The Khan's Palace

Although I'm now home in America, I'm going to keep posting as if we recently had these adventures around Europe. I'll post the dates we actually visited these locations at the start of each posts in an attempt to keep things straight. 

The Khan's Palace

Visited: April 6th, 2013

Continuing on our tour of the Crimea we visited Bakhchysarai which is located in the dead center of the peninsula.  The main tourist site is The Khan's Palace which is a mosque and palace originally constructed in the 16th century.

I had never seen such beautiful minarets before.

While I didn't go into the mosque side, we did explore the palace.  I enjoyed these stained glass windows in what is called the summer pavilion which has a fountain that is flowing in the summer.

Another glorious stained glass window this one with a triangle and hexagon shapes.  

Here is the chandelier in one of the palace's larger rooms.  The palace was built by the Crimean Khan dynasty and is one of the few examples of the Crimean Tartar style of architecture.  

The Russian poet Pushkin visited the palace in 1820 and was so inspired by the beauty of one of the fountains there that he wrote a poem about it called "The Fountain of Bakhchysarai."  You can read the entire poem here.  

They have placed a small bust of Pushkin near the fountain that was his inspiration.  I don't know about you but I'm not quite feeling the level of inspiration that he felt.  On the other hand, give me a baseball card and I'm writing thousand word essays on the topic so you can take your inspiration where you can.  

After seeing so many Orthodox churches around Ukraine it was a nice change of pace to see the minarets of a mosque on a lovely spring day.

After leaving the palace and heading down the road that runs in front of it we found an even larger monument to Alexander Pushkin. It made telling the cabby where we were located a whole lot easier.