Magnificent Century was filmed at Hadımköy's TEM studios, with a replica of Topkapı Palace; its story runs from Topkapı and the Old Palace to Süleymaniye, Hürrem's bathhouse and tomb.
Hürrem rises from harem slave to Suleiman's legal wife, a jump the series turns into a court war. The route follows her from Topkapı and the Old Palace, where the harem lived until 1541, past the mosque Suleiman built for his son, Sinan's Süleymaniye, the bathhouse she endowed near Hagia Sophia, and the tiled tomb where she lies. The palace on screen was a set; the real buildings are still in the city.
In 1973 Paul Theroux set out from London Victoria on a four-month railway loop through Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, then came back on the Trans-Siberian Railway. His travelogue, published in 1975, became a classic of the genre.
This route follows episodes the book's reviewers single out, from the Direct-Orient Express to Istanbul, Calcutta, Burma, Vietnam and Tokyo. The book's own text could not be checked, so some pins mark a city's station rather than a scene, and some places are not safe to visit now.
Ezio Auditore da Firenze comes to Constantinople in 1511, an old Assassin chasing five keys that unlock a library sealed beneath Masyaf by Altaïr two and a half centuries earlier. The keys lie scattered across an Ottoman capital caught between the succession claims of the princes Ahmet and Selim, with Byzantine Templars working against the city; the search runs from the Galata Tower and Hagia Sophia to the palace at Topkapı, out to the Maiden's Tower in the Bosphorus and, at the end, into a stronghold of the Byzantine Templars under Cappadocia.
This route starts at Masyaf in Syria and follows Ezio through the real Istanbul of the game, the tower, church, palace and islet that can still be visited, before ending underground in Cappadocia.
