest of sunny days, a wonderfully refreshing thought especially if you've endured a sticky journey to get here by public transport and one that makes you wish that the palace authorities could set the water flowing again.

Upstairs the two most impressive rooms gaze at each other across a central hallway. Both are decorated in Moorish style, with lots of inland wood and mother-of-pearl. Most of the other rooms are clones of those in Dolmabahçe, with plenty of heavy chandeliers, elaborate Yıldız porcelain, and carpets and drapery designed and made in the Hereke factory out on the Gulf of İzmit. What distinguishes the decoration at Beylerbeyi, though, is that most of the ceilings are decorated with delicate paintings of ships and that there are many large panels inscribed with poems and quotations from the Quran.

Once you've finished looking round the palace you can take a turn around the gardens, which contain the only stables to have survived from late Ottoman times. But what makes a visit to Beylerbeyi so especially delightful is that there is an entire hidden neighborhood nearby to explore as well. To find it you need to look out for a grand entrance on the main road that leads into the grounds of the huge Beylerbeyi Camii, built in 1778 by Sultan Abdülhamid I for his mother, Rania, and designed by Mehmed Tahir Ağa. If you walk through the grounds and exit on the far side of the mosque you will find yourself in a lovely little square in front of the ferry terminal which is ringed with fish restaurants to suit all budgets and coffee shops to suit all tastes. In winter if you time your visit carefully (www.ido.com.tr) you may even be able to take a ferry back across the Bosporus to Beşiktaş. Strangely, this is not an option in summer unless you feel like shelling out for one of the new sea taxis (Tel: 444 44 36).

It's probably not a good idea to try and visit it in the same day, but a little further along the Bosporus at Küçüksu, midway between Kandilli and Anadolu Hisarı, there is a second small palace - - or rather in this case a hunting lodge -- which was built by Sultan Abdülmecid I in 1856-7, this time to a design by Nikoğos Balyan. It too stood on the site of an older wooden building in an area beside the Göksu and Küçüksu rivers that was at that time still so beautiful that it reveled in the title “the Sweet Waters of Asia.”

The Küçüksu Kasrı has a mere eight rooms, which makes it very manageable to visit and ideal for those with limited enthusiasm for baroque ornamentation. As at Beylerbeyi, you approach from the rear rather than from the water, which means that the face that initially greets you is quite restrained - - only when you walk round to the front do you see the Balyan love of stone ornamentation given full rein. Inside, a wonderful double staircase winds up through the middle of the lodge and opens onto a set of rooms with beautiful parquet floors, elaborate fireplaces and the usual array of Bohemian crystal, Yıldız porcelain and Hereke carpets. Since this was a hunting lodge, there is no proper bedroom, although the bathroom does feature a wonderfully ornate sink that contrasts sharply with a very workaday shower.

The gardens of Küçüksu Kasrı feature a pair of pretty lily ponds, and if you walk round to the side you'll find a waterside café waiting to offer you refreshments. While you're sipping your tea, it's worth taking a look at the gorgeous free-standing Mihrişah Sultan fountain just outside the lodge grounds that was built by Sultan Selim III for his mother in 1807. It's one of the finest of its kind in all İstanbul.

Until recently a foul-smelling mess, the Küçüksu Deresi, meaning "small river creek," right beside the lodge is being dredged at this very moment. The Göksu Deresi has already been given new life, with lots of pleasure boats now moored in front of a set of fish restaurants, so the Sweet Waters of Asia may soon be back, if not quite to their former beauty, at least to a place where families will once again want to bring their picnic baskets.