After lunch (a tiny bit of plain rice for me), we went to the Maharajah’s palace in Mysore; a.k.a. The Mysore Palace. It’s huge and during tours, you only get to see half of it; the other half is occupied by the Maharajah’s descendant who happens to be a member of parliament. The original palace burnt down in 1897 and the current palace (AmbaVilas Palace) was completed in 1912 at a cost of 4.2 million rupees (1 million CAD). The original palace was made of wood and the current palace is made of marble, stone, ivory and gold.
The first hallway you go through has two huge mounted elephant heads and leads into the Wedding Hall. It is all open but there are nets over the windows to keep the pigeons out. The walls are painted with stories of great things the Raj, his ancestors, the gods and others did. Santhos explained that one of the pillars carved like a giant bird with two elephants in its claws depicts the Raj (the bird is their family symbol) being more powerful than the elephants.
The next area of the tour is the throne room, which we were lucky to quickly see. As we were admiring the throne the power went out and we were whisked away so the doors and windows could be barricaded; without power, none of the alarm systems protecting artifacts within the chamber worked. Just before this, as I was admiring the throne, I had visions of the current Raj coming down every once in a while to just sit in “his chair”. There was a statue of the Krishna Raj at the top of the stairs. It was so lifelike that I thought it was a real person and so did Sheeva. It was startling.
The rest of the palace tour was done in a whirlwind. There were the council chambers, the area where the Raj addresses the people, the area where the Raj watches fighting matches. In the end we tried to take pictures in front of the palace and our tour guide was rushing us along to the next destination like we were on fire.
Destinations:
2 comments on “The Mysore Palace”Add yours →