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I’ve always been one to find the beauty in the simpler things in life. Because this is what I was used to, I found I didn’t quite know what to do with the gold-encrusted luxury that is a palace harem. And by encrusted, I mean every ceiling and around the edges of every doorway. Everything that wasn’t gilded was covered in these tiles with the most beautiful cerulean blue designs on them. Our professor told us it took 7,000 people three years to build the whole Palace. I wonder how much of that was spent on just this area of it. How long all the details must have taken, I can’t even imagine. I wished I could, though. For an art major who’s always dreamed of building her own house, this place was like a pilgrimage to Mecca. Dome ceilings and crafted archways. Enormous, hand-carved wooden doors with ornate cast iron handles. So breath-taking was the beauty of this place that a friend of mine on the trip said, “You know, I might not mind being owned so much if it meant I got to live here.” This statement was, I’m sure, a joke. But it got me thinking, what would it have been like to live here? There’d be food, and music, and I’d never run out of people to talk to. Could I have lived here? Between my professor and some of the boards posted throughout the palace, I basically got the quick and ugly version, but I wanted to know more. According to the book I bought about the harem, most of what we know about life inside the harem is known only indirectly, as even the blueprints obscure and omit it's existence. And yet many, if not most of the women who lived in the harem were captured and brought there and, once there, were never allowed to leave. In this sense, they were scarcely better off than the Black Eunuchs who guarded them. Once inside the harem, the women were concubines and the only way to gain favor was by bedding the sultan and bearing his children. Imagine being thrust into a prison cell, albeit an incredibly fancy one, and trying to make friends with the other prisoners while simultaneously competing for the affections of your captor. Now, I’ve never been one for reality television, but oh, to be a fly on that wall! Actually, having typed the above sentence, I believe the fact that this would make for an excellent movie is precisely the reason I did identify with this place so much, having also studied film in college. There are many components to a great film, but arguably the most important is dramatic irony, which I can only imagine the life of a concubine being chalk full of. Imagine being kidnapped and taken away from your home, brought to this beautiful yet foreign place that you can never leave and then told you must then sleep with the man responsible for bringing you here. Then imagine attempting to befriend some of the other women there for your own sanity; even though you don’t trust them, and they’ve no reason to trust you, since you’ve all been placed in a situation where you’re forced to compete for the affections of one man, that you probably don’t even like. Granted, I’m sure not all the women who lived there hated the sultan or each other. Just based on the idea of telling several hundred women they must compete for one man, I can only imagine the treachery those gorgeous walls have witnessed. I’m still reading the book I bought, but I wish I could know even a fraction of the things that went on in there. Did any of the women ever escape? Did any of them ever fall in love with their neutered protectors? How many of them schemed in order to move up the ranks and how many simply quit trying? Maybe this is the dramatic irony of my trip; that of all the amazing and overwhelmingly beautiful things we’ve seen, I chose to focus on the most detailed and beautiful place with the darkest and most obscured history.