Mysore Palace is one of the most magnificent buildings. It is a sight not to be missed when it is illuminated on Sundays and festive occasions. The interior of the Palace is equally worth a visit, for its spacious halls, called Mantaps, paintings and architectural beauty. The palace is an excellent combination of Indo-Saracenic architecture. The domes and the outside construction are of Muslim architecture. But the interior of the Palace is a fine example of Hindu architecture. Together, it is an aesthetic blend of Hindu and Muslim architecture.Though the present Palace is little over a century old, there is clear evidence to show that there existed a royal structure even when the two Yadu dynasty princes, Yaduraya and Krishnaraya, came to Mysore in 1399 A.D. The Mysore chieftain had his residential building here. Mysore remained the capital of the Yadu or Wodeyar dynasty till 1610 when Raja Wodeyar shifted his headquarters from Mysore to Srirangapatna, after defeating the Vijayanagar representative. Till this period, as the Mysore rulers continued to rule their province from Mysore, there must have existed a building appropriate to their stature and needs. We find a clear description of the Mysore Palace as it existed during the period of Kanteerava Narasaraja Wodeyar (1638) and Chikka Devaraja Wodeyar (1673-1704), the earliest description of the Mysore available on record. This clearly indicates that a royal structure existed in Mysore even prior to them. Kanteerava Narasaraja Wodeyar is credited to have rebuilt the old structure and the fort around it and strengthened it by placing around it eleven powerful guns, each bearing a name. The Palace, probably, did not receive due care after Chikka Devaraja Wodeyar, because of political instability in their kingdom.
Historical evidence goes to show that the Palace and the buildings located around it within the fortwalls suffered further when Tipu Sultan embarked upon a project to shift the town to Nazarbad, a distance of about 1.5 kms from the present Palace. There was no building worth the name in Mysore for the coronation of the five-year-old Krishnaraja Wodeyar III, after Tipu died in the battle against the British in 1799. The capital was shifted back to Mysore from Srirangapatna and the ancestral Palace was rebuilt on the same site in the same form as it existed earlier. The model and paintings of this Palace, built chiefly out of wood and mud in Hindu style, can be seen even today. The Maharaja and his family moved to the Palace in 1801.
