Money was being spent everywhere, and the easiest thing to buy in Istanbul was, in fact, money. Ten years ago, money changers were ubiquitous; they've been replaced by equally ubiquitous ATMs. Turkey had been trying to join the European Economic Community (now the European Union) since 1963 and was still waiting. The euro is common currency in hotels and restaurants. An inclusive tolerance, good for business. A Turkish friend, Melik Kaylan, explained the Ottoman system of "millets," nationalities: "Christians, Jews, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, all had their own laws and courts. The Ottomans allowed rather loose conversions to Islam for the sake of form, so that qualified people could be high officials, ambassadors, and the like. The Ottoman empire acted as a haven for refugees from other conflicted areas—the Sephardim from Spain, the Caucasus refugees fleeing from the czar's pogroms. It meant that the empire was full of endlessly varied minorities even beyond its own intense mixture from Albanians to Egyptians."

This became clear when I went to the Harem. At the entrance to Topkapi Palace, throngs of women in flowing black robes swayed like pampas grass—Gulf Arabs, their heads and faces shielded by thick veils, their only feature a pair of heavily made-up eyes. The Turkish veil, on the other hand, is just a head scarf. The ruling AKP encourages the scarf as a visible profession of adherence to Islamic law, and the tolerant consensus is that it marks the wearer as a "good girl," but universities forbid head scarves. Few Turkish women wear makeup in the daytime, and the ones in scarves and long, shapeless coats look less like fundamentalist chattel than Balkan schoolteachers, circa 1954.

I wanted to see those emeralds as big as bread loaves again. The Topkapi guide—a voluble man who charged forty euros to speculate wildly in French—assured me that he didn't know what emeralds I was talking about. "Isn't that big enough for you?" he asked, pointing to a giant green stone in a jeweled dagger among jeweled boxes and diamond egrets in the treasure house.

In the courtyard there were once roses, hyacinths, tulips, and lilacs. The reign of Ahmet III (1703-1730), a lover of peace and even more of point-petalled tulips, is known as the Tulip Period, L&aacirc;le Devri. Now there are only trees. But there are no severed heads on show either, or piles of ears, as in the reign of Selim II. Topkapi reminded me more of the Kremlin than Versailles.

As he trotted me through the Harem, the guide explained that haram is Arabic for "forbidden," that concubines were "interns," young foreign girls who could not be touched by the sultan until they had been re-educated and renamed. Christians, blue-eyed blonds, Polish, Russian, Bulgarian, Georgian—they were bought, or captured, in other countries. There were hundreds of them at any given time from the fifteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth, sometimes a thousand. They had children, the children had children, and today in Istanbul, you see faces you'd see in Moscow or Kraków.