Word: topkapi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Toplcapi. Closing time. The gates swing to, the guards take a cigarette break. In the gilded halls of Istanbul's Topkapi Palace Museum no sound is heard. But in the flowery promenade-no doubt about it, the metal lid on that mulch pit moved...
Obviously, Director Jules Dassin isn't. In Topkapi, adapted from a tidy thriller (The Light of Day) by Eric Ambler, he has pulled off the niftiest caper seen on screen since the jewel job he engineered in Rififi. As in Rififi, unfortunately, the rest of the film seems a bit Dassingenuous. The director's jokes are often too laboriously explained, and the camera's adoration of Melina Mercouri, the great love of Dassin's life, is sometimes boring and always embarrassing...
...emeralds. And it's even more fun to watch Ustinov, a semi-Egyptian sphink who asks unseemly riddles ("Wanna buy some feelthy peectures?"), make like a male Mata Hari and look like a two-ton dip of coffee ice cream wearing baggy tweeds. When Ustinov is onscreen, Topkapi is top chop...
...unabashed Turkophile, I was delighted to see your illustrated article on the treasures of the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul [June 23]. However, your reflections on the Turks as brutal conquerors are somewhat onesided. The damage wrought in Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 was, in the light of those times, very slight. Contrast this with the incredible rape, vandalism and slaughter that accompanied the Christian armies of the Fourth Crusade when they sacked Constantinople in 1204. Suleiman I, as well as many others of his dynasty, looks like an angel when compared with many of his "civilized" Christian contemporaries...
...Topkapi Museum was originally a palace built in the 1470s for the retinue of Mohammed the Conqueror. As the empire grew, so did the retinue, until under Suleiman, it numbered more than 5,000. Attached to the imperial household, working in tiny studios scattered through the rambling palace grounds, were artisans and craftsmen whose job was to transform the raw plunder of war into objects that enhanced the glory of the sultan. The artisans also instructed the sultans' sons, for each young prince had to have at least one skill not connected with the throne. Suleiman was an expert...