@brittarnhild
Mehmet the Conqueror, one of the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, loved tulips. And I mean loved them, really LOVED them. More than anything else. In the Ottoman Empire a garden was not a garden without tulips.
I came to Istanbul during thre wrong season. No gardens with tulips in August, but while watching the old part of the city being decorated for Victory day, huge tulips appeared.
Did you know that it was the Turks who introduced the tulip to Europa, and especially to the Dutch? I didn´t until I started preparing for my week in Istanbul. In The Netherlands people fell for this plant, and in the seventeenth century there was a "tulip fever" in Holland where tulip bulbs sold for huge sums.
In the language of flowers, which the Turks were the first to develop, the gift of a red tulip said "I am on fire from your beauty"
Before going to Istanbul I downloaded "Tulip Fever" by Deborah Moggach on my Kindle. I know I have it in paperback home here somewhere, I read it years ago, but so far I have been unable to locate it. So a kindle version is not a bad thing :-)
I finished it, and today I downloaded Alexandre Dumas´ "The Black Tulip", so the tulip fever will follow me for some time yet.
I was hoping to bring some tulip bulbs back home from Istanbul, but I didn´t find any. We did a transfer in Amsterdam though, and there they were. Loads of them. And now, after I passed the store, there are less than it used to be ;-)
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No Turkish tulips bulbs,
though I did bring home a few other tulip souvenirs.
