This spectacular 19th-century hotel still belongs to the Sandoz family and thus manages to keep its personality intact. Have a drink or coffee on its garden terrace after stepping through the ballroom where the great and the bad assembled to pick over Turkey’s bones in 1924. A niche full of black and white pictures serves as a shrine to the day Turkey regained its independence. Among them is one of the redoubtable İsmet İnönü rowing in the lake. And when you get back to istanbul, make a point of visiting the charming İnönü house on Heybeliada, now a museum. The modesty says something profound about the way politics have changed in less than a century.