"This decadent palace, which overlooks the Bosphorus from the European side, holds great importance to Turkey. The late-19th-century sultans resided here and ruled the Ottoman Empire from here, and while the Turkish Republic's capital is in Ankara, its first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, stayed at the palace whenever he visited Istanbul. It was here that Atatürk took his last breath, on November 10, 1938, at 9:05 a.m.—the time displayed on the palace clocks today."
If you only have three days in istanbul
