Sparkling jewels from every corner of the empire are kept in the Treasury, which is home to the jewel-encrusted dagger that is the object of desire in the 1964 film Topkapi.
Other Biennial-related highlights include Bertrand Ivanoff's neon installations on the old Orthodox Palestinian Christian Church and Johan Tahon's milky ceramic figures set in a 15th-century tiled kiosk in walls of the Topkapi Palace.
But the hapless pasha was decapitated, his severed head being duly placed in a gourd full of honey and exposed at the Topkapi palace in Istanbul, after he was implicated in a plot to overthrow the sultan.