High above Hyderabad, 2,000 feet up a hill, sits the extraordinary Falaknuma Palace — translated as ‘mirror of the sky’ in Urdu. In a joint YouTube video shared on August 21 by Curly Tales and Mashable India, actors Dino Morea and Zoya Afroz took viewers on a tour of the legendary estate, now the Taj Falaknuma Palace. Also read | Indian royal family gives tour of its massive 500-acre palace in Vadodara: Roughly 4 times the size of Buckingham Palace
The history of Falaknuma is a saga of royalty and an unexpected twist of fate. The story begins not with a king, but with his deputy. However, the staggering costs of constructing and furnishing the palace nearly bankrupted the prime minister. The Nizam accepted, reimbursing the construction expenses and transforming the palace into his official royal retreat. A few doors down is the billiards room, home to one of only two tables of its kind ever made. And then there is the ‘Jade Room’. Once used to host world leaders and dignitaries, it was the repository for the nizam’s famed collection of jade, jewels and objets d’art. Stained glass, frescoes and a low, intimate seating plan made it both a treasury and a conversation chamber.
In 1884, Nawab Sir Viqar-ul-Umra, then prime minister of Hyderabad and brother-in-law to the nizam, commissioned British architect William Ward Marrett to build something Hyderabad had never seen: a palace in a hybrid Italian and Tudor style, laid out, as seen from above, in the form of a scorpion with its stingers outstretched. When his brother-in-law, Mir Mahbub Ali Khan, the sixth nizam of Hyderabad, visited the completed estate in 1897, he was so captivated by its splendour that Sir Viqar offered it to him. Today, preserved and operated as a luxury heritage hotel by Taj Hotels, the 60-room palace is reportedly valued at around ₹ 200 crore.
Its twin, according to palace lore shared during the tour, sits in Buckingham Palace.
