© 2016 – Deniz Türker

All rights reserved.

 iii

Gülru Necipoğlu Deniz Türker

Ottoman Victoriana: Nineteenth-Century Sultans and the Making of a Palace, 1795-1909

ABSTRACT

This dissertation is a historical reconstruction of the last Ottoman palace in Istanbul known as Yıldız.

Using a diverse and largely untouched collection of archival sources (including maps, architectural

drawings, pattern-books, newspapers, photographs, and countless expense records), the five subsequent

chapters chronologically examine the building and growth of the now fragmented site, situating it in the

international circulation of ideas and forms that characterized the accelerated and porous world of the

nineteenth century. This understudied palace may belong, nominally, to the rarefied realm of the

Ottoman elite; the history of the site, however, is profoundly connected to Istanbul’s urban history and to

changing conceptions of empire, absolutism, diplomacy, reform, and the public. The dissertation explores

these connections, framing the palace and its grounds not only as a hermetic expression of imperial

identity, but also as a product of an expanding consumer culture.

The first chapter tackles the site’s static historiography that has overlooked its extremely dynamic

architectural evolution. The literature overview contextualizes the reasons for such scholarly lacuna:

Sultan Abdülhamid II’s contested presence in nationalistic narratives factor into the discussion. Yıldız’s

neglect is part of an endemic dispossession in scholarship of Ottoman art and architectural output from

the eighteenth century onwards, because its forms are believed to be foreign and threatening to local craft

traditions. The chapter argues instead that Yıldız’s patrons and artists approached their commissions with

historical rigor and with an eye for artisanship and the vernacular.

The second chapter follows Yıldız’s eighteenth-and nineteenth-century histories through the eyes

of the Ottoman court chroniclers. Their meticulous day-to-day descriptions of the lives of sultans and how

they used their capital’s royal grounds show us that for a long time before Yıldız became Abdülhamid II’s
 iv

royal residence, it belonged to the sultans’ powerful mothers and wives. The collective efforts of these

entrepreneurial women converted Yıldız from a minor imperial retreat to an income-generating estate.

The site started its life, then, as an exemplary gendered space that uproots conventional notions of the

Oriental harem.

The third chapter traces the grand landscaping project undertaken at Yıldız by Christian Sester,

the court’s Bavarian head-gardener. Not only does this chapter outline the site’s dramatic physical

transformations under Sester’s tutelage from the 1830s to the 1860s, but it also tracks his establishment of

a cosmopolitan gardeners’ corps. The diverse members of this corps, the chapter shows, deeply impacted

the urban landscapes and marketplaces of Istanbul well into the 1910s.

The fourth chapter examines Yıldız’s light, pavilion-like structures in the context of the century’s

Alpine appeal as well as the world expositions that commodified the use of these small-scale typologies.

While exploring the functions of these structures in the courtly context, the chapter also highlights the

mass-appeal of catalogue-order chalets among the Ottoman bureaucrat classes and the competition these

buildings engendered in Istanbul’s domestic spaces. This chapter also speaks more broadly about the

nature of architectural styles, designs and taste in the Ottoman world of the late-nineteenth century.

Yıldız’s history cannot be written without photograph albums, central to Abdülhamid II and his

reign. The fifth and final chapter does precisely that by focusing on the previously unknown, last and

most intimate photograph album that the sultan commissioned of the site. The album exhibits Yıldız in its

most up-to-date incarnation and in the way that Abdülhamid II wanted it to be seen: grounds that required

active engagement, that were simultaneously intimate and sublime, and that incorporated both untouched

and cultivated landscapes. The chapter draws formal comparisons with earlier, better-known photograph

albums of the palace that were prepared for an international audience. Unlike any other, this album gets

us closest to Abdülhamid’s own biography of imperial spaces, the precedents that he inhabited during his

princely years. These sites, in turn, influenced his architectural patronage in Yıldız. Therefore, the album

is conceptualized here as a revealing visual biography of the most elusive of sultans and his similarly

elusive palace.
 v

Lastly, I take victoriana in the title to imply a global designation, a trigger that to my mind best

describes the push and pull of tradition at the onset of modernity. At no other site than Yıldız is this

tension played out so clearly in the Ottoman lands. I mean to draw thematic connection between Victorian

England and the Ottoman Empire at specific moments in which the latter found itself negotiating between

local craft and global industry, between its imperial image and its newly emerging social classes, between

royalty’s austerity and its requisite international presence, and between tradition and invention.
 vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Introduction to Abdülhamid II’s Yıldız Palace

a. Yıldız as a Fortress, City, and Neighborhood 15

b. Yıldız’s Ubiquitous Dāʾires 25

c. The Sultan’s Self-Designed Sightseeing Tour 30

d. Yıldız’s Layout 38

II. Yıldız Kiosk and the Queen Mothers of the Tanzimat Era: Gender, Landscape, and Visibility

a. Women of the Court and the Lure of Beşiktaş 59

b. The First Yıldız Kiosk and its Echoes Across the Shore 67

c. The Favorable Winds of Yıldız Kiosk, Mahmud II, and Archery 77

d. Yıldız as the Quintessential Valide Estate 81

e. Yıldız, Ottoman Women, and Profligacy 93

f. The Yahya Efendi Convent as Yıldız’s Spiritual Crux 99

Conclusion 106

III. From Çırağan’s Backyard to the Heart of the Gardening Corps: Yıldız and its Gardeners

a. The First European Head-Gardeners in the Ottoman Court 113

b. Christian Sester and the English Garden in the Ottoman Capital 118

c. Istanbul’s Germanic Networks and Royal Gardeners After Sester 138

d. A Change of Hands in the Final Years of the Corps 159

Conclusion 165

IV. The Architecture of Yıldız Mountain: Pre-fabs, Chalets, and Home-Making in Istanbul

a. Abdülhamid II, Woodwork, and a Taste for Timber Construction 171

b. Nordic “Frame Houses” and the Global Typology of Domestic Bliss 187

c. The First Portable Structures in the Ottoman Domains 193

 vii

d. Scaled-down Architecture, Intimate Diplomacy 204

e. Hamidian Bureaucrats and their House and Garden Competition 210

f. Building Practices, Architectural Sources, and Resources 221

Conclusion 231

V. “Town and Country” (Belde ve Ṣaḥrāʾ): An Ottoman Album of Imperial Sites from 1905

a. Order, Materiality, and Frame 240

b. Abdülhamid’s Own Biography of Places 249

c. Souvenir’s Recipients 257

d. Souvenir’s Precedents 265

e. Abdülhamid and Architectural Preservation 271

f. Inclusions 277

g. Souvenir’s Yıldız 282

h. Partitions 288

Conclusion 292

VI. EPILOGUE 296

VII. FIGURES 305

VIII. BIBLIOGRAPHY 421

 viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Both my time as a PhD student and this dissertation that marks its end owe a lot to my three

wonderful advisors, Gülru Necipoğlu, David J. Roxburgh and Cemal Kafadar. A novice art

historian could not ask for a better, wiser trio of scholars. Gülru Necipoğlu courageously

accepted a dissertation topic from the nineteenth century and, with patience, always guided me

back to the established historical roots of ideas, events, and spaces. David J. Roxburgh was a

relentless source of support and encouragement, a dedicated editor, and an infinite well of

information on the cultural and literary histories of the nineteenth century. Cemal Kafadar has

instilled in me an interest in historical figures who stood outside of their times who either pushed

the limits of convention or engaged with it in productive ways. The nineteenth-century Ottoman

queen mothers and German landscapists, the protagonists of my dissertation, are products of his

“finger of wonder.” During our often irregular but extremely invaluable meetings, Ahmet Ersoy

shared in the excitement over my archival discoveries and unknowingly renewed my energy to

write when I was most disheartened. I owe a lot to the bibliographical wisdom and linguistic

expertise of our brilliant librarian András Riedlmayer. Without his critical eye, this dissertation

would have undoubtedly suffered.

Financing a dissertation research that requires a lot of traveling is an art. With the

backing of my academic advisors, and most importantly the larger-than-life presence of Sue

Kahn at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), I received generous support from

university funding throughout my three years of research. A Frederick Sheldon Traveling

Fellowship and a summer grant from CMES initiated me into my first year of archival work. In

the following two years, I found a true academic home at Dumbarton Oaks as a William R. Tyler
 ix

Fellow. Here, not only dissertation chapters took shape and new avenues of research opened up,

but, above all, brilliant colleagues became lifelong friends. I would especially like to thank my

fellow Tylers, Nawa “Nawi” Sugiyama, Saskia “Saskis” Dirkse, and Julian “Julianus” Yolles, as

well as wonderful supervisors Yota Batsaki, Anatole Tchikine, John Beardsley, Sarah Burke

Cahalan, and Linda Lott for making all of this possible at such a rare and special place. The

verdant Yıldız of my dissertation carries a lot of the gardens of Dumbarton Oaks in it.

The bureaucratic hurdles of research and access would make for a fine comic novel. The

current and former members of the Yıldız Palace Foundation, Can Binan of Yıldız Technical

University, İlona Baytar and Akile Çelik of Dolmabahçe Palace Museum, archivists at the Prime

Minister’s State Archives and librarians at the Istanbul University Library’s Rare Works

Collection, all incredibly generous souls who I have met along the way, certainly made the

process easier even pleasurable. In Cambridge, Julie-Ann Ehrenzweig, Cecily Pollard, and

Deanne Dalrymple were always there to provide the necessary watermarked, signed, and sealed

letters for all kinds of applications.

Thanks are due to Hilal Uǧurlu, who always undertakes her own research with an eye to

help mine and who gave me the opportunity to present to an early version of my research in my

native language in an unbelievably productive forum in Istanbul. Similarly, many thanks are due

to Adam Mestyan, Toufoul Abou-Hodeib, Mercedes Volait, Edhem Eldem and Nasser Rabbat

for organizing and chairing panels where they allowed me to introduce some of my preliminary

findings. Peter Christensen gave me the chance to share a chapter of this dissertation with the

printed world and to be able to claim a bit of the contested and coveted Yıldız for myself. Marisa

Mandabach, Leili Vatani, Farshid Emami, and Himmet Taşkömür lent their language expertise to

translating critical passages for the dissertation. Thanks also to Meredith Quinn, who understood
 x

and mollified all my frustrations as a new mother and a graduate student and shared her

motherhood wisdom with enviable grace. A special thanks to my ever-ebullient friend and

colleague, Yavuz Sezer: If it were not for our mutual joy in trespassing Ottoman imperial haunts,

I would never have discovered Yıldız. And a huge thanks to Akif Yerlioǧlu, an irreplaceable

friend, who always lends an ear and a helping hand, and brings constant laughter not only to my

life but also to my son, Rui’s.

I am deeply grateful to my dear friends in Istanbul, Doruk Samuray, Yağmur Nuhrat, Ali

Yazgan, Zeynep Tolun, Gizem Ünal, and Emrah Kavlak, who have always enlivened my often

extended and difficult stays there. And, to the Aras, Beyazıt, and İlter families, I owe a lot to

their stalwart presence in the life of my parents and mine through tremendous joy and

devastating sadness.

Thanks to Nadia L Marx, the sister I never had, and Jesse C. Howell, the brother I never

had.

Above all, boundless gratitude goes to my incredibly supportive family: Tevfik Türker,

my heroic, inspiring father, Rodrigo Cerdá, my sub-unit, and Blanca and Jorge Cerdá, my

generous, wise and thankfully always rambunctious in-laws.

All the worthwhile ideas in this dissertation are dedicated to my mother, Selma Akkor,

who unfortunately did not live to see the final product, but throughout the process entrusted me

with her immense willpower, so that I could see it through. I cannot wait to be able to share her

unrelenting love and her boundless appreciation of creative worlds, ideas, and things with Rui,

hopefully for a lot longer than the time she and I were able to have together.
 xi

LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 Map undertaken by Yıldız Technical University outlining Yıldız Palace’s current occupants,
2010, Istanbul.

1.2 Map undertaken by Yıldız Technical University highlighting the different sections of the Yıldız
Palace complex and its adjacencies under Abdülhamid II, 2010, Istanbul.

1.3 Çadır Kiosk fronted by an artificial lake, building attributed to the Balyans, 1861-1876.

1.4 Malta Kiosk, building attributed to the Balyans, 1861-1876.

1.5 Abdülhamid II’s private residence (Hususi Daire), building attributed to Vasilaki (kalfa) Ionnidis,
1880s, photographer unknown, Dolmabahçe Palace Museum, Abdülmecid Efendi Library, k86-
26.

1.6 Twin palaces (çifte saraylar), no longer extant, built for the palace’s head-scribe and head-
chamberlain in Teşvikiye built by Abdülmecid, 1839-1861.

1.7 Shaykh Zafir tomb and library fronting the Ertuǧrul Mosque, Raimondo D’Aronco, post-1894.

1.8 Imperial stables at Yıldız, attributed to Raimondo D’Aronco, post-1894.

1.9 Imperial library at Yıldız, photographer unknown, Istanbul University Library, Rare Works
Collection.

1.10 Imperial tile factory at Yıldız, photographer unknown, Istanbul University Library, Rare Works
Collection.

1.11 Imperial theater at Yıldız, architect unknown, repairs attributed to Raimondo D’Aronco.

1.12 Gāh-ı abyāż (white palace), Gulistan Palace, Tehran.

1.13 Elevation drawing of the gallery of paintings (no longer extant) between Abdülhamid II’s private
residence and the Şale Kiosk, Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul.

1.14 “The general plan of the railways that are conceptualized for the garden of the imperial palace of
Yıldız” (Yıldız sarāy-ı hümayūnu baǧçesinde inşāsı mutaṣavvir olan demiryollarınıñ ḫarīta-ı
umūmīyesidir), Istanbul University Library, Rare Works Collection, 93283.

1.15 “Interior view of the imperial wagon” (rükūb-ı şāhāneye maḫṣūṣ vāgonuñ dāḫilī manôarası),
Istanbul University Library, Rare Works Collection, 93283.

1.16 “The imperial wagon” (rükūb-ı şāhāneye maḫṣūṣ vāgon), Istanbul University Library, Rare
Works Collection, 93283.

1.17 Partial layout of the Yıldız Palace complex under Abdülhamid II with emphasis on the
administrative (selāmlıḳ) and residential quarters (harem).
 xii

1.18 Partial aerial view of Yıldız highlighting its main gates, from Fuad Ezgü, Yıldız Sarayı Tarihçesi
(1962).

1.19 Aerial view of Yıldız highlighting the centrality of the Mabeyn Kiosk, from Fuad Ezgü, Yıldız
Sarayı Tarihçesi (1962).

1.20 Enameled perfume box depicting the Mabeyn Kiosk and the gate of sovereignty (saltanat kapısı),
artist and date unknown, Yıldız Palace Museum Collection.

1.21 “Interior view of the imperial ironworks,” (taʿmīrḫāne-i hümāyūnlarınıñ manẓara-ı dāḫilīyesi),
Istanbul University Library, Rare Works Collection, 90552.

1.22 Gate leading to Yıldız’s harem from the Mabeyn courtyard, repairs attributed to Raimondo
D’Aronco.

1.23 (from left to right) The pedimented residence of the valide, the erstwhile Small Mabeyn, and the
first, prefabricated version of Abdülhamid’s private residence, photographer unknown, Istanbul
University Library, Rare Works Collection, 90407.

1.24 Present state of the residence of the hazinedarusta with a closed bridge connecting to the
servants’ quarters on the right and the quarters for the sultan’s wives on the left.

1.25 Present state of the one-story quarters for the eunuchs-in-waiting, connecting to the palace theater
via a gallery.

1.26 Princess Naile and Şeker Ahmed Paşa in one of the greenhouses in the harem, photographer and
date unknown, Istanbul University Library, Rare Works Collection.

1.27 Present state of the residence of the chief black eunuch surrounded by greenhouses and the
terraces of the inner garden.

1.28 Recently unearthed mural of the Ottoman domains under the entrance dome of the quarters of the
sultan’s wives.

1.29 Garden of the Şale Kiosk, Abdullah frères, Dolmabahçe Palace Museum, Abdülmecid Efendi
Library, 11-1267.

1.30 Present view of the Island Kiosk in the inner garden of Yıldız, building attributed to Raimondo
D’Aronco, post-1894.

1.31 View of Yıldız’s inner garden with the Şale Kiosk in the background, photographer and date
unknown, Istanbul University Library, Rare Works Collection, 90407.

1.32 Yıldız’s Mecidiye Portal providing access from the waterfront avenue to the palace’s outer
gardens.

1.33 Map with the central “pool of the valley” (dere ḥavuż), the artificial lake in the inner garden and
pond in front of the Çadır Kiosk.
 xiii

1.34 Present view of the bridge connecting the waterfront palace of Çırağan with Yıldız’s outer
garden, attributed to the Balyans, 1861-1876.

2.1 Sedad Hakkı Eldem, Reconstruction of Franz Phillip von Gudenus’s plan of the yalı of Çırağan
in Köşkler ve Kasırlar (1969).

2.2 Louis-François-Sébastien Fauvel, Vue d’un Kiosque entre Defterdar-Bournou et Kourou-

Tchechmè in Marie-Gabriel-Auguste-Florent Choiseul-Gouffier, Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce
(1792-[1824]).

2.3 Sedad Hakkı Eldem, Reconstruction of the plan of Fauvel’s Kiosque entre Defterdar-Bournou et
Kourou-Tchechmè in Köşkler ve Kasırlar (1969).

2.4 Antoine Ignace Melling, Palais de la Sultane Hadidgé à Defterdar-Bournou in Voyage

pittoresque de Constantinople et des rives du Bosphore (1819).

2.5 Extant stone epitaph of Mihrişah Valide Sultan’s fountain on Serencebey Road, 1797-1798,
Beşiktaş, Istanbul.

2.6 Detail showing the “Valideh Sultan Serai” in Helmuth von Moltke, Karte von Constantinopel,
den Vorstaedten, der Umgegend und dem Bosphorus in Auftrage Sr. Hoheit Sultan Mahmud's II:
mit dem Messtisch in 1:25,000 aufgenommen in den Jahren 1836-37, British Library, London.

2.7 Tomb and sebil of Nakş-ı Dil Valide Sultan, 1817, Fatih, Istanbul.

2.8 Two extant and adjacent archery stones in Ihlamur (in Yıldız’s northeast) marking Mahmud II’s
records, 1811, Istanbul.

2.9 Detail of the Yıldız estate in Helmuth von Moltke, Karte von Constantinopel, den Vorstaedten,
der Umgegend und dem Bosphorus in Auftrage Sr. Hoheit Sultan Mahmud's II: mit dem
Messtisch in 1:25,000 aufgenommen in den Jahren 1836-37, British Library, London.

2.10 The Bezmialem Valide Sultan Fountain, 1839, Maçka, Istanbul.

2.11 Extant wooden epitaph of Bezmialem Valide Sultan’s pavilion in Yıldız with the inscription of
Raşid’s poem, Dolmabahçe Palace Museum, Istanbul.

2.12 Mıgırdıç Melkon, Marmara Strait, 1844 (?), oil on canvas, wood and silk, 60x90cm, Deniz
Müzesi, Istanbul, 507.

2.13 Map showing the farmlands, strawberry fields, and residences of the employees of the farmstead
belonging to the queen mother in the vicinity of Yıldız Kiosk, undated, Topkapı Palace Museum,
Istanbul, 9494.

2.14 Bezmialem Valide Sultan’s fountain near Yıldız, 1843, which was relocated to the Topkapı
district of Istanbul between the years 1957 and 1959.

2.15 Pertevniyal Valide Sultan Mosque, 1871, attributed to Serkis Balyan, Aksaray, Istanbul.

2.16 Yıldız’s Mabeyn Kiosk, 1861-1876, attributed to the Balyan family of architects, Beşiktaş,
Istanbul.
 xiv

2.17 Validebağı Kasrı (the mansion of the queen mother’s orchard), 1861-1876, attributed to the
Balyans, Koşuyolu, Istanbul.

2.18 Contemporary view of the Yahya Efendi Tomb and Mosque, Beşiktaş, Istanbul.

2.19 Perestu Valide Sultan’s Townhouse in Maçka, date and architect unknown.

3.1 Vue du kiosque du Bostandji-Bachi á Kourou-Tchechmé [View of the Head-Gardener’s Kiosk in

Kuruçeşme] in Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier, Voyage Pittoresque de la
Grèce (1782–[1824]).

3.2 Baron von Hübsch’s residence in the right foreground. Antoine Ignace Melling, Vue de la partie
centrale de Buyuk-Dèrè sur la rive européen du Bosphore [The View of the Central Part of
Büyükdere on the European coast of the Bosphorus], Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople et des
rives du Bosphore (1819).

3.3 W. H. Bartlett, The Summer Palace at Beglier-Bey, in Julia Pardoe, The Beauties of the
Bosphorus (1839).

3.4 Contract signed between “Bahçıvan Kretyen Sester” and Fethi Paşa, BOA, D. DRB. I 2/12.

3.5 Detail from the Ottoman Imperial School of Engineering’s 1840s reprint of the Von Moltke map
in Burak Çetintaş, Dolmabahçe’den Nişantaşı’na (2010).

3.6 Çırağan Palace, artist and date unknown, gouache on engraving, 52x70 cm, Milli Saraylar Resim
ve Heykel Müzesi, Istanbul, 12/2838.

3.7 W. H. Bartlett, Scene from Above the New Palace of Beshik-tash, in Julia Pardoe, The Beauties of
the Bosphorus (1839).

3.8 Mıgırdıç Melkon, Pen box depicting the Beşiktaş Palace, undated, oil and papier-mâché, 60x90
cm, Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul, CY 454.

3.9 Çadır Pavilion in the Imperial Park of Yıldız, photographer unknown, 1880–1893, Abdul-Hamid
II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Lot 95, no. 14.

3.10 Carlo Bossoli, Çırağan Palace, Topkapı Beyond, undated, tempera on linen canvas, 116x180 cm,
private collection.

3.11 Sester’s Ottoman seal, “head-gardener of the waterfront palace of Çırağan,” BOA, HH. d. 18928.

3.12 C. Stolpe, Plan von Constantinopel mit den Vorstädten, dem Hafen, und einem Theile des
Bosporus [Map of Constantinople with its Suburbs, Ports, and a Section of the Bosphorus] (1856)
expanded and reprinted by Lorentz & Keill, Istanbul, 1882.

3.13 Sketch map of the Ortaköy section of Yıldız’s gardens with Sester’s garden and residence
highlighted, 1867(?), Istanbul University Library, Rare Works Collection, 93332.

3.14 The new Yıldız pavilion that replaced Sester’s residence, photographer unknown, 1902(?),
Atatürk Library, Istanbul, Alb. 156.
 xv

3.15 Sketch layout of Istanbul’s St. Esprit Cathedral catacomb with the location of Sester’s family
tomb highlighted, in Sac. Ph. Victor Del Giorno, Chroniques de la Basilique Cathédrale du
Saint-Esprit, vol. 1 (1983).

3.16 The Sester family tomb, St. Esprit Cathedral, Istanbul.

3.17 Current view of the German Consulate’s summer residence in Tarabya with its terraced forest in
the background, Istanbul.

3.18 Advertisement of the Koch nurseries in Ortaköy and Kağıthane in the Annuaire oriental (1898).

3.19 A section of Jacques Pervititich’s insurance maps showing the location of the Kochs’ nursery in
Ortaköy on the lower left-hand corner, 1922.

3.20 Announcement of Adam Schlerff’s death in Die Woche (1907).

3.21 A page from a defter detailing the gardeners’ register, BOA, Y. PRK. SGE. 10/36.

3.22 View of a greenhouse in the garden of Şale Kiosk (Şāle ḳaṣr-ı hümāyūnları civārındaki
limonluğun manẓara-ı ʿumūmiyesi), photographer unknown, undated, Istanbul University Rare
Works Collection, 90552.

3.23 Gustave Deroin’s advertisement in the Annuaire oriental (1893-1894).

3.24 The remarkably congested surroundings and shrunken grounds of today’s Koubbeh Palace, Cairo.

4.1 Vasilaki Kargopoulo, Tchair kiosque à Yeldez (precedent to the kiosk made of twigs?), 1878,
Istanbul University Library, Rare Works Collection, 90407.

4.2 Çit Kiosk, 1867-1876, attributed to the Balyans, Yıldız Palace, Istanbul.

4.3 “A view of the Island and Swiss pavilions from the island inside the imperial garden” (ḥadīḳa-ı
dāḫilinde adadan ada ḳaṣr-ı ʿālīleriyle İsveç ḳaãrı hümāyūnları manẓarası), photographer
unknown, after 1894, Istanbul University Library, Rare Works Collection, 90552.

4.4 A neo-Mamluk console attributed to Abdülhamid II, 1901-1902, 130x236x43.5 cm, private
collection, Italy.

4.5 The office of İzzet Holo Paşa in the center foreground in a photograph titled “the view in the
direction of Beyoğlu from the conservatory of the new noble pavilion,” (yeñi ḳaṣr-ı ʿālīniñ
cāmekānından Beyoğlu cihheti görünüşü), photographer and date unknown, Istanbul University
Library, Rare Works Collection, 90552.

4.6 The office of the aides-de-camp on duty, attributed to Raimondo D’Aronco, after 1894, Yıldız
Palace, Istanbul.

4.7 The Small Mabeyn from the lake inside Yıldız’s inner garden, attributed to Raimondo D’Aronco,
after 1894.

4.8 Guillaume Berggren, view of Abdülhamid II’s private residence on the left and the Şale Kiosk at
the center, 1889, Dolmabahçe Palace Museum, Abdülmecid Efendi Library, k128-30.
 xvi

4.9 One of the five extant princes’ chalets, architect and date unknown, Yıldız Palace, Istanbul.

4.10 Distant view of the Swiss (later Cihannüma) Pavilion, photographer and date unknown,
Dolmabahçe Palace Museum, Abdülmecid Efendi Library, k128-39.

4.11 Abdülhamid II’s private residence (hususi daire), photographer and date unknown, Dolmabahçe
Palace Museum, Abdülmecid Efendi Library, k86-30.

4.12 Pastoral vignettes on the ceilings of Maslak Pavilion, artist and date unknown, Maslak, Istanbul.

4.13 Victor Petit, Châlet du lac de Thure, undated, chromolithograph, Istanbul University Library,
Rare Works Collection, 93220.

4.14 V. Olbrich, Farmhouse, undated, watercolor on paper, 29x40cm, Milli Saraylar Resim ve Heykel
Müzesi, Istanbul.

4.15 “Mirahor Kiosk at Kağıthane” (Kāğıdḫānede kāʾin Mirāḫor ḳaṣr-ı hümāyūnu), undated,
attributed to Abdullah Frères, Abdul-Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC,
Lot 9517, no. 22.

4.16 “Villa Tuscan Style,” M. Thams & Cie.’s Catalogue of Norwegian Houses, after 1889, Istanbul
University, Rare Works Collection, 92352.

4.17 “Villa Swiss Style,” M. Thams & Cie.’s Catalogue of Norwegian Houses, after 1889, Istanbul
University, Rare Works Collection, 92352.

4.18 “Cardboard Construction” (Muḳavvā İnşāāt), Front page of Servet-i Fünūn, no. 25 (1892).

4.19 “Interior view of a barrack belonging to the offices of the Yıldız Hospital, among the charitable
institutions of the sultan Yıldız Hospital” (müʾessesāt-ı ḫayriyet-i gāyāt cenāb-ı mülūkāneden
olan Yıldız ḫastaḫāne dāʾirelerinden bir ḳoğuşuñ derūnu), Frontpage of Servet-i Fünūn, no. 331
(1897).

4.20 “The operating room belonging to the Yıldız Hospital, among the charitable institutions of the
sultan Yıldız Hospital” (müʾessesāt-ı ḫayriyet-i gāyāt cenāb-ı ḫilāfetpenāhīden olan Yıldız
ḫastaḫānesiniñ ʿameliyāt dāʾiresi), Servet-i Fünūn, no. 331 (1897).

4.21 “Small Wooden Houses built for the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Independent State of
Congo,” M. Thams & Cie.’s Catalogue of Norwegian Houses, after 1889, Istanbul University
Library, Rare Works Collection, 92352.

4.22 Swedish Pavilion (no longer extant) inside the inner garden of Yıldız, M. Thams, after 1889.

4.23 “Châlet no. 222,” Kaeffer & Cie.’s catalogue, Châlets Suisses Bois Découpés, 1884, Istanbul
University, Rare Works Collection, 92007.

4.24 Swiss (Şale, but later Cihannüma) Pavilion, undated, attributed to Abdullah Frères, Abdul-Hamid
II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Lot. 9524, no. 9.

4.25 “Châlet no. 222,” Kaeffer & Cie.’s catalogue, Châlets Suisses Bois Découpés, 1884, Istanbul
University Library, Rare Works Collection, 92007.
 xvii

4.26 “An imperial pavilion at Yıldız” (Yıldız’da kāʾin ḳaṣr-ı hümāyūn), undated, attributed to
Abdullah Frères, Abdul-Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Lot. 9534,
no. 14.

4.27 Japanese Kiosk in the inner garden of Yıldız, undated, attributed to Vasilaki Kargopoulo, Istanbul
University Library, Rare Works Collection, 90407.

4.28 Plan and elevation of the chalet-extension to Osman Paşa’s townhouse in Beşiktaş, 1894,
architect unknown, BOA, HH. d. 27830.

4.29 Contemporary view of Hereke Kiosk, attributed to Serkis Balyan, İzmit.

4.30 The actual prefabricated kiosk in Hereke assembled for the visit of the German emperor and
empress, Le Monde illustré (1898).

4.31 Persian (ʿAcem) Kiosk at Yıldız, photographer and date unknown, Istanbul University Library,
Rare Works Collection, 90508.

4.32 Wooden binding of the photograph album gifted by Wilhelm II to Abdülhamid II depicting the
German emperor’s hunting lodge in Rominten, photographer and date unknown, Istanbul
University Library, Rare Works Collection, 91380.

4.33 View of the prefabricated lodge in Rominten, photographer and date unknown, Istanbul
University Library, Rare Works Collection, 91380.

4.34 “Casino Norwegian Style,” M. Thams & Cie.’s Catalogue of Norwegian Houses, after 1889,
Istanbul University Library, Rare Works Collection, 92352.

4.35 Süreyya Paşa’s Nişantaşı townhouse and observation (seyir) pavilion, Collection of Nurhan
Atasoy, Istanbul.

4.36 Wooden kiosk above a grotto in the harem garden of Kamil Paşa’s townhouse, Collection of
Nurhan Atasoy, Istanbul.

4.37 Kiosk in the garden of Münire Sultan’s mansion, Collection of Nurhan Atasoy, Istanbul.

4.38 Nişantaşı’s “town of pashas” with Süreyya Paşa’s property in the foreground, 1890s.

4.39 “No: 35,” Strömmen Trævarefabrik’s prefabricated home catalogue, Dolmabahçe Palace
Museum, Abdülmecid Efendi Library, Istanbul.

4.40 Unrealized tower project for Abdülmecid Efendi’s Acıbadem townhouse, undated, Dolmabahçe
Palace Museum, Abdülmecid Efendi Library, Istanbul.

4.41 Contemporary view of Khedive Abbas II’s Qasr al-Montaza, architect unknown, Alexandria.

4.42 “The private study of the surgeon Cemil Paşa” (operātör saʿādetlü Cemil Pāşā ḥażretleriniñ
hücre-i mütālaʿaları), Servet-i Fünūn, no. 378 (1898).

4.43 Charles Dickens’s Swiss chalet, Gad’s Hill, Higham, after 1865.
 xviii

4.44 Kulāh-ı farāngī (European’s hat) Pavilion in the park of amīn al-dawla’s Tehran residence, ʿAlī
Khān Vālī Album, Harvard University, Fine Arts Library Special Collections, Cambridge, MA.

4.45 Sultan Abdülaziz’s hunting lodge at the Validebağı estate, 1867-1876, attributed to Serkis
Balyan, Istanbul University Library, Rare Works Collection, 90474.

4.46 J. Boussard, “shed for sheep and ibexes at Paris’s Jardin des plantes,” in Constructions et
décorations pour jardins, kiosques, orangeries, volières, abris divers (1881?).

4.47 Cross-section of a stable found among a set of building construction and repair documents,
undated, Istanbul University Library, Rare Works Collection, 93209.

4.48 Emile Thézard, elevation of a chalet and its accompanying pricing legend, from Petites
constructions françaises (1894).

4.49 Advertisement for the “Ottoman House of Industry” (Dārü's-Ṣanāyiʿ-i

ʿOsmāniyye), İḳdām (1896).

4.50 “Waterfront view of the Ottoman House of Industry located in Ahırkapı” (Aḫūrḳapuda vāḳiʿ
Dārü's-Ṣanāyiʿ-i ʿOsmāniyyeniñ deñiz ṭarafından görünüşü), Servet-i Fünūn (1899).

4.51 Hogélin & Sundström Society’s advertisement for their inexpensive and salubrious homes, Gènie
civil ottomane (September, 1913).

4.52 Cross-section, elevation, and plan of the “elaborate” (mükellef) residence in Mehmed İzzet’s “
house” (ev) entry, Rehber-i Umūr-ı Beytiyye (1902).

4.53 Illustration for Halid Ziya’s novel, Māʾi ve Siyāh (Blue and Black), Servet-i Fünūn (1897).

5.1 “Tophaneli Hasan bin Tahsin Efendi, civil agent in the service of the police force of Galatasaray,
his leg injured by a bomb exploding in front of Galatasaray,” Istanbul University Library, Rare
Works Collection, 779-71.

5.2 “Pre-and post-operation photograph of a patient with a rather large hernia” (ġāyet büyük fıtıḳ
ʿilletine mübtelā marażıñ ʿameliyātdan aḳdem ve soñra alınan foṭoġrafı), Istanbul University
Library, Rare Works Collection, 90506.

5.3 Souvenir’s Tarnavski binding, Atatürk Library, Istanbul, Alb. 156.

5.4 Souvenir’s split flyleaf displaying the recycled book and name of the gilder.

5.5 Souvenir’s opening shot, the ceremonial greeting spot (mülāḳāt maḥalli) in the Şale complex of
Yıldız.

5.6 Souvenir’s closing shot, the promenade of Kaǧıthane.

5.7 Scene from Yıldız’s outer garden, Souvenir 1905.

5.8 Scene from Yıldız’s outer garden, Souvenir 1905.

5.9 One of the bridges spanning the “pool of the valley” (dere ḥavūż) inside Yıldız’s outer garden,
 xix

Souvenir 1905.

5.10 A shot from over the bridge depicted in figure 5.9, Souvenir 1905.

5.11 Map of the Maslak estate, undated, Istanbul University Library, Rare Works Collection, 92586.

5.12 The imperial tile factory in Yıldız’s outer garden, Souvenir 1905.

5.13 The Maslak Pavillion, Souvenir 1905.

5.14 The stud farm in Kaǧıthane, Souvenir 1905.

5.15 The imperial farm of Ayazağa, Souvenir 1905.

5.16 Maʿiyyet (retinue) Kiosk in the imperial estate of Ihlamur (Nüzhetiye), Souvenir 1905.

5.17 The English gardens of the Şale Kiosk, Souvenir 1905.

5.18 The D’Aronco additions to the Şale Kiosk called the ceremonial apartments, Souvenir 1905.

5.19 Photograph of a no longer extant chinoiserie-inspired pavilion in Yıldız, Souvenir 1905.

5.20 Postcard from a Guillaume Berggren photograph depicting Abdülhamid’s selamlık ceremony.

5.21 Vasilaki Kargopoulo in the garden of the Edirne Palace, photographer and date unknown.

5.22 Vasilaki Kargopoulo, photograph of a no longer extant rustic hut in Yıldız’s outer garden, 1879,
Istanbul University Library, Rare Works Collection, 90751.

5.23 Photograph of a no longer extant rustic cabin in Yıldız’s outer garden, Souvenir 1905.

5.24 William Henry Fox Talbot, Gate of Christchurch, 1844.

5.25 “The imperial palace of Yıldız, imperial pavilions of Ayazağa and Kağıthane, and the extant
properties around them” (Yıldız sarāy-ı hümāyūnuyla Ayāzāġā ve Kāġıdhāne ḳaşr-ı hümāyūnları
ve eṭrāf ü civārında vāḳiʾ ārāżi), Istanbul University Library, Rare Works Collection, 92911.

5.26 Celal Esad (Arseven)’s sketch of Yıldız after the Young Turk Revolution, L’Illustration (1909).

5.27 Partitions separating the newly added Ortaköy section of Yıldız from the main waterfront avenue
below, Souvenir 1905.

5.28 Picket-fences of the menagerie belonging to Yıldız’s expanded section, Souvenir 1905.

5.29 Halil Paşa’s painting of the entrance to the Çamlıca garden in Recāʾizāde Maḥmūd Ekrem,
ʿAraba Sevdāsı, Muṣavver Millī Ḥikāye (1314 [1896]).
 xx

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATIONS FROM OTTOMAN TURKISH

I have written out all the transliterations that contain complete diacritical markings myself; these
are from unpublished sources. I have otherwise remained faithful to the transliteration systems
used by the editors of the published Ottoman Turkish sources.

I have made sure to provide complete diacritical markings of frequently repeated words like
mābeyn and selāmlık the first time they appear, retaining the modern Turkish spelling in their
subsequent appearances.

NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS

I have supplied the translations of Ottoman, Turkish, German, French and Persian sources
myself, unless a published source or the generous help of a colleague is cited.
 xxi

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

BOA Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (Prime Ministry Ottoman State Archives)

DBİA Dünden Bugüne İstanbul Ansiklopedisi

DİA Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi

İAK İstanbul Atatürk Kitaplığı (Istanbul Atatürk Library)

İÜMK İstanbul Üniversitesi Nadir Eserler Koleksiyonu (Istanbul University Central

Library, Rare Works Collection)

PVSE Pertevniyal Valide Sultan Evrakı (Pertevniyal Valide Sultan Archives)

TSME Topkapı Saray Müzesi Evrakı (Topkapı Palace Museum Archives)

 1

I.

Introduction to Abdülhamid II’s Yıldız Palace

Soon after the turbulence that characterized the months between the failed reinstitution of the

constitution and the deposition of Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909) had momentarily subsided,

Francis McCullagh, a British war correspondent who lived through these events in Istanbul, was

excited to report that the doors of Yıldız, the mysterious prison-like palace of the mad sultan,

“afflicted with a monomania of fear,”1 were finally going to be opened following the

government’s Young Turk takeover:

For many years past Yildiz has been regarded by all Turkey as an ogre’s den into which
the best of the Osmanli [sic] were dragged and devoured; as an impregnable stronghold
wherein priceless booty was accumulated; as a mysterious residence littered with
evidences of a thousand crimes, undermined by secret passages, and provided with all the
mysterious chambers, labyrinths, trap-doors, &c. which one would naturally expect to
find in the house of a man who has all his life employed a staff of translators to render
into Turkish the dregs of the low-class, sensational novels of intrigue and crime that are
written in Europe.
The fall of the hoary monster who inhabited this lair constituted therefore, so far
as the Ottomans were concerned, one of the most sensational events of their whole
amazing history, inasmuch as it laid bare to them all the secrets of Yildiz Kiosk.2

As soon as its royal inhabitants left Yıldız, the new bureaucrats of the incumbent constitutional

monarchy—the Committee of Union and Progress, the political body of the Young Turk

Movement and the new titular sultan, Mehmed V (r. 190-18)—set out to itemize the contents of

the vacated grounds. McCullagh likened this grueling task to sending a “tax-collector to make

1
Francis McCullagh, The Fall of Abd-Ul-Hamid (London: Methuen & co., 1910), 262. On the multi-faceted,
itinerant work of this journalist, see John Horgan, “Journalism, Catholicism and Anti-Communism in an Era of
Revolution: Francis McCullagh, War Correspondent, 1874-1956,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 98 (390):
169-184.
2
Ibid., 287.
 2

out a list of the goods in Ali Baba’s cave.”3 Aided by one of the eunuchs, whose life was spared

for his knowledge of the location of safes full of bank-notes, company shares, gold, silver,

decorations, medals, and jewelry, the commission spent months compiling lists, numbering and

reallocating objects, furniture, and books, dispersing the thousands of animals that made up the

imperial menagerie, and classifying the palace’s archives, which included countless unopened

reports (jurnals) from sycophants who sought Abdülhamid’s protection.4 However, all the parties

involved, including McCullagh, were utterly dismayed by what they saw. Expecting a treasure

trove of secrets, quirky layouts, and invaluable imperial objects, they were instead stuck with an

abundance of ordinary Oriental knick-knacks, Victorian technologies, and the kinds of items—

Japanese fans, hanging scrolls, and screens—easily attainable from a specialized Pera merchant

or department store: “Enough rosaries, sticks, and chibouks were discovered to start a hundred

Oriental antique merchants in business, but the only objects in the accumulation of which Abd-

ul-Hamid displayed the true zeal of a collector were pianos, gramophones, clocks, shirts, collars,

keys, and modern fire-arms, especially revolvers.”5

3
McCullagh, 287. For the inventories of this commission, see Murat Candemir, Yıldız’da Kaos ve Tasfiye (Istanbul:
İlgi Kültür Sanat, 2007). For a more focused analysis of the contents of Yıldız’s imperial museum that were
itemized by the commission, see Murat Candemir and Hanefi Kutluoğlu, Bir Cihan Devletinin Tasfiyesi: Yıldız
Sarayı Müzesi Tasfiye Komisyonu Defteri (Istanbul: Çamlıca, 2010). On the formation and early work of the
commission, the memoirs of Halid Ziya (d. 1945), the novelist and then-head-scribe of Mehmed V is indispensible;
see, Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil, Saray ve Ötesi: Son Hatıralar (Istanbul: Özgür, 2003).
4
On Nadir Ağa, the palace eunuch, who collaborated with the Young Turk government and whose life was thus
spared, see Hakan Y. Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and its Demise, 1800-1909 (New York: McMillan,
1996); and Ehud Toledano, As if Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2007). For his intimate interviews with his friends and dictations of his memoirs to Turkish
journalists of the early republican years, see Münir Süleyman Çapanoğlu, “Abdülhamid’in En Yakın Adamı Nadir
Ağa Eski Efendisi için Neler Söylüyor,” in Yedigün, no. 83 (1934): 19-21 and 20; Hasan Ferit Ertuğ, “Musahib-i
Sani Hazret-i Şehriyari Nadir Ağa’nın Hatıratı-I,” in Toplumsal Tarih, no. 49 (January, 1998): 9-15; and “Musahib-i
Sani Hazret-i Şehriyari Nadir Ağa’nın Hatıratı-I,” in Toplumsal Tarih, no. 50 (February, 1998): 6-14.
5
McCullagh, 297. The interest of the nineteenth-century sultans in Victorian technological equipment can be
surveyed in the nicely categorized publications of the Turkish National Palaces Institution (Milli Saraylar), a branch
of the Turkish Parliament; Milli Saraylar Aydınlatma Araçları Koleksiyonu: Chandeliers and Lamps in the National
Palaces (Istanbul: TBMM, 1998); Milli Saraylar Isıtma Araçları Koleksiyonu: Heating Devices in the National
 3

The sultan’s interests were not unlike those of a well-to-do European bourgeois. He

wanted his shirts aplenty and starched, his ashtrays handy, and American gilt clocks in each of

the rooms he most frequently occupied, always synchronized. The cataloguers discovered many

trade journals from which he bought objects, furniture, locks, revolvers, and mail-order,

prefabricated houses. He referred to the quarters he inhabited in Yıldız as his home.6 The

structures he built for himself and his family were modest in scale and cost—“he required little

more space than a cat and was evidently not a monarch who delighted in striding up and down

lofty halls.”7 Their interior furnishings that in their abundance resembled “an auctioneer’s

showroom,”8 displayed an array of styles from Japanese and art nouveau, to Empire and Louis

XVI.

Yıldız’s historiography has been overwhelmingly dominated by narratives that align the

palace with Abdülhamid, its longest resident and patron. Numerous accounts of the site penned

by supporters of the Young Turk Movement read the palace’s architectural idiosyncrasies as

representative of Abdülhamid’s twisted mind and of the paralyzing fears that made him a

prisoner of his own home: “his house is a standing monument to the greatness of his cowardice

and the littleness of his mind.”9 The most famous Ottoman version of these accounts linking the

palace’s labyrinthine unwieldiness with its proprietor is the two-volume Abdülhamid II and the

Era of his Rule: His Personal and Political Life (ʿAbdülḫamīd-i Sānī Devr-i Salṭanatı, ḥayāt-ı

Palaces (TBMM, 1998); and Candan Sezgin, ed., Sanayi Devrimi Yıllarında Osmanlı Saraylarında Sanayi ve
Teknoloji Araçları (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, 2004).
6
Ziya Şakir, Sultan Hamit, Şahsiyeti ve Hususiyetleri (Istanbul: Muallim Naci Gücüyener Anadolu Türk Kitap
Deposu, 1943), 328.
7
McCullagh, 258.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid., 255.
 4

ḥuṣūṣiye ve siyāsiyesi) written by Osman Nuri (d. 1909), an obscure military member of the

Young Turks, who died before seeing his publication through. This work, which is

indiscriminately cited today in discussions of Yıldız’s architectural layout, has often been

mistakenly attributed, but it was not, in fact, the product of an official court chronicler nor was it

based on archival sources of any kind, let alone the memoirs of individuals who lived or worked

at the site. Rather, the work is composed of a collage of often grossly exaggerated stories

translated and assembled from foreign newspaper articles and travel narratives.10 Abdurrahman

Şeref (d. 1925), the last court-appointed historian of the Ottoman state under Abdülhamid's

successor Mehmed V (r. 1909-1918), likens Abdülhamid II’s Yıldız to the garden of Şeddād.11 A

barrage of these kinds of texts, whose impartiality and evidential value are deeply questionable,

has continuously crippled our understanding of the palace and its architectural history. This is, in

part, the reason why a monograph on this site has never been produced: simply parsing through

what is real and what is not is a task unto itself.12

10
From what I have been able to identify, especially for the palace and garden related sections, Osman Nuri seems
to have translated indiscriminately from Bernhard Stern, Abdul Hamid II, seine Famillie und sein Hofstaat, nach
eigenen Ermittelungen (Budapest: S. Deutsch, 1901). Other red flags that make Osman Nuri’s text unreliable are the
invented names of a lot of the palace employees, especially the local ones, during a time when the archives of the
palace contained meticulous lists of its personnel, and many local outsiders had palace informants to fill in the
missing details in their narratives.
11
Şeddād (Shaddād) is thought to be the despotic ruler of the tribe of ‘Ād in Yemen, who denied the primacy of God
and built a garden in the likeness of paradise and with lofty pillars. Mention of this city appears in the Koran as the
garden of İrem (Iram). In the view of this historian, Abdülhamid was not unlike Şeddād, an oppressor, while
Yıldız’s high, impenetrable walls were like the mythical pillars of the notorious ancient ruler’s İrem. Both tyrannical
rulers were doomed to fall, along with their ostentatious dwellings. See Abdurrahman Şeref, Son Vak’anüvis
Abdurrahman Şeref Efendi Tarihi, II. Meşrutiyet Olayları (1908-1909), ed. Bayram Kodaman and Mehmet Ali Ünal
(Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1996), 9.
12
In its sensationalist tendencies and popularity at the turn of the century, the European counterpart (and possible
precedent) to Osman Nuri’s work is Georges Dorys, pseud., Abdul-Hamid intime (Paris: P. V. Stock, 1901). This
scathing, pseudonymous biography quickly received numerous translations and a wide readership; it was written by
Anastase Adossidis, an early member of the Young Turks and the son of the former governor of Crete, Adossidis
Paşa. For Adossidis, see M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995), 183 and 189; and Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and
Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 444.
 5

Some scholars, seduced by these undeniably attractive apocryphal narratives, still try to

discover secret, underground tunnels (of which there are none), and continue to be fixated by the

notion that Abdülhamid slept in different rooms every night to bewilder his assassins. It is also

difficult to reinscribe a site that has received designations like “ogre’s den,” or “the lair of a

hoary monster,” as one that merits examination within the broader historiography of Ottoman

architecture, especially when the cultural output of the nineteenth century is neglected by the

field of Islamic art as a period irrecoverably subservient to Western forms, ideas, and modes of

representation.13

It is true that to many early-twentieth century Ottomans, who were seeking a

parliamentary monarchy, the eradication of censorship, and a level of transparency in the

remaining decades of the Ottoman sovereignty, Abdülhamid and his palace were infamously

enigmatic and deserving of public enmity. In their eyes, Yıldız had become “a fortress of

despotism” and “a synonym for dark misgovernment.”14 Its former occupants and employees

frequently laced their accounts with sensationalist stories to appeal to this very audience—an

audience that was ready to despise the dethroned sultan and the spaces and symbols of his rule.

13
As scholars of Ottoman art and architecture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we always seem to have to
preface our historiographical concern that what we study is perpetually left out with this kind of plea. However,
recent scholarship on the period is gradually shedding this burden of having to continually carve out a discursive
niche representing levels of continuity (and rupture) with the past to be able to find a voice. To my mind foremost
among these works in the eighteenth century are those of Tülay Artan that I cite extensively in the subsequent
chapter. For the nineteenth century, I have benefited tremendously from the scholarship of Ahmet Ersoy, especially
his most recent publication: Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary: Reconfiguring the
Architectural Past in a Modernizing Empire (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015). Among the architectural histories
that are dismissive of Yıldız’s lack of architectural cohesion, monumentality, and “palatial magnificence” is Doğan
Kuban’s entry on the site in his Ottoman Architecture (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors Club, 2010), 626-628.
Although Kuban’s interpretation is dispirited, he does identify Yıldız as a trendsetting site in the late-nineteenth
century garden culture, an argument that I make in Chapters 3 and 4. There are others in the genre of heritage studies
that are written to raise cultural awareness of the fragmented palace, which although lagging in historically grounded
arguments, still attempt to place the site’s idiosyncratic melding of Ottoman traditional palace building and
landscaping with studied foreign imports; see Metin Sözen, Devletin Evi Saray (Istanbul: Sandoz Kültür Yayınları,
1990), 201-202.
14
McCullagh, 299.
 6

These narratives had quickly cornered a profitable market through the popular dailies. Carrying a

spectrum of favorable to hostile impressions, and with some written in response to others, they

not only collectively dominated the world of newspaper serials but also continued to appear well

into the second half of the twentieth century.15

Perhaps the single most stirring anecdote reflecting the level of public antipathy to Yıldız

comes from a close member of Abdülhamid’s family. Aided by an atmosphere of freedom felt in

Istanbul immediately after the sultan’s removal, his great-niece Mevhibe Celaleddin was able to

visit the palace, which was opened to the public by the Young Turk government for a period of

time before Mehmed V moved in. She provides one of the most compelling anecdotal

descriptions of the public’s reaction to Abdülhamid’s deposition and Yıldız’s place in their urban

consciousness. When she first enters the site, Mevhibe is struck by the masses touring the palace

grounds; Yıldız seemed to her to have become an excursion site (mesīre).16 But gradually the

true nature of this popular interest revealed itself. Participants in this outing were there to display

their anger in visceral ways. Mevhibe was horrified to witness a woman coaxing her son to

publicly urinate on the Gobelin upholsteries in one of the chalets in the palace’s private garden.

There is a long history of gawking at and despoiling a deposed ruler’s official dwelling that has

continued into the present day. Only recently, in February 2014, when the Ukrainian president

15
The most famous among these serialized recollections of life under Abdülhamid’s palace which were later
published as memoirs are: Ayşe Osmanoğlu, Babam Abdülhamid (Istanbul: Güven Yayınevi, 1960); Tahsin Paşa,
Sultan Abdülhamid: Tahsin Paşa’nın Yıldız Hatıraları (Istanbul: Boğaziçi Yayınları, 1990); and İsmail Müştak
Mayakon, Yıldız’da Neler Gördüm (Istanbul: Sertel Matbaası, 1940). The beauty of this triad is that the authors
represent different groups within the palace; Ayşe Sultan is the sultan’s daughter and views the site as her home.
Tahsin Paşa is its principal administrator and a functionary working closely with Abdülhamid, and Mayakon, a
lowly scribe. An overlooked but equally informative serial-cum-memoir is Örikağasızade Hasan Sırrı’s Sultan
Abdülhamit Devri Hatıraları ve Saray İdaresi (Istanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 2007). This last work is possibly the
most insightful with regard to the administrative breakdown of the palace and its functionaries, and surprisingly is
featured the least in the historiographies of Yıldız and in the biographies of Abdülhamid.
16
Sârâ Ertuğrul Korle, Geçmiş Zaman Olur ki, Prenses Mevhibe Celalettin’in Anıları (Istanbul: Çağdaş Yayınları,
1987), 126-127.
 7

Victor Yanukovych was ousted by the Euromaidan demonstrations, the protestors opened up to

the public to experience his one-hundred-hectare residence and park, the Mezhyhirya, which not

unlike Abdülhamid’s Yıldız, featured a Finnish-made Victorian chalet, a zoo, a barge, shooting

range, and gazebos.17

In the early days of the Turkish Republic, it was precisely the enigmatic nature of Yıldız

that made it a perfect hideaway for the military school of this new nation, which prided itself on

the might of its army. Presumably in an effort to parallel the Hamidian spy network that was

thought to have been at the palace’s core (which was not, in fact, as organized as has been

speculated), the republic’s intelligence agency also set up shop in one of the palace’s buildings.18

The fact that there is not a single extant locally drawn map of the complex from the reign of

Abdülhamid is, I believe, connected to the site’s furtive republican transformation into a military

zone and the subsequent redaction of the blueprints of its headquarters. It is also telling that the

famous insurance maps of Jacques Pervititch (or Pervitić), which date from the first decade of

the republic, gloss over the palace with an abrupt transition from the busy commercial center of

Beşiktaş to the more residential district of Ortaköy.19 Yıldız’s martial inhabitants commissioned

a meager first attempt at a monograph of the palace with indiscriminate borrowings from Osman

Nuri’s work.20

17
William Booth, “The Most Surprising Thing at Yanukovych’s Estate? He Has Relatively Good Taste,” The
Washington Post, 25 February 2014.
18
Süleyman Kâni İrtem, Abdülhamid Devrinde Hafiyelik ve Sansür: Abdülhamid'e Verilen Jurnaller (Istanbul
Temel Yayınları, 1999); Emre Gör, II. Abdülhamid'in Hafiye Teşkilatı ve Teşkilat Hakkında bir Risale Örneği
‘Hafiyelerin Listesi’ (Istanbul: Ötüken Neşriyat, 2015). Also see Mayakon, 179-188.
19
Jacques Pervititch, Jacques Pervititch Sigorta Haritalarında İstanbul: Istanbul in the Insurance Maps of Jacques
Pervititch (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı, 2010), 40-41, 46-48.
20
Fuad Ezgü, Yıldız Sarayı Tarihçesi (Istanbul: Harb Akademileri Komutanlığı, 1962).
 8

The palace was soon parceled out even further (fig. 1.1).21 The Şale compound, which

under Abdülhamid II was designed to host his imperial guests, came to be operated as a casino

by an American in the 1920s, while the site’s park became a public promenade.22 The numerous

apartments and individual chalets of the sultan’s family—the palace’s most private, residential

section—were turned into a university. A mammoth curvilinear hotel took over a segment of its

gardens, towering over the elegant timber Ertuǧrul convent, mosque, tomb and library complex

of the North African shaykh Muhammed Zafir Efendi (d. 1903) of the Shadhiliyya Sufi order,

lauded today as the best example of Ottoman art nouveau architecture. Today, a modest research

institution shares the same space with a building that was recently converted into a ceremonial

hall for the use of the prime minister. What is more, there are plans to restore this fragmented site

to its full glory as a garden palace, not to open it up to the public as a museum like the Topkapı

Palace, but to convert it into the Istanbul residence of the Turkish president.23 The official name

selected to describe this project is külliye, a word that is appended to describe Ottoman mosque

complexes with many charitable adjacencies and never applied to secular structures like palaces

or civic institutions.

Although Yıldız still occupies a sizable portion of the urban core of Istanbul’s European

side, the complex history of its fragmentation and its incredibly voluminous and hard-to-parse

archives have caused scholars to approach it with astonishing trepidation.24 And, although parts

21
For a brief history of the site’s fragmentation, see Çelik Gülersoy, “Yıldız Parkı,” in Dünden Bugüne İstanbul
Ansiklopedisi (DBİA), vol. 7 (Istanbul: Kültür Bakanlığı ve Tarih Vakfı, 1993), 519-520.
22
Ali İhsan, Yildiz, The Municipal Casino of Constantinople: the Historical Past of the Palace and Park of Yildiz
(Constantinople: A. İhsan, 1926).
23
Murat Bardakçı, “Yıldız Sarayı ‘Cumhurbaşkanlığı Osmanlı Külliyesi’ Oluyor,” in Habertürk Gazetesi, 8
November 2015.
24
For the earliest overview of the diverse nature of these archives, see Stanford Shaw, “The Yıldız Palace Archives
of Abdülhamid II,” Archivum Ottomanicum 3 (1971): 211-237.
 9

of the site have been reconfigured as museums—the beautifully restored Şale compound

administered by the National Museums (an administrative branch of the Turkish Parliament) and

the more haphazard Istanbul City Museum converted from the palace’s aides-de-camp building

by the municipality—on any given day they receive only a handful of visitors. It is surprising

and at the same time incredibly sad that such a large and unorthodox site that bears evidence of

nineteenth-century Ottoman material culture is willfully forgotten. One scurries while walking

along its boundary walls always fearing that one is trespassing in an area belonging to a

governmental body, and more often than not, guards appear to tell you that, in fact, you are.

In the few historical descriptions of the site—mostly ensconced in encyclopedia entries—

the most surprisingly overlooked fact is that for more than a century Yıldız provided a blank

canvas, a literal and metaphorical landscape, onto which its various patrons projected their

personal architectural predilections, and where they reinvented and played out their courtly status

and imperial identities.25 If this dissertation is nominally a chronological history of Yıldız’s

evolution from a royal retreat to a palace complex, it is also an examination of how certain royal

personages fashioned themselves and their monarchic ambitions through this site. Principal

among these patrons were not, as would be expected, the sultans of the reform era, but their

powerful mothers, the valide sultans. Yıldız first emerged as the royal retreat of these women

and continued to function as such until Abdülhamid II ordained it his palace in 1878. This

fascinating and unknown history of ownership is what I detail in Chapter 2.

While Mahmud II (r. 1808-39) was rebuilding the royal waterfront residence of Çırağan

as his official palace, he was trying to redefine the architectural symbols of his rule. The sultan

was not the only one, however, who was looking to recast himself as a reformist. His hired
25
For the best-known overview of Yıldız, see Afife Batur, “Yıldız Sarayı,” in Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e Türkiye
Ansiklopedisi, vol. 4 (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1985), 1048-1054; and in DBİA, vol. 7 (Istanbul: Kültür Bakanlığı
ve Tarih Vakfı, 1993), 520-527.
 10

Bavarian head-gardener Christian Sester, appointed to restore this new palace’s vast and hilly

backyard, also fashioned a complex identity for himself in the Ottoman cultural landscape of the

1830s. This was a period when most of the bulwark institutions like the janissary corps on which

the state had rested for centuries had recently been overhauled, causing every major player, from

sultans to valides and viziers to bureaucrats, to scurry to redefine their public roles. In the

relatively freewheeling atmosphere of imperial recastings, a talented and status-seeking foreign

gardener could become much more than the sum of his horticultural knowledge and past

experience. Over the course of his thirty-year life in the Ottoman Empire, he appears to have

successfully gone native and become a confidante to the sultans and high-ranking palace

officials, and a guardian angel to European renegades and expatriates. European newspapers

even reported that Sester had been elevated to knighthood by the Ottoman court. The

monumental landscaping project in Çırağan that was initiated by Mahmud II, and continued by

Abdülmecid (r. 1839-61) thanks to Sester’s local fame and international expertise is central to

Chapter 3.26

The palatial and extra-courtly gardening trends that we observe in the Ottoman Istanbul

of the nineteenth century developed in tandem with the interests of the sultans and their mothers,

and the foreign and local experts they employed in crafting ingenious landscaping projects to

complement their new residences. The horticultural developments in Yıldız under the valides as

well as the gardens of Çırağan under Mahmud II and his son and successor Abdülmecid

pioneered an enthusiasm for horticulture that permeated all levels of society, from the city’s

affluent tradesmen and low-level state officials to members of the court’s inner circle. All the

26
An abridged version of this chapter has recently been published; see Deniz Türker, “ ‘I don’t want orange trees, I
want something that others don’t have’: Ottoman Head-Gardeners after Mahmud II,” International Journal of
Islamic Architecture (IJIA) 4:2, Special Issue on the Conception and Use of Expertise in the Architecture of the
Islamic World since 1800 (2015): 257–285.
 11

city’s houses and gardens began to look like Yıldız, its winding park, artificial lakes, concrete

grottoes, gazebos, and various other types of garden architecture. This kind of unabashed, one-

to-one modeling was felt the strongest during Abdülhamid’s long tenure, and newspaper articles,

photographs, and memoirs from the period offer direct evidence of such architectural emulation.

The palace’s buildings, modest in scale and price, but easy to customize, motivated the local

residential building industry to answer to the demand of the city’s locals from varying

socioeconomic backgrounds and allow them to make decisions about the design of their own

homes all the way down to the roof fringes, window frames, and hobby-specific rooms.

The remainder of this chapter will provide an architectural overview of Yıldız, as it

appeared while it served as Abdülhamid’s palace. I will attempt to underline how he conceived it

and how some of his closest family members, court officials, and his most intimate guests saw it.

Instead of framing it as a palace built around courtyards, as a handful of short descriptions that

identify tenuous linkages to Topkapı Palace have tried to do, I will discuss prominent segments

of the Hamidian compound, which were intended to serve purposes similar to its antecedents,

functional and ceremonial, public and private.27 To his privileged viewers, Abdülhamid wanted

to appear attentive, at times perhaps overbearingly so.28 Therefore, the souvenirs and the spaces

inside Yıldız that commemorated these relations and encounters were always charged and

ceaselessly celebratory. While walking through the vacated palace, the British journalist

McCullagh poignantly observes, “one is inclined to conclude that the house had been furnished

27
There are a number of courtyard-centered descriptions of Yıldız. Afife Batur’s encyclopedia entry and Fuad
Ezgü’s brief history, for example, follow this architectural principle in analyzing the site, but see also Bülent Bilgin,
“Yıldız Sarayı,” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi (DİA), vol. 43 (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 2013),
541-544.
28
Selim Deringil’s seminal work on Abdülhamid’s separate and meticulously crafted appeals to his subjects and
foreign allies highlights the strategic symbols of his rule, see The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the
Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909 (New York: I.B. Tauris, 1998).
 12

with presents, books and samples of furniture, &c., sent by foreign firms and foreign

potentates.”29 The ensuing section will serve to clarify the physicality of a space that has been

the subject of a great number of speculative interpretations. My approach to the description of

Abdülhamid’s Yıldız will be a centripetal one: beginning with the broadest possible designations

of the site and its relationship to its larger urban environment, I will gradually narrow my focus

towards a definition of its internal parts by means of a comprehensive narrative walkthrough.

Abdülhamid was a meditative and frugal architectural patron. Even the most defamatory

of biographies spares countless pages detailing his prudent patronage, his “natural taste and

talent for architecture,” and his “marked preference for the modern and for the new.”30 One of

them highlights his ability to read plans, request scale models and often design his own

buildings:

More than one plan, executed with his own hand, has surprised his architects. He
understands their explanations very well, and recognizes the correctness of the
observations they make…For the smallest building he insists on the construction of a
model elaborately studied out, in which all the details are shown with the most
conscientious minutiae, so that the building he is putting up is only a mathematical
enlargement. He counts himself, in advance, the number of bricks which should be used
in building, and keeps this model, after having had it signed by the architect on each of
the sides representing the façades of this edifice, in order to be able to see later if his
orders have been strictly carried out.31

Besides the natural protection that the site provided, two other factors that brought

Abdülhamid to Yıldız were its assumed air quality (shielded, as it was, against the lodos, the

warm, southwesterly wind the sultan deemed bad for his health),32 and its spaciousness, which

29
McCullagh, 259.
30
I have relied on the 1901 English translation of Dorys’s Abdul-Hamid intime; see Georges Dorys, The Private Life
of the Sultan of Turkey (New York: Appleton and Co., 1901), 118.
31
Dorys, Private Life, 118-119.
32
M. Metin Hülagü. Sultan II. Abdülhamid’in Sürgün Günleri: Hususi Doktoru Atıf Hüseyin Bey’in Hatıratı, 1909-
1918 (Istanbul: Pan Yayıncılık, 2007), 340. This underutilized text is perhaps the most intimate biography of the
sultan in exile. It is a much more reliable primary source on Abdülhamid’s character and beliefs than the apocryphal
 13

satisfied his desire to maintain the active lifestyle that he had grown accustomed to in the great

outdoors afforded by sites such as the Maslak and Kaǧıthane Pavilions.33 In fact, the

understudied railway project that I will expand upon later in this chapter is indicative of his

vision to turn Yıldız into an Alpine estate with its requisite typologies. “Above the green slopes,

in among the tree-trunks, we passed innumerable châlets,” one visitor to his palace would later

observe.34 Another ascertained that “The Sultan’s own residence is a graceful and simple wooden

building of the Swiss style of architecture.”35

The final two chapters of this dissertation explore Abdülhamid’s architectural taste for

economical, light wooden structures and read it within a global nineteenth-century country villa

aesthetic. A somewhat fractious foreign diplomat recalls having shivered in one of these

structures while meeting the sultan: “These houses, built in haste from light materials and barely

heated, are glacial. I have rarely been as cold as I was during that audience” (Ces maisons batées

à la hâte, en matériaux légers et à peine chauffées sont glaciales. J’ai eu rarement aussi froid

que pendant cette audience).36 Even Abdülhamid’s deeply confessional recounting of his

princely years to a physician, appointed to his care while in exile, often revisits these airy

mansions, gardens and estates he inhabited. One of them in particular highlights how he

disagreed with his uncle, the then-reigning sultan Abdülaziz, on the latter’s suggestion to rebuild

autobiographies written after his deposition that have been accepted as his: Abdülhamid II, II. Abdülhamid’in Hatıra
Defteri (Istanbul: Selek Yayınevi, 1960); Abdülhamit Anlatıyor (Ankara: Kardeş Matbaası, 1964); and İsmet Bozdağ
ed., Abdülhamid’in Hatıra Defteri: Belgeler ve Resimlerle (Istanbul: Kervan Yayınları, 1975). Scholars continue to
refer to these biographies as Abdülhamid’s dictated recollections, even after their real writers have been identified.
33
I return to a more focused analysis of the imperial spaces that Abdülhamid inhabited before he settled in Yıldız in
Chapter 5.
34
Anna Bowman Dodd, In the Palaces of the Sultan (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1903), 71.
35
Dorys, Private Life, 121.
36
Paul Chambon, Correspondance, 1870-1924, vol. 1 (Paris: B. Grasset, 1940-1946), 23.
 14

Prince Abdülhamid’s Tarabya yalı in stone: “I do not fancy buildings made of stone and bricks

(kārgīr). In my opinion, they are better wooden,” (Ben ise kargirden hoşlanmam, böyle ahşap

olması daha iyidir).37

These last two chapters challenge the preconceived notion that Yıldız’s buildings were

willfully eclectic and were impulsively and haphazardly borrowed from examples found in the

period’s famed world expositions.38 Broadly, they underscore Abdülhamid’s preference for

chalets, identify their sources, and consider the way he used wooden pavilions to counter the

prevailing palatial taste for Tanzimat neoclassicism that he intensely associated with his

predecessors. Whether or not his architectural choices were a deliberate affront to the

architectural culture of the preceding period, Abdülhamid saw in wooden kiosks and pavilions

the best means to display crafts. Instead of reminiscing about his vast palace while in exile, his

thoughts wandered again and again to his mentorship of capable artisans (erbāb-ı ṣanʿat) in the

ateliers of Yıldız, and their skills in carpentry, woodcarving, and turnery, as well as his own

creations. Had he not been a sultan, he said, he would run an arts-and-crafts school.39

Yıldız’s history cannot be written without photograph albums, which were undeniably

central, in representational terms, to Abdülhamid II and his reign. The fifth and final chapter

focuses on the last and most intimate, previously unknown photograph album that the sultan

commissioned of the site in 1905. The album exhibits Yıldız in its most up-to-date incarnation

and in the way that Abdülhamid II wanted it to be seen: grounds that required active

engagement, that were simultaneously intimate and sublime, and that incorporated both

37
Hülagü, 151-152.
38
Georgeon, Sultan Abdülhamid (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2006), 178-179.
39
Hülagü, 221-222, and 337.
 15

untouched and cultivated landscapes. Created around the time that Marcel Proust started writing

his epic semi-autobiographical society-tale À la recherche du temps perdu, a saga that

commences with the narrator’s recollection of the long nature walks he took in his youth along

the fictional village of Combray, and contemporaneous, also, with Leoš Janáček’s famous piano

cycle On an Overgrown Path (Po zarostlém chodníčku), the album is about exploratory walking

and sightseeing in Istanbul’s imperial sites and promenades, a representation of nineteenth-

century private parks and wanderlust. But, more importantly, the album craftily infuses

Abdülhamid’s biography of places into its visual narrative.40 The chapter draws formal

comparisons with earlier, better-known photograph albums of the palace that were prepared for

an international audience. In contrast to its renowned antecedents, this album brings us closest to

Abdülhamid’s conception of Ottoman imperial spaces through the many versions that he

inhabited during his princely years. These sites that he occupied until the age of thirty-four

deeply influenced his architectural patronage in Yıldız. Therefore, I conceptualize this album as

a revealing visual biography of the most elusive of sultans and his similarly elusive palace. In its

attempt to reveal the history of this enigmatic space and the intentions of its patrons, the

dissertation comes full circle: it begins with and makes its way back to Abdülhamid.

a. YILDIZ AS A FORTRESS, YILDIZ AS A CITY, YILDIZ AS A NEIGHBORHOOD

To Yıldız’s contemporaries and later historians, Abdülhamid’s palace appeared to carry

architectural ambitions beyond those of an imperial residence (fig. 1.2). The sultan, for fear of

40
Pedestrianism and nature walks were incredibly popular pastimes in this period; not only mini-manifestoes on
walking, novels, paintings and hiking guidebooks, but also photograph albums increasingly detailed these pleasure
activities. Two works have historicized this nineteenth-century novelty; see Edwin Valentine Mitchell, The Art of
Walking (New York: Loring & Mussey, 1934); Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York:
Viking, 2000); and Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking, The History Science, Philosophy, and Literature of
Pedestrianism (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008).
 16

being dethroned, or worse, assassinated, retreated from urban life and public visibility, and over

the course of thirty years, built himself a city.41 The first visitor to write about the palace as a city

in microcosm was the Qajar ruler Muzaffar al-Din Shah (r. 1896-1907). The shah saw the palace

in its most complete state, and almost at the end of Abdülhamid’s thirty-three-year reign. On the

return leg of his third and last trip to Europe, the shah was hosted by Abdülhamid in Yıldız, in

the lavish garden compound of the Şale Kiosk, which was built and expanded many times over

to accommodate, entertain, and impress foreign heads-of-state.

Perhaps not as succinct and expressive a diarist as his father Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848-

96), who had pioneered European diplomatic travel for the Qajar state, Muzaffar al-Din Shah

highlighted what he found interesting in his sojourn through frequent repetition. In his

travelogue, Yıldız’s city-like appearance receives this kind of emphatic treatment. The shah

observes, “Yıldız is actually a small town surrounded by walls and is exclusive to the sultan and

the royal family. It is not only a garden and building, but a royal citadel which is quite vast and

extended.”42 A few pages later, he repeats: “Yıldız palace, which is actually the fortress (arg) of

government and is a town unto itself.”43

Nasir al-Din Shah’s experience of this site in 1867 as the guest of Sultan Abdülaziz (r.

1861-76) was remarkably different from that of his son. Then constituting Çırağan’s backyard,

the many “detached structures” that would be absorbed into Abdülhamid’s palace had just begun

41
In the nineteenth century, a sovereign’s fear of assassination was only too real. Most famously, multiple attempts
were made on Queen Victoria’s life. See Paul Thomas Murphy, Shooting Victoria: Madness, Mayhem, and the
Rebirth of the British Monarchy (New York: Pegasus, 2012). The Qajar ruler Nasir al-Din Shah was killed by an
Iranian revolutionary, Mirza Reza Kermani. A more obvious reminder is perhaps the fact that the nominal cause of
World War I was the assassination of the crown-prince of Austria-Hungary Franz Ferdinand by Gavriolo Princip, a
member of the Serbian nationalist group, Young Bosnia (Mlada Bosna).
42
Muẓaffar al-Dīn Shāh Qājār, Safarnāmah-i Farangistān: safar-i avval (Tihrān: Intishārāt-i Sharq, 1363 [1984]),
220.
43
Ibid.
 17

to be built when Nasir al-Din surveyed them from a carriage. The buildings whose construction

the shah witnessed must have been the two masonry pleasure pavilions, the Malta and Çadır

kiosks that occupied the northern and southernmost knobs of the imperial park (figs. 1.3–1.4).44

According to Nasir al-Din, this site was conceived as Abdülaziz’s private zoological garden

boasting specimens that the shah had not seen even in Europe.45 Here, Nasir al-Din encountered

peacocks, a roaring tiger, a leopard, an aviary that housed rare Australian golden pheasants, and

dovecotes filled with pigeons. The Azizian version of the site carried architectural echoes of

Napoleon III’s and Empress Eugenie’s Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation inside Paris’s Bois de

Bologne—rustic animal sheds of wood, wire-fencing, and thatched roofs, miniature structures for

the guests’ respite, dainty gazebos, and neoclassical island hermitages. In two short decades, and

from one shah to the next, ricocheting avenues, buildings, and intricate street patterns had

already been laid over a landscape that would become Abdülhamid’s city:

Yıldız garden, which is in the middle of the Ottoman lands, is known as sarāy. As we
mentioned, it is a town [shahr] with several edifices [ʿimārāt], a forest [jangal], a hunting
field [shikārgāh], a lake [daryācha], and various facilities for excursion [asbāb-i
tafarruj]. It also includes excellent barracks [sarbāzkhāna]; up to thirty thousand regular
troops reside in this garden. In fact, it is an enormous citadel [ark] surrounded by very
solid walls and fortifications. No one without the permission of the government is
allowed in or out… A museum, a library, a zoo, a number of workshops [fabrik], several
private residences for the sultan’s family [haramkhāna], and all equipment of a great
Ottoman royal apparatus [dastgāh-i salṭanat-i buzurg-i ʿusmānī] is provided in the Yıldız
palace complex [sarāy].46

Indeed, the site’s high and mighty walls, which for the palace’s nineteenth-century

observers bore an ominous quality resonating with the seclusion of the sultan, turned the palace

44
Çelik Gülersoy, Yıldız Parkı ve Malta Köşkü (Istanbul: Türkiye Turing ve Otomobil Kurumu Yayını, 1979).
45
Nāṣir al-Dīn Shāh, The Diary of H. M. The Shah of Persia: During his Tour through Europe in A.D. 1873,
translated by J. W. Redhouse (Costa Mesa, California: Mazda Publishers, 1995), 221.
46
Safarnāmah-i Farangistān, 221-222. I thank my colleague Farshid Emami for helping me with the English
translation of this passage; I have preserved the glosses from the original text that he has provided in the Persian
transliteration.
 18

into a fortress. Today the congested urban sprawl and a modern hotel encroaching upon its walls

obscure what must have been an intimidating physical presence in the lives of the nineteenth-

century residents of Beşiktaş and Ortaköy. Like the shoreline walls of the Topkapı Palace that

protected it from possible threats from the land and sea, Abdülhamid erected walls around his

complex to shield his court from a potential siege by Russian battleships on the Bosphorus

during the Russo-Turkish War that ended in 1878, and also from insurgents against his

sovereignty who might try to storm the palace.47 The infamous case of the Young Ottoman

journalist-theologian Ali Suavi, who in 1878 attempted a coup by charging into Çırağan from its

shore in an effort to free and reinstall the deposed sultan Murad V, strengthened Abdülhamid’s

resolve never to leave Yıldız.48 It is not surprising then that to Muzaffar al-Din, Yıldız resembled

a fortress (ark). Another factor that probably contributed to his observations is the fact that

Gulistan, the shah’s palace complex in Tehran, which was made up of a variety of pavilions like

Yıldız, was built inside the Safavid ruler Shah Tahmasp’s sixteenth-century fortifications.49

Yıldız’s interior partitions reinforced the fortress-like appearance created by its

monumental outer walls. The Romantic-novelist Anna Bowman Dodd (d. 1929), who

accompanied the American ambassadorial delegation to Abdülhamid’s court a few years before

Muzaffar al-Din Shah’s visit, was similarly struck by the palace’s countless inner walls. To her,

Yıldız appeared to be a “medieval,” “living fortress,” made up of “walls within walls.”50 In her

observations “the chief residence of His Majesty, the harem, and the pavilions where his younger

47
Georgeon, Sultan Abdülhamid, 174-175.
48
Ibid., 175.
49
Jennifer M. Scarce, “The Architecture and Decoration of the Gulistan Palace: The Aims and Achievements of
Fath ʿAli Shah (1797-1834) and Nasir al-Din Shah (1848-1896),” Iranian Studies 34, 1-4 (2001): 103-116.
50
Dodd, 74 and 82.
 19

sons and their households live,” were enclosed within an inner wall, like the keep of a fortress,

and set on a terrace occupying the summit of the highest hill.51

The somewhat apocryphal descriptions of Yıldız found in The Private Life of the Sultan

of Turkey, a lurid biography written under the pseudonym Georges Dorys and likely

commissioned by the Young Turks as one of many anti-Hamidian narratives at the turn of the

century, imagined this segment of the palace as a hexagonal fortress. In Dorys’s imaginings, it

constituted “what is popularly called the Small Enclosure of the Palace, the iron doors of which,

opening only on the outside, could not be forced in case of a popular rising or military mutiny.”52

Impenetrable doors, gateways, fences, barriers and walls were central, both physically and

metaphorically to Abdülhamid’s reign. Even the soldiers and guards that lined the palace walls

or accompanied the sultan to his highly ceremonial public Friday prayers (Cumʿa selāmlığı)

were often described as a “wall of steel” or a “fence of glistening muskets.”53 Moreover, Dodd

likened the crowded protocol of a diplomatic reception for the American delegation, which the

sultan attended with his “aides-de-camp, household guards, officers, courtiers, and even priests

[imams],” to a silent progression through a “living wall of eyes:”54

The shapes of uniformed men met one at every turning. A line of tall soldierly figures
would be passed, framed in one of the long, damask-hung passages. Groups of others,
close to the doorways of salons, stood as if posing for caryatids…young officers in
showy uniforms caught the eye and held it though the groups were rooms and rooms
beyond, in the distant perspective.55

51
Dodd, 74.
52
Dorys, Private Life, 120.
53
Dodd, 49.
54
Ibid., 88.
55
Ibid.
 20

Yıldız’s most circumspect historiographers are those who have built their observations on

Muzaffar al-Din’s repetitive rendering of the palace as an urban settlement. In the only useful but

limited encyclopedia entry on the palace, Afife Batur’s analysis rests upon the fact that it grew

over time and organically acquired an urban layout: “a milieu unlike that of a palace, was it

intended as a town?”56 Batur reads the palace made up of interwoven streets and buildings as a

site devoid of geometry and axiality. Neglecting its pre-palatine history as a much smaller

imperial site that formed the kernel of its subsequent growth and reconfiguration, she

concentrates on its unsystematic planning. She is quick to argue that additions to and connections

between buildings were carried out spontaneously and without premeditation, whereby a fabric

of streets and small irregular piazzas emerged to give the palace the appearance of a “medieval

city.”57 François Georgeon, the historian who has produced the most balanced biography of

Abdülhamid II, also calls the palace “a town within a town,” which like any growing city

appeared to be a permanent worksite.58 It is true that Yıldız was always in need of a building to

accommodate a new government office, or an additional residence to house a family member or

imperial guest. The lands around it—most of which were privately owned gardens and

orchards—were often seized to allow for its continual development. Countless official

documents show how the palace gradually engulfed its surroundings and grew piecemeal into a

fifty-hectare complex by the turn of the century.

To understand the eventual palatial evolution of Yıldız’s architectural layout, it is

important to recognize that for a long time the Yıldız estate and its buildings served as an

56
Afife Batur, “Yıldız Sarayı,” in Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e, 1050.
57
Ibid.
58
Georgeon, Sultan Abdülhamid, 180-181.
 21

imperial retreat much like a traditional urban mansion (ḳonāḳ) which consisted of administrative

quarters allocated for the sultan and his male retinue (selāmlıḳ) and a more private residential

one for the female members of the court (ḥarem). A high wall, bearing a baroque fountain with

heavy reliefs of flowers arranged inside bulbous vases and exaggerated rustication, separated the

two zones of this estate when Abdülhamid selected it as his palace. The Mabeyn Kiosk, which

formed the physical kernel of the site’s eventual development, was built during Abdülaziz’s

reign, a time when a typology closely resembling eighteenth-century French urban mansions

with subtle neoclassical trimmings was adopted especially for such royal retreats.59 This estate

was allocated for the use of his mother, Pertevniyal Valide Sultan (d. 1883); an almost identical

version was simultaneously being built for her in the woods of Acıbadem, known today as the

Validebağı (the orchard of the sultan’s mother) Kiosk. The shared trademark features of these

cross-axial structures were the pronounced cornice that separated the two floors, Serlian

fenestrations, composite double-pilasters as quoins, blind balconies with crenellated consoles,

and friezes banding through every aperture. Like the Validebağı Kiosk, at some point there may

have been plans for a Mansard roof with oeil-de-boeuf windows for the Mabeyn. Pertevniyal

Valide Sultan was an earnest architectural patron and directly involved in the upkeep of her

properties. It is very likely that the repetitive typology of the French hôtel particulier in sites

associated with her is reflective of her particular stylistic preference for retreats. A much simpler

building with a pedimented roof belonging to an earlier period—either from the time of Mahmud

II or that of his son Abdülmecid—formed the main structure of the estate’s harem section.

Abdülhamid II’s palace grew up around these two pre-existing sections of a single estate, with

59
Pars Tuğlacı, Osmanlı Mimarlığında Batılılaşma Dönemi ve Balyan Ailesi (Istanbul: İnkılâp ve Aka, 1981), 288-
316.
 22

other structures being built in and around them to accommodate the needs of an expanding

palace.

Another of Muzaffar al-Din’s Shah’s perceptive descriptions of Yıldız noted its centrality

with respect to surrounding neighborhoods. A retinue of Ottoman and Qajar viziers,

ambassadors, and translators, who accompanied the shah, must have informed him that Yıldız’s

presence extended beyond its fortress walls. In his diary entry, the neighborhoods of Ortaköy,

Dolmabahçe, and Beşiktaş appear to him to be irrevocably and symbiotically linked with the

palace in a constant circulation of goods, services, and people. These peoples and places, he says,

constitute “Yıldız’s neighborhood” (mujāvir-i qaṣr-ı Yıldız).60 To the shah, not only the houses

and shops of ordinary locals, but Dolmabahçe—recently demoted to mansion (ʿimārat) as

opposed to palace status—its mosque, and the imperial foundry of Tophane seemed to have all

been subsumed under the authority of Abdülhamid’s Yıldız.

The innumerable employees of Yıldız, from the Arab and Albanian regiments inhabiting

the Orhaniye and Ertuǧrul barracks girding its walls, to its eunuchs, its chief bath keepers, and its

quilt-makers, would populate Beşiktaş’s bustling marketplace, its ramshackle coffee-shop that

“hung like a cage above a lumber warehouse,”61 its bakeries, butchers, and food-sellers. The

palace’s affluent bureaucrats, on the other hand, were given sumptuously endowed mansions in

the plateaus of Nişantaşı that Georgeon calls the “town of pashas.”62 Because Yıldız under

Abdülhamid had upstaged the Sublime Porte as the empire’s administrative center, the ministers

were strongly encouraged to live close to the palace, because they would be indiscriminately

60
Safarnāmah-i Farangistān, 221.
61
Hagop Mintzuri, İstanbul Anıları, 1897-1940 (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1998), 31.
62
Georgeon, Sultan Abdülhamid, 183. For a wonderfully illustrated history of the evolution of this “town of pashas,”
see M. Burak Çetintaş, Dolmabahçe'den Nişantaşı'na: Sultanların ve Paşaların Semtinin Tarihi (Istanbul: Antik
A.Ş., 2005).
 23

called upon at any hour of the day.63 The imperial treasury covered the cost of construction and

of furnishing the mansions for the grand-vizier, the chief religious official, and the minister of

war, and even subsidized rents for the homes of many low-ranking officials.64

The sultan commissioned photographs that meticulously documented the process of

building the houses of his viziers. Among the expenses of the imperial treasury, one comes

across room-by-room furniture lists for their interiors.65 It is not surprising that one of these lists

begins with the grand-vizier’s study (yazı odası) with its bureau, library, and requisite cigarette

stand, because it was the dedicated and industrious governmental work that he was expected to

undertake in this space that earned him this well-appointed residence. We are told by a

contemporary insider that these mansions were often preferred to Yıldız as sites for the

ministerial gatherings at which important decisions regarding the state were discussed, because

they offered a privacy that the palace’s Mabeyn often did not.66 To encourage these bureaucrats

to remain as close as possible to the newly designated governmental palace (where members of

the administration were always on call, and viziers, scribes and aides worked in twenty-four-hour

shifts at times of emergency), the sultan’s calculated benevolence extended beyond the

appointment of opulent mansions and luxurious furnishings to landscaping and the provision of

63
On Yıldız Palace’s transformation into the empire’s administrative heart, see Carter V. Findley, Bureaucratic
Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte, 1789-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 239-
269.
64
Tahsin Paşa’nın Yıldız Hatıraları, 226-227.
65
Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (BOA), Y. PRK. HH. 34/38.
66
Mustafa Ragıb Esatlı, Saray ve Konakların Dilinden Bir Devrin Tarihi (Istanbul: Bengi Yayınları, 2010), 91-92,
and 94-95; most recently on the salon-like gatherings and cultured discussions in these mansions of the Ottoman
elite, see Şemsettin Şeker, Ders ile Sohbet Arasında On Dokuzuncu Asır İstanbul’unda İli, Kültür ve Sanat
Meclisleri (Istanbul: Zeytinburnu Belediyesi Kültür Yayınları, 2013). For an intimate eyewitness account of life
inside the mansions of the paşas, see Semiz Mümtaz Sedes, Eski İstanbul Konakları (Istanbul: Kurtuba Kitap,
2011).
 24

greenhouses and delicate wooden pavilions to keep his officials content in their domestic

worlds.67

Even more than the many military barracks situated on the high plateaus to the palace’s

north and northwest, it was the police station in Beşiktaş’s square and its chief, Yedi-sekiz Hasan

Paşa (who killed Ali Suavi during the latter’s Çırağan raid to reinstall Murad V), that were

believed to be responsible for the surveillance around Yıldız. The station controlled all the

properties surrounding the palace and handpicked their tenants, from the Hasan Paşa creek to

Ihlamur and Yenimahalle, from Ortaköy to the entrance of the Şale Kiosk, and from the hillside

street of Serencebey to Yıldız’s Mabeyn. A palace scribe recalled that this station was where

Yıldız really started: “it was the beginning, door, and lock of the palace” (Burası Yıldızın mebdei,

kapısı, kilididir).68 The station’s personnel were often covertly integrated into the

neighborhood’s shopkeepers, posing as tailors, cobblers, or beggars.

Amid the urban chaos of the capital’s new center, Yıldız imposed an implicit hierarchy

over its neighborhoods. A baker with an oven in Beşiktaş had to abide by it when distributing

bread via his itinerant vendors (ṭablakār): starting with the devout attendees of the sixteenth-

century mosque-dervish convent of Yahya Efendi, then the mansions of the sultan’s closest aides

bordering the palace—Tahir Paşa, the imperial head-guard, Rıza Paşa, the minister of war, Ali

Bey, the sultan’s secretary—and proceeding to the stately homes of viziers, ministers, and

scribes in Nişantaşı. Yıldız’s kitchens, their stone buildings located beside the Mecidiye Mosque,

not only fed its own inhabitants and employees, but also catered large round trays full of food

covered in dark cloth three times a day to the yalıs (shore mansions) of the court’s extended

67
For vibrant recollections of the grueling Mabeyn shifts and the palace clerks’ conception of their workplace as an
extension of their time as students in the Imperial Public Service School, see Kayahan Özgül, ed., Ali Ekrem
Bolayır’ın Hatıraları (Ankara: Kurgan Edebiyat, 2013), 319-328.
68
Mayakon, 11.
 25

members that dotted the shorelines from Kuruçeşme and Ortaköy to Fındıklı.69 When about forty

tablakars, dressed in their pitch-black, high-collared stambouline frocks, walked in single file

along the avenue behind Çırağan, “they cast long shadows on the sidewalks.”70 The court’s

savvy food-vendors also sold the large quantities of leftovers to Beşiktaş’s locals, while

broughams carrying the court’s female members crisscrossed the roads connecting Yıldız with

the waterfront mansions of their relatives.71 This deeply enmeshed economy that spanned the

palace and its surroundings was also constantly invigorated by the spectacle that was

Abdülhamid’s Friday prayer ceremonies. The shopkeepers of Beşiktaş served halvah and zythum

(boza) to the immense crowds that gathered each week to witness the sultan’s grand yet

unchanging devotional act.72

b. YILDIZ’S UBIQUITIOUS DĀʾİRES

The government officials who received Abdülhamid’s highest esteem were given offices within

the palace that often doubled as overnight lodgings. Dāʾire, the word that defined a government

office in the spatially and functionally hyper-compartmentalized Tanzimat bureaucracy, was also

adopted in Yıldız to describe floors, rooms, and apartments inside buildings as well as individual

pavilions designated for a particular person, office, or function. This word’s prevalence in

Yıldız’s spatial demarcations not only indicates the unusual integration of imperial residence and

offices of government at this site—a blurring of sorts between domestic and official spaces—but

also the way in which Abdülhamid showed his partiality towards his retinue. The dictionary

69
Mintzuri, 42-43.
70
Ibid., 55.
71
Halide Edib Adıvar, Memoirs of Halidé Edib (New York: The Century co., 1926), 36.
72
Memoirs of Halidé Edib, 36.
 26

definitions of the word from the period highlight the fact that it applied both to a professional

office as well as to a segment of the domestic residence. Ḳāmūs-ı Türkī, compiled by the

Ottoman Albanian writer Şemseddin Sami (d. 1904), who was the head-scribe to the military

inspections commission located in the Çit Kiosk of Yıldız, described daire first as “a collection

of rooms inside a large mansion” (bir ḳonāḳ vesāʾir binānıñ münḳasım olduğu aḳsāmıñ beheri ki

bir ḳāç oda vesāʾireden mürekkebdir), and only second as “each of the governmental

departments responsible for the affairs of state and the buildings that house their offices or

assemblies” (umūr-ı devleti idāre eden şuʿbātıñ beheri ve beheriniñ aḳlām ve mecālis

vesāʾiresini ḥāvī ebniyesi).73

Although daire was used to refer to more obvious Ottoman governmental institutions,

like the office of the grand-vizier, the scribes and members of the Mabeyn, its was also used to

describe incredibly idiosyncratic ones created by Abdülhamid himself—institutions that

transformed his paşas and close acquaintances into his private political advisors and informants.

When outlining the civil offices of Yıldız, Tahsin Paşa, Abdülhamid’s head-scribe after 1894

who served until his deposition in 1908, identified some of them by the officials who were

appointed to run them, rather than the specific functions of the offices: the offices (daire) of İzzet

Paşa (the second scribe of the Mabeyn, head of the revenues’ office, and high-commissioner of

the Hejaz Railways), Derviş Paşa (a specialist of politics in Albania), Kamphofner Paşa (a

German military expert), Aleksandr Kara Todori Paşa (an experienced diplomat), Şakir Paşa

(head of the military commission), and Dragoman Nişan Efendi (an Armenian daily translator of

French newspaper articles on issues regarding the Ottoman state).74 İsmail Müştak (later

Mayakon), a clerk working under Tahsin Paşa, writes in his memoirs, which were serialized in
73
Şemseddin Sāmī, Ḳāmūs-ı Türkī (Dersaʿadet: İḳdām, 1317 [1899-1900]), 601.
74
Tahsin Paşa’nın Yıldız Hatıraları, 20-28.
 27

the early years of the Turkish Republic, that if given a bird’s-eye-view of Yıldız under

Abdülhamid, would see “a gloomy neighborhood composed of tiny offices [daires].”75

In the official language of Yıldız’s archives and the memoirs of its bureaucrats and

various other members of the court, a building’s name is hardly ever mentioned, while the word

daire is more frequently used to describe an administrative office serving a palace function or the

quarters designated to its many inhabitants. Şadiye Sultan, another one of Abdülhamid’s

memoir-writing daughters, described Yıldız as “a palace broken up into apartments” (Dairelere

taksim edilmiş saray).76 This practice of demarcating both buildings and official functions with

the name of the person or office that held them makes it difficult to attribute any one building to

a person or an office. However, all of the palace’s inhabitants thought of their assigned lodgings

in terms of collections of rooms or apartments within a larger complex, rather than as

independent structures. Even Abdülhamid’s own residence, a stately Victorian home, was

referred to as his personal quarters (Ḫuṣūṣī Dāʾire) (fig. 1.5).

Some of these daires were more idiosyncratic than others and were a result of

Abdülhamid’s own brand of generosity, his personal whims and preferences. For years, he

hosted Dr. Blane, a French physician who had formerly practiced his trade on transatlantic ships,

in two rooms (iki odalı bir daire)77 inside the Small (küçük) Mabeyn, because he found the

doctor’s medical wisdom and quirky habits (of carrying around two bags full of antique artifacts

and leaving his room only for short strolls in the palace park) to his liking. Blane became “a

75
Mayakon, 180.
76
Şadiye Osmanoğlu, Babam Abdülhamid, Saray ve Sürgün Yılları (Istanbul: Timaş, 2012), 21.
77
Hülagü, 294.
 28

personal doctor and mentor” (hem doktorum hem akıl hocam idi), according to the sultan’s

recollections, and was one of the few advisors who dined with him every night.78

High-ranking state employees were not the only recipients of Abdülhamid’s tactical

munificence, distributed as part of a strategy he called isticlāb, or the act of drawing near.79 He

hosted influential Arab and Kurdish notables in the Double Palaces (Çifte Saraylar) located in

the Teşvikiye quarter of Nişantaşı for considerable lengths of time, keeping them occupied with

gratuitous state protocol, honors, and gifts in order to weaken their control over populations and

regions that Abdülhamid wanted to consolidate under his caliphal authority (fig. 1.6).80 These

structures, constructed by Abdülmecid to house the head-chamberlain (bāşmābeynci) and scribe

(bāşkātib) and once the first residential buildings of what would become the town of pashas,

were transformed under Abdülhamid II into guest apartments (misāfirīn dāʾiresi). To the

neighborhood’s local inhabitants, these figures with their sumptuous accommodations were

exiles in the empire’s capital under the sultan’s constant surveillance. The memoirs of

government officials label them quite caustically as provincial tyrants (taşra mütegallibesi) or

bandit chiefs (sergerdeler), whose family members seem to have led palpably sober, interiorized

lives (namahremlik) amid the vibrant sociability that had emerged in Yıldız’s residential

extensions in Nişantaşı. An itinerant local food vendor recalled how difficult it was to

communicate with the non-Turkish-speaking residents of these conservative households, female

78
Hülagü, 220.
79
Tahsin Paşa’nın Yıldız Hatıraları, 40; Selim Deringil, “Legitimacy Structures in the Ottoman State: The Reign of
Abdülhamid II (1876-1909),” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 23 (1991): 345-359.
80
The sultan’s inauguration of the Imperial School for Tribes to educate and integrate the sons of these leaders for
governmental jobs was another aspect of his tightening grip on the empire’s remaining and predominantly Muslim
provinces, see Eugene L. Rogan, “Asiret Mektebi: Abdülhamid II’s School for Tribes (1892-1907),” International
Journal of Middle East Studies 28, 1 (1998): 83-107.
 29

members would speak in whispery tones and only extend their hennaed hands through doors to

receive their daily share of the goods.81

The most conspicuous architectural example of Abdülhamid’s strategic detainment of

influential Arab notables in Istanbul and close to his palace was his commission of a stately

devotional and residential complex for Muhammed Zafir, the aforementioned North African

shaykh. The Ertuğrul convent mosque—“an adorned and modest prayer space” 82 adjacent to the

palace’s western walls—was appointed to Zafir’s Sufi order, and his extended family were

moved into two monumental timber mansions within the same garden. His family members

continued to occupy the same residence in the republican years, and the memoirs of one of his

last remaining descendants indicate that Abdülhamid’s surreptitious overprotection eventually

resulted in the loss of ties with their North African origins.83 I will return to the importance of

this shaykh in the sultan’s life in Chapter 2. Here, however, I want to mention that the sultan’s

confidante and decades-long selamlık companion Gazi Osman Paşa (d. 1900),84 a seasoned

battle-mastermind and hero of the Russo-Ottoman War of 1878, who was the highest-ranking

member of Abdülhamid’s administration and had an entire floor of offices allocated to him in the

Mabeyn Kiosk, was also given an urban estate which occupied the same imperial street as the

shaykh’s complex.85 This still extant street—named Serencebey Yokuşu—held considerable

prestige in the hierarchy of Yıldız’s surrounding neighborhoods, and the most influential

members of Abdülhamid’s cabinet employed in decisions regarding the state, religion, and

81
Mintzuri, 24-25.
82
“ Ziynetsiz, külfetsiz bir ibadetgâh,” in Mayakon, 113.
83
Güngör Tekçe, Şeyh Zafir Konağında Bir Tuhaf Zaman (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2008).
84
On Osman Paşa’s formal and extremely fettered relationship to Abdülhamid and the palace, see Semih Mümtaz,
Tarihimizde Hayal Olmuş Hakikatler (Istanbul: Çığıraçan, 1948), 98-101.
85
Ibid., 98-103.
 30

warcraft were made to reside therein. The sultan’s commemoration of figures important to his

rule and conduct extended even into death: after the shaykh’s passing, he commissioned the

Italian Art Nouveau architect Raimondo D’Aronco to build a small domed tomb and adjacent

library in front of the timber dervish convent (fig. 1.7). The small scale of these pavilion-like

twin structures were in line with Abdülhamid’s patronage of person-specific and customized

buildings in which he conducted his brand of intimate diplomatic gatherings. These are discussed

at length in Chapter 4.

c. THE SULTAN’S SELF-DESIGNED SIGHTSEEING TOUR

Inside Yıldız, Muzaffar al-Din Shah shows great interest in a particular group of palatial

structures that formed the itinerary of Abdülhamid’s carefully choreographed sightseeing tour for

his guests of honor. These comprised of the museum, library, zoo, and factories. “The Sultan had

said that we were to see his museum, library and garden,” 86 observed the German Orientalist

Max Müller’s wife Georgina in 1894. Another female visitor vibrantly recalled, “a manufactory

of porcelain, an arsenal, a museum containing the Imperial library and a magnificent collection

of miniatures, enamels and jewels, meanwhile, as on and on we had been driven, past lawns,

lakes, gardens, and kiosks, we came, in due time, to an archway, beyond which a number of low

buildings within an inner courtyard proved to be the imperial stables.”87 Conducted by a courtier,

Abdülhamid’s privileged visitors were first made to see the museum inside his private garden in

which he preserved and displayed the treasured gifts of his foreign counterparts:

Here are collected and beautifully arranged all the presents that he has received as well as
innumerable valuable objects that belonged to some of his predecessors. Countless clocks
and watches, inlaid armour, objects in jade, caskets, wonderfully bound books, china of

86
Georgina Adelaide Müller. Letters from Constantinople (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897), 52.
87
Dodd, 75.
 31

all sorts, pictures, miniatures, jeweled ornaments of every kind, all so arranged in their
cases that one could examine and enjoy them, a delightful contrast to the confusion in
which treasures of the old Seraglio are heaped together. One upright case contained four
dozen of the most perfect deep blue Sèvres plates, a present from the Emperor Napoleon,
sunk into velvet, twenty-four on each side of the stand. Each plate was a picked and
perfect specimen…We could have spent hours examining everything, but time was
limited, and we were taken on to the private stables, still within the Harem walls, holding
twelve of the most perfect Arabs, used by the Sultan for riding and driving in the park of
Yildiz.88

In the Imperial Stables, located close to the Malta Kiosk, the many prized Russian,

Austrian and Arab steeds were “put through their paces” for the guests (fig. 1.8).89 If world-

renowned scholars were a part of the retinue, they would be brought to the library at the edge of

the Mabeyn courtyard staffed by a “devoted librarian along with “six or eight intelligent

assistants,” and containing “a carefully prepared and full catalogue,” “exquisite Persian MSS.,”

“modern Indian works on Indian music,” “fine MSS. of the Koran with glosses and

commentaries,” “bookcases of the best construction and movable shelves,” “a very good

collection of English, French, and German classics,” “glass cases, filled with gorgeously bound,

illustrated works, chiefly gifts to the Sultan, and “photographs of places in the Sultan’s

dominions and of public buildings in Stambûl (fig. 1.9).”90 The guests would also walk across

the suspended footbridges—“the sultan’s favorite rickety bridge”91—hovering above the park’s

lakes or take a carriage across its valley to reach the tile factory (fig 1.10). Muzaffar al-Din Shah

tells us that three Qajar students apprenticed in the factory. Depending on which side of the park

88
Dodd, 54-55.
89
Ibid. 55.
90
Ibid., 57-58. In fact, aside from the main library, many of Yıldız’s residential buildings contained their own
library rooms, one of which was reserved for Abdülhamid’s collection of books from his princely years. The initial
reconnaissance reports of Abdurrahman Şeref, who was appointed the court chronicler to Mehmed, after the
deposition of Abdülhamid as well as the commissions subsequently employed to list all of the books housed in the
palace identified at least four of these spaces. See Murat Candemir, Son Yıldız Düşerken (Istanbul: Çamlıca), 2011,
144-146.
91
Enid Layard, Twixt Pera and Therapia: The Constantinople Diaries of Lady Layard (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2010),
253.
 32

the guests began their tour, the Çadır or Malta Kiosks were often outfitted for their respite. For

some time, Çadır served as an annex to the imperial Hereke factory; looms were installed inside

this kiosk to supply necessary furnishings and repairs for the palace, augmenting the palace’s

self-subsistence function and image as facilitator of local craftsmanship.92 The structures inside

the park were indeed seen as stations for artisanal work. Once the Italian artist Fausto Zonaro (d.

1929) received his court appointment, the Çadır Kiosk was assigned to him as a private atelier.93

Although most of the palace’s buildings were not geometrically ordered, and its

courtyards lacked a linear sequence, thus, to Batur, resembling a medieval town, the experience

of its grounds followed a systematic courtly order. It was expressly choreographed by the sultan

and implemented by his master of ceremonies (teşrifāt nāẓırı), who was also the head-dragoman

of the court (divān-ı hümāyūn tercümānı).94 The sultan would later attribute his excessive gift-

giving—especially to the wives of foreign ambassadors— and the controlled intensity of his

hosting in the palace grounds, to the timeworn decorum that was upheld by the “wisdom of the

government, and the government of wisdom” (o zaman böyle hareket etmek ‘hikmet-i hükûmet,

hükûmet-i hikmet’ icabı idi).95

To the palace’s most important guests, for whom the Şale Kiosk was reserved,

Abdülhamid opened up the doors of his private residential space and his “” theater (fig. 1.11).

Inconspicuous from the outside, this latter structure was located in the transitional zone between

the sultan’s personal residential quarters and study, the Ḫuṣūṣī Dāʾire and Small Mabeyn, and

92
BOA, HH. d. 16536.
93
Fausto Zonaro, Abdülhamid’in Hükümdarlığında Yirmi Yıl: Fausto Zonaro'nun Hatıraları ve Eserleri (Istanbul:
YKY, 2008), 161.
94
Örıkağasızâde Hasan Sırrı, 149-152; for the medieval town analogy, see Afife Batur, “Yıldız Sarayı,” in DBİA,
vol. 7, 522.
95
Hülagü, 245.
 33

the gate that opened into the compound of the Şale. In Muzaffar al-Din Shah’s memoirs, we

come across the mention of an enclosed gallery that connected his Victorian residence with the

Şale. It was in this gallery that Abdülhamid exhibited paintings depicting members of the House

of Osman and Ottoman battle scenes; a surviving cross-sectional representation of these

paintings in situ suggests how they would have been arranged (fig. 1.12). The sultan’s visual

glorification of his dynastic past in the space reserved for his most intimate guests seems to have

worked on the shah, who wrote the following: “Most of this gallery’s walls are decorated with

paintings of the Ottoman sultans’ wars, which are really spectacular and reveal the high dignity

of this family.”96

The impressions of this grand display of gifts and glories as well as the sultan’s

museological impulse must have had a lasting impression on Nasir al-Din Shah, who designed a

small museum inside the Gulistan Palace to store the gifts he had received from Abdülhamid

called gāh-ı abyaż (white palace) (fig. 1.13).97 With its classical plasters and subtle floral stucco

window frames, this Qajar repository of gifts may have carried architectural similarities with

Abdülhamid’s museum or imperial library, or might have been a small replica of the Mabeyn.

The sultan spent hours personally showing Nasir al-Din’s son and successor Muzaffar al-Din the

most valuable manuscripts from his collection of “twenty-thousand books,” and presented him

with a Quran handwritten by the eighteenth-century court calligrapher Yedikuleli Seyyid

Abdullah Efendi. The shah also read out his fortune from pages of an album (muraḳḳaʿ) of

calligraphy by the sixteenth-century Persian master of the nastaliq script, Mir Emad Hasani.98

96
Safarnāmah-i Farangistān, 224.
97
Başak Kilerci, "Ottoman-Qajar Relations through Photography: Mozaffar al-Din Shah's İstanbul Visit"
(Unpublished Master’s Thesis, Boğaziçi University, 2013).
98
Safarnāmah-i Farangistān, 225; and, Kilerci, 104.
 34

Abdülhamid’s preoccupation with structures that reinforced diplomacy within his palace

gardens continued unabated all the way into the third decade of his reign, at a time when he

recycled a design undertaken by the Levantine architect Alexandre Vallaury for the crown

princes and intended for the suburban imperial estate of Kurbaǧalıdere to serve as a new pavilion

for court banquets. Abdülhamid placed this building immediately next to the tile factory, on the

last plot of land to be absorbed by the palace grounds from the neighborhood of Ortaköy.

Bearing the profile of an eighteenth-century French townhouse, this structure and its landscaped

gardens concluded the sultan’s architectural project to stage his diplomacy in relation to his

extended family (a central subject of Chapter 5) or foreign heads-of-state (examined through his

construction of ephemeral buildings in Chapter 3).

The buildings that Abdülhamid most wanted his guests to see were distributed inside the

palace’s park. To speed up the movement of visitors between these structures, an elaborate, one

kilometer and six hundred meter-long railway track carrying an imperial wagon (rükūb-ı

şāhāneye maḫṣūṣ vāgon) was even projected for this part of the palace (fig. 1.14).99 This novel

mode of travel must have been considered a less cumbersome way to traverse the steep slopes of

the park that were, moreover, bisected by a natural gorge bearing cascades and lakes. Though

unrealized, we can see from the royal presentation copy of the railway plans that this was an

incredibly dramatic project—quite unusual for a palace. It came with a topographic cross-section

detailing how the tracks were to be laid out, the locations of the bridges and tunnels along the

route, and the design of the imperial wagon including its interior furnishings of sumptuous

Hereke carpets, textiles and Orientalist-Alhambresque furniture (fig. 1.15). The creator of the

99
The original drawings of this project are housed in the Istanbul University Library’s Rare Works Collection
(İÜMK), and filed under the catalogue number 93283.
 35

project is unknown, but it seems to bear Abdülhamid’s imprimatur. The first folio containing the

elaborate plan bears the Ottoman coat of arms and the caption above it suggests with the word

mutaṣavver that the project was conceived, at least partly, in-house: “the general plan of the

railways that are conceptualized for the garden of the imperial palace of Yıldız” (Yıldız sarāy-ı

hümāyūnu bāǧçesinde inşāsı mutaṣavver olan demiryollarınıñ ḫarīta-ı umūmīyesidir).

Tracing almost exactly the spots that Yıldız’s many foreign visitors saw, the wagon was

set to pick up the sultan’s guests from a spot between the Mabeyn and Çit kiosks. Not by

coincidence, this zone was where the foreign dignitaries awaiting their audience with the sultan

gathered after the selamlık. The sultan, who loved to conduct his private diplomatic meetings

with delegations and royal guests inside the park’s kiosks and pavilions, might have seen this

high-altitude ride as a novel and exciting diversion. An interesting parallel to note here is the fact

that Nasir al-Din Shah seems also to have installed two wagons inside the gardens of his palace

that according to the French ambassador Paul Cambon (d. 1924) resembled “our first class

wagons with three compartments upholstered in gray fabric.”100 These two wagons, otherwise

sheltered in a purpose-built hangar and without rails on which to travel, were revealed only when

distinguished guests were visiting the grounds. These diplomatic guests were made to spend time

inside the rail cars, “opening and closing the doors, or playing with the windows” (Quand un

visiteur de distinction se présente on le fait monter et séjourner pendant quelques instants dans

un compartiment. On ouvre et on ferme les portières, on fait jouer les vitres).101 A photograph

from Nasir al-Din Shah’s extensive photograph collection—one that he may have taken

100
Cambon, 389.
101
Ibid.
 36

himself—shows women, children, and eunuchs of his harem inside this stationary vehicle,

peering out of its windows.102

On the map of Yıldız’s imperial railway project, which is drafted in minute detail (down

to the site’s diverse flora), the wagon’s route commences by first crossing the Mabeyn courtyard

following the downward slope of the ridge along the arsenal and stopping in front of the imperial

library. From here the wagon enters a short bridge, resting on arcaded piers, and traverses the

artificial lake in front of the Çadır Kiosk (marked as köşk on the plan, possibly as a reference to

its earliest incarnation as an open structure not intended for overnight habitation, while the Malta

Kiosk, here, is marked as a ḳaṣır). After the first bridge, the rails curve towards the north as the

wagon enters a tunnel that tracks along the high walls that separated the sultan’s private garden

from the park. This tunnel leads the wagon onto the second, longer bridge (with high castellated

towers, bearing the Ottoman banner), stopping at the final site of the tour, the imperial stables,

before depositing its prospective passengers at their lodgings in the Şale Pavilion.

Batur only briefly mentions this project as part of her argument that the palace was

conceptualized as an industrializing city unto itself.103 Surprisingly, since then, no close analysis

of this unconventional palatial addition has been undertaken, despite the fact that the plans

contain a detailed map of Yıldız under Abdülhamid, one of only a handful that survive. Though

undated, the project was likely conceived before 1894, because the layout of the Şale on the map

appears to date from a period before the Italian architect Raimondo D’Aronco’s extensions to

this structure. The partial map of the grounds—covering almost the entirety of the external park,

the Mabeyn courtyard and the environs of the Şale—exhibits minute topographical

measurements and painstaking representation of the park’s diverse plantings (flatter grounds
102
Kilerci, 176.
103
Afife Batur, “Yıldız Sarayı,” in Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e, 1050.
 37

were reserved for kitchen gardens and formal flower parterres, while the slopes were densely

wooded) that must have necessitated access to and an intimate knowledge of the site. The

terraced platform on which the sultan’s private garden rested was conspicuously left out, but its

walls were carefully demarcated. Therefore, this project for the park may have been developed at

around the same time that Abdülhamid was designing his personal gardens, which would have

commanded spectacular views of the wagon and tracks traversing the grounds down below.104

During Abdülaziz’s reign, each time a railway line was completed in the imperial

domains, often by a European company that had received concessions for its construction, the

sultan received an imperial wagon and also its scale model as gifts.105 This unrealized prestige

project for Yıldız may have been the result of a similar international deal that was struck during

Abdülhamid’s time (fig. 1.16). Under the protective hand of the Ottoman Public Debt

Administration, which was established in 1881 to regulate the bankrupt empire’s foreign debt

and revenues, countless European investors vied for concessions to maintain their power over the

region by installing railway lines that connected Anatolia with Baghdad and beyond.106 These

lavish drawings likely represented the recreational side of what was otherwise a cutthroat

environment of negotiations between European entrepreneurs and ambassadors, Ottoman

ministers, and the bankers and superintendents employed by the Administration. To extort

104
For a detailed on-site, archaeological study of the palace’s inner garden, see Münevver Dağgülü Şen, “Yıldız
Sarayı Selamlık Bahçe Düzeni,” Yayınlanmamış Yüksek Lisans Tezi, Yıldız Teknik Üniversitesi, 1984. For an
abridged version of this unpublished master’s thesis, see Münevver Dağgülü Şen, Yıldız Sarayı Selamlık Bahçesi:
Has Bahçe-İç Bahçe (Tesbit ve Envanter Çalışması) (Istanbul: Yıldız Teknik Üniversitesi Yayın No: 267, 1993).
105
For examples of wooden scale models of the imperial wagons produced for Sultan Abdülaziz during the
construction of the İzmir-Aydın line and the Rumelia line, see Şennur Şentürk, Demir Yol: Tren Çaǧı (İstanbul:
Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, 2003), 44 and 46. The original version of the imperial wagon that would have
been attached to the train operating between İzmir and Aydın is now exhibited in the Rahmi M. Koç Museum in
Istanbul.
106
Murat Özyüksel, Osmanlı İmparatorluǧu’nda Nüfus Mücadelesi: Anadolu ve Baǧdat Demiryolları (Istanbul:
Türkiye İşbankası Kültür Yayınları, 2008), 22-26.
 38

construction rights, the parties involved also had to appeal to the reigning sultan’s sensibilities.

In the case of Abdülhamid, the project’s unknown planners knew the sultan’s tastes all too well.

The imagined interiors of the wagon were upholstered in his beloved Hereke fabrics and the

furniture featured the kind of Damascene inlays that the sultan himself was skilled in crafting.

They were also attuned to Abdülhamid’s conception of his palace. The makers of the project

correctly identify the key stops along the sultan’s sightseeing tour, and they also seem to grasp

the appeal that the site’s Alpine topography held for the sultan, overemphasizing it in the

drawings. The landscapes that form the backdrop to the watercolor cross-sections of the bridges

and the view depicted through the wagon’s window, in particular, greatly dramatize Yıldız’s

hills, transforming them into mountains with deeper valleys and denser forests.

d. THE LAYOUT OF ABDÜLHAMID’S YILDIZ

The impenetrable “high walls of Abdülhamid’s fortress” (ḳalʿa sūru) that to many were a source

of tremendous consternation were punctured by heavily guarded doors servicing the different

segments of the palace complex (fig. 1.16).107 The Albanian tüfekçis of the Second Squadron,

whose frequent unruliness made them seem no different from the pre-Tanzimat janissary corps in

the eyes of the palace officials, patrolled their gates.108 Three main doors, clustered around the

Mabeyn, were used the most. Of the three, the one that remained open every day from morning

till midnight was located right below the Set Kiosk and its terrace, an elevated pavilion and dais

reserved for the foreign delegations invited to watch Abdülhamid’s selamlık (fig. 1.17). Off to

the side and at the foot of the hill that climbed up to the other two ceremonial gates, this portal

107
ʿOsmān Nūrī. Abdülḥamīd-ī Sānī Devr-i Salṭanatı, Ḥayāt-ı Ḫuṣūṣiye ve Siyāsiyesi, vol. 2 (İstānbūl: Kitābḫāne-i
islām ve ʿaskerī, [1327]-1911), 451.
108
Mayakon, 134-141.
 39

was referred to as the servant’s entrance (koltuk kapı) by the palace’s royal residents. But to the

numerous clerks employed in the Mabeyn and the head-scribe’s office, who had to pass through

it everyday, it was the palace’s main door (cümle kapı).

When the highest-ranking students of the Imperial School of Public Service (mekteb-i

mülkiye-i şāhāne) were recruited to the coveted scribal positions within the palace, they entered

Yıldız through this portal and were immediately taken into the office of the head-scribe to be told

the requirements of their post. The memoirs of these recruits provide the best descriptions of the

human traffic in and out of this portal. The crowded pageantry that paraded through this main

door day and night included grand-viziers (Saturdays and Tuesdays), ministers (Mondays and

Thursdays), senior to lowly office-holders, and dragomans and palace’s first-time visitors, rich

provincials, concession-seeking foreigners, formidable contractors, robed members of the ulema,

the merchant class, nondescript middlemen, jewelers, Ottoman dandies in European garb, and the

requisite small-time informants.109 One of these scribes in particular provides a colorful

breakdown of these visitors according to the degree of recognition they received from the

palace’s doormen, who to him represented “the plainest of measurements of what the palace

was” (sarayı anlamak için sadeliği ile beraber en doğru mikyaslardan biri kapıcılardır).110

Osman Nuri, Abdülhamid’s contentious and obscure biographer, tells us that this door

opened up to the now broken-up first segment of the palace.111 This expansive area fronting the

Mabeyn included the daires that were employed in the upkeep of the palace and the most

important offices responsible for communications between the sultan and the ministries. Once

109
Mayakon, 117-124.
110
Ibid., 119.
111
ʿOsmān Nūrī, ʿAbdülḫamīd-i Sānī Devr-i Salṭanatı, ḥayāt-ı ḥuṣūṣiye ve siyāsiyesi, vol. 2 (İstānbūl: Kitābḫāne-i
İslāmī ve ʿAskerī, 1328), 401.
 40

inside this portal, the stately Mabeyn and its appendage, the Set Kiosk, stood on an elevated

terrace to the right, while the mammoth imperial kitchen and pantry that fed the multitude of

palace employees multiple times a day were found on the left, on lower ground along a slope.

The majority of the heavily trafficked buildings of the palace were constructed as

understated gallery-like apartments with discrete, often tediously undifferentiated neoclassical

façades. They were elongated for practical reasons, to accommodate the internal separations of

the various daires that served as the quarters of individuals or subgroups within an administrative

office. These structures were often placed in barrack-like parallel blocks, one after the other,

resting on the sloping terrain’s ridgelines. For instance, parallel to the imperial kitchen and

separated from it by a large courtyard, stood the building allocated to the countless aides-de-

camp who were not on active duty inside the palace. Those who were on their shifts, meanwhile,

were given lodgings inside a chalet-like building on the other side of the Mabeyn, conveniently

adjacent to the harem door.

The segment of the palace’s selamlık or administrative quarters that the koltuk kapı

opened onto also housed the office of the head-scribe (a non-extant small timber structure), a

stone repository for the scribal archive (hazine-i evrak dairesi),112 and the offices of the eunuchs

(agavat dairesi), who serviced the individual Yıldız residences of the sultan’s extended family.

The sultan’s unmarried daughters and sisters, the young princes as well as married ones with

small families, were all expected to reside inside Yıldız’s grounds.

Although there may have been no ceremonial linearity in the organization of the palace’s

selamlık section, the Mabeyn Kiosk, Yıldız’s main administrative structure, physically bisected it

112
Although this structure cannot be identified today, an unrealized project has emerged from among Raimondo
D’Aronco’s papers of a structure resembling a Roman sarcophagus for an imperial archive in Yıldız that might have
been planned to replace this old one. For the drawing, see Ezio Godoli, “D’Aronco e Vienna: un dialogo a distanza,”
in Atti del Congresso Internazionale di Studi su "Raimondo D'Aronco e il suo tempo": 1/3 giugno 1981 (Udine:
Istituto per l'Enciclopedia del Friuli Venezia Giulia, [1982]), 189. Also see Şakir, 361.
 41

in two: the more public zone into which the koltuk kapı led its visitors and the relatively more

private one allotted to the sultan’s closest retinue. An aerial photograph taken during the early

years of the Turkish Republic, when Yıldız became the nation’s military academy, best reflects

the centrality of the Mabeyn and the way it splits the selamlık into these zones (fig. 1.18). The

second, elevated and relatively more private section was often inaccessible even to an employee

of the scribal offices, and housed only the officials on duty whose responsibilities were/work was

divided between the sultan’s study and the Mabeyn. The cluster of buildings around this second

section was much smaller; most were made of timber, had residential appeal, and contained far

more inventive wooden ornamental decoration as a marker of the rank of the office holders who

occupied them. The now non-extant office of Abdülhamid’s beloved second-scribe İzzet Holo

Paşa (d. 1924), the lodgings of the aides-de-camp on duty, and the Çit Kiosk which served

multiple intimate functions from emergency wartime convocations, theological discussions in the

presence of the sultan during Ramadan (ḥużūr dersleri), and intimate post-Friday prayer

gatherings between the sultan and foreign ambassadors, were the central structures of the

selamlık’s more selective zone. If a visitor, who had entered the palace through the koltuk kapı,

was allowed into this second section of the selamlık, he was made to pass through the office of

the head-guard (sertüfekçi), situated between these two zones and aligned with the Mabeyn’s

elevated basement floor, right below the Çit Kiosk. In many ways, this division of the public

zones according to a gradation of closeness to the sultan could be thought of in terms of the

traditional splitting of Islamic audience halls into public (divān-ı ʿāmm) and private (divān-ı

ḫāṣṣ) chambers. And, perhaps more closely, Abdülhamid’s use of the Mabeyn (where he was

largely absent) and Small Mabeyn (where he was present to a small circle of officials) is

reminiscent of the sixteenth-century sultans and their absent-presence in the crowded Council
 42

Hall in the second courtyard of the Topkapı Palace, and secluded dwelling in the Privy Chamber

in its third courtyard.113 Mabeyn, as a structure relating to a transitional space between the

private residential quarters and a site to accommodate the perpetual administrative role of the

sultan, seems to have emerged under the reign of Abdülhamid I, when he erected a Mabeyn

Kiosk next to the Privy Chamber in the Topkapı Palace, a pattern also repeated in the Edirne

Palace.114

The palace’s second and third portals opened onto this more private section of the

selamlık. The one referred to as the imperial gate (saltanat kapısı) was in line with the koltuk

kapı. These two portals both faced the Hamidiye Mosque. Directly facing the slope that led up to

the Mabeyn was the third and last portal, the gate of the sultan’s mother (valide kapısı). With the

exception of the gate of sovereignty, the names of the two others were not fixed for the disparate

inhabitants of the palace. While a scribe may have known the main entrance as the koltuk kapı,

indicating a kind of servitude, to Abdülhamid’s daughter it was known as the aş kapısı (“stew

gate”) because of its proximity to the kitchens and the constant circulation of its tablakars in and

out of the gates carrying food to Yıldız’s employees, guests, and affiliates, all living in the

peripheries of the palace. The sultan’s daughter recalled the gate of the sultan’s mother as the

gate of departure or “official journey” (gidiş kapısı), a door that was used only by the members

of the court.115 However, as will become clearer in the dissertation’s second chapter, this portal

was most likely named after Yıldız’s pre-palatine owners, the queen mothers of the previous

113
Gülru Necipoǧlu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapı Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth
Centuries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 56-60, and 91-96.
114
Ibid., 195.
115
Ayşe Osmanoğlu, 90-91.
 43

sultans, and the tradition of preserving the names of sites in the memory of their owners meant it

maintained this designation.

Bearing composite pilasters identical to those found on the façade of the Mabeyn, the

imperial gate was probably also erected during the reign of Abdülaziz (fig. 1.19). After Yıldız

became a palace, this gate was reserved specifically for Abdülhamid’s use on days when he

ventured beyond the palace walls: the Friday prayer ceremonies at the Hamidiye Mosque, the

official greetings (muʿāyede) for the two religious festivals (bayrām) in the domed ceremonial

room of the Dolmabahçe Palace, and the imperial visitation on the fifteenth day of Ramadan of

the mantle of the Prophet Muhammad in the Topkapı Palace (Ḫırḳa-ı Şerīf, or interchangeably,

Ḫırḳa-ı Saʿādet).116 The valide gate was used by the members of the household who lived in the

palace, and like the imperial gate, it received its name from the fact that it was used by the

sultan’s adopted mother and her retinue during the Friday ceremonies when she left the palace in

her carriage to witness the pomp and circumstance of her son’s public appearance.

The sultan’s foreign guests, who were invited to see the palace and granted the privilege

of meeting him informally, were also brought into Yıldız through this gate, because it provided

easy access to Abdülhamid’s abovementioned sightseeing route. It was, in fact, the very spot

from which the imperial railway project would have begun. A right turn from this gate and down

the slope towards the shore led the visitors to the Imperial Library fronted by a dovecote (used

later as the Imperial Pharmacy and today the headquarters of the Turkish State Intelligence

Agency) and the Çadır Kiosk, with its lake and island in the palace’s park.

116
On the sultan’s processional to visit the Prophet’s mantle in the Topkapı Palace, see Hakan T. Karateke,
Padişahım Çok Yaşa!: Osmanlı Devletinin Son Yüz Yılında Merasimler (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2004), 195-199;
and on the grand bayrām receptions for the ʿīd-i fıṭr (feast marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan) and
ʿīd-i ażḥā (the Feast of the Sacrifice) under Abdülhamid II, see Karateke, Padişahım Çok Yaşa!, 82-92.
 44

The buildings that lined the Hamidian sightseeing route hid their mundane functions

behind their embellished façades, like the chalet-esque offices of the aides-de-camp and the

columned-façade of the palace’s armory (the silahhane initially served as the palace’s dining

facilities but was later converted into a makeshift museum of weaponry or simply the repository,

mahzen, as Abdülhamid called it) (fig. 1.20). Following the hill’s downward gradient,

Abdülhamid’s ironworks atelier stood adjacent to the armory and contained a coach house on its

entry level (fig. 1.21). Later on, while in exile in Thessaloniki, the deposed sultan recalled this

site with greater frequency and fondness than any of the other crafts facilities that he had

installed in Yıldız. He praised its steam-operated machinery and metal-casting technologies for

objects such as locks, bolts, keys, and coins, and the fact that he had tirelessly recruited talented

apprentices from the Tophane Imperial Foundry to the atelier’s diverse operations ranging from

the building of royal carriages to the manufacture of furniture and of a small boat made of

imported aluminum planks for the palace’s artificial lakes.117 This part of Yıldız, where

Abdülhamid had placed all the manufacturing facilities and museums that fulfilled the palace’s

refurbishing needs also made for a memorable segment of the palatial tour that was intended to

show the sovereign actively engaged with the advancement of imperial crafts and their local

artisans. Although this area shared the same irregularly shaped courtyard of the Mabeyn, the

scribes, for instance, were barred from visiting the Imperial Library.118

If the palace’s selamlık was bifurcated by the Mabeyn into two segments, one for the

workaday employees and one more exclusive, there was a similar division in its harem. The

quarters of his immediate family consisting of his wives, young and unmarried children, and the

117
Hülagü, 155, 221-222, and 335.
118
Örikağasızâde Hasan Sırrı, 161.
 45

servants allocated to their individual daires, were closest to his own residence. Demarcated by a

wall, this tightly spun area was the palace’s real harem. However, Abdülhamid also gave

individual apartments within the palace grounds to married members of his family, which were

located farther up the complex’s hilltop and constituted their own neighborhood of parks, ponds,

chalets, servant quarters, and a school for the education of the princes (referred to as the efendis).

In his memoirs, the sultan’s head-scribe describes this harem extension as a remarkably

interiorized neighborhood (“muhit”) of its own. He ponders, “what kind of life did they lead in

this neighborhood was unknown to me, but it was certainly not one where they [the princes]

strove to perfect their personhood.”119 Furthermore, he believed that the instructors of the school

lacked merit and competence, while most of the princes were unenthusiastic recipients of their

teachings.120 In a similar vein, one the sultan’s scribes saw this neighborhood as a separate

appurtenance of the palace itself (devâir-i merbûta).121

A curiously narrow door through the wall decorated with high reliefs that separated the

selamlık from the harem led the sultan’s family members and his closest aides, scribes and hand-

picked visitors into a relatively cramped courtyard, an exterior antechamber that preceded the

harem (fig. 1.22). This outdoor waiting room was often called the zülvecheyn, a word meaning

two-sided or bidirectional, which is generally ascribed to transitional zones between the men and

women’s quarters in an affluent Ottoman household. This designation not only implied that the

zone offered access to these two segments of a wealthy residence, but in the case of Yıldız also

meant that this antechamber provided the only royal passage between the sultan’s quarters and

the Şale—that is, between the sultan’s family quarters, his most intimate space, and the court’s

119
Tahsin Paşa’nın Yıldız Hatıraları, 30.
120
Ibid.
121
Örikağasızâde Hasan Sırrı, 30.
 46

royal guest lodgings. It was also this quirky zülvecheyn that provided access, via an arch-like

opening between the sultan’s private residence and workspace (Hususi Daire and Small

Mabeyn), to the harem’s oblong, heavily landscaped English garden.

To the female members of the court, who saw the area bordered by the harem wall with

high sculptural reliefs as the threshold of their private residences, the small courtyard of the

zülvecheyn constituted the actual selamlık of their home.122 This was the quarter where the head

of their family always conducted his business, because the sultan hardly ever ventured into the

two zones of the Mabeyn. To them, the Mabeyn courtyard with all its administrative and service

facilities was a separate entity, a distinct neighborhood of government employees and offices,

removed both physically as well as hierarchically from the privacy and sanctity of their home.

Thus, as a spatial and functional designation, the selamlık indicated different zones for the

members of the harem and the government officials on the other side of the wall.

Abdülhamid’s private residence (the Hususi Daire, discussed in detail in Chapter Three),

his workspace inside the Small Mabeyn, and the residence of the valide (once the Azizian

Mabeyn’s main harem structure) were perhaps unusually located in this transitional zone (fig.

23). What I called Yıldız’s real harem, where the sultan’s immediate family and their numerous

attendees resided, was clustered inside a small, terraced area on the northeast border of the

sultan’s private garden. Its largest structures were the conglomeration of three interlinked, two-

story apartment blocks, which were built respectively for the female servants (cariyeler dairesi),

the female supervisor of the harem and her retinue of kalfas (hazinedar usta dairesi), and the

wives (kadınefendiler dairesi) of the sultan (fig. 24). These three connected units were

compressed from the north by the Şale Kiosk. In fact, the earliest version of the Şale, likely

122
Ayşe Osmanoğlu, 113; Ali Said, Saray Hatıraları, Sultan Abdülhamid’in Hayatı (Istanbul: Nehir, 1994), 29-32.
 47

commissioned by Abdülaziz and extant during the site’s palatial conversion under Abdülhamid,

dictated the eventual irregularity of the harem’s layout and its spatial confinement. A steep

declivity to their east limited its expansion, but allowed a citadel-like border forming a natural

belvedere from which the private harem garden enjoyed a commanding outlook over the palace’s

park below.

The quarters allocated to the servants of the harem were located in transitional spaces,

often squeezed between two zones or two apartment units that they serviced. An archway

underneath the residence of the sultan’s eunuchs-in-waiting (musahib ağalar dairesi) marked the

harem’s threshold on the Şale side (fig. 25). This transitional structure was connected to the

sultan’s private residence, because as the foremost harem chamberlains, these eunuchs scurried

between the sultan and the selamlık on the Mabeyn side to report the needs of the former to the

office of the head-scribe. These individuals also took turns keeping vigil in the Hususi Daire to

communicate Abdülhamid’s orders to the members of the harem. Nadir Ağa (d. 1935), the third

musahib who was Abdülhamid’s favorite thanks not only to his devotion to the sultan but to his

athletic daring (he tested the first automobile to be brought into the palace and operated the

barges on the harem’s lake), was able to evade persecution in the aftermath of the sultan’s

deposition by showing the commission formed by the Young Turk government the numerous

hidden safes inside the harem apartments.123

Similarly, the apartment of the hazinedar usta, who as the female counterpart to the

sultan’s head-chamberlain in the Mabeyn was responsible for the management of the harem, was

situated between and connected by enclosed bridges to the apartments of the sultan’s wives on its

one side and, on the other, to those of the female servants under her purview. Within the harem,

123
McCullagh, 288; Ayşe Osmanoğlu, 84.
 48

the hazinedar usta wielded “considerable discretionary powers” (selahiyet-i vâsi’a sahibi), 124

was held in higher esteem than the sultan’s wives, and had direct access to the sultan. She was

the harem’s financial accountant, its master of ceremonies, and often the preferred bearer of the

sultan’s decrees over his eunuchs, who were, in turn, relegated to acting as the hazinedar’s

personal messengers between the harem and the offices within the Mabeyn—especially the one

in constant communication with the accountants of the imperial treasury, located in the

Dolmabahçe Palace.125

The outdoor space between the residence of the eunuchs-in-waiting and these three

apartments was incredibly tight, labyrinthine and tiered, and defined overall by a cluster of

terraces that ended with the wall separating the harem from the grounds of the Şale. Three iron-

frame greenhouses with grottoes once ran along the harem-side of this wall. In the family albums

shot inside the palace’s interiors, these greenhouses and their elevated rostra-like grottoes frame

the poses of the sultan’s young children and their instructors, favorite among them the celebrated

artist and sultan’s aide Şeker Ahmed Paşa (d. 1907) (fig. 1.26).

Perched like a jewel-box on the first tier of these staggered sets, and between the

apartments of the eunuchs-in-waiting and the rest of the harem structures, was the residence of

the chief black eunuch (kızlarağası or darüssaade ağası) (fig. 1.27). With its Roman windows,

high-relief sculptures of flower-vases in place of keystones, pronounced quoins, and strikingly

small scale, this delicate two-floor building carries echoes of Ottoman pleasure pavilions from

earlier decades, such as those at Göksu, Küçüksu and Ihlamur, and may be one of the last

remaining fragments of the site’s pre-palatine history as a much smaller royal estate. 126 It is no

124
Örikağasızâde Hasan Sırrı, 168-169; Ayşe Osmanoğlu, 77-82.
125
Örikağasızâde Hasan Sırrı, 169.
 49

surprise that this standout structure from the recent past was repurposed to fit the office of the

chief eunuch, who held the same rank as the grand-vizier and chief religious officer in court

hierarchy—though it seems merely titular in the Hamidian era.127

As I have touched upon before, to ease the busy circulation between the different daires

inside the harem, almost all of the individual buildings were physically linked with their service

quarters. In fact, from the multipurpose Çit Kiosk of the selamlık, which offered access to the

harem’s antechamber (zülvecheyn), a visitor was able to walk all the way to the lofty turreted

ceremonial hall inside the Şale Kiosk without having to step outside once. Similarly,

Abdülhamid could move between his study inside the Küçük Mabeyn and the Şale, where he

visited his royal guests, or meet with the grand-vizier, who was assigned a set of rooms there on

his twice a week audience with the sultan. Abdülhamid’s private residence (Hususi Daire) was

not only connected to the quarters assigned to the eunuchs in his service, it also had private

access through a gallery to the already interconnected apartments of the female servants, the

hazinedar usta, and, finally, his wives.

The younger sons and daughters of the sultan received their initial co-educational

instruction in the otherwise nondescript apartments appointed to the sultan’s wives until the

former were old enough to continue their schooling in the aforementioned separate building. The

main entrance to these apartments supported a dome painted with a map of the Ottoman

territories, while a reflective pool right below it (which was later removed) reversed the mural

and made it available for close-up study (fig. 1.28).

126
The pronounced cornice on the first-floor level, similar to the one found on the Çit Kiosk, indicates to us that
when it was first built, it was a one-floor structure, adhering in many ways to the general typology of subsidiary
buildings to imperial konaks like the Mabeyn from the reigns of Abdülmecid and Abdülaziz.
127
Tahsin Paşa’nın Yıldız Hatıraları, 141.
 50

Life inside the Hamidian harem was often quiet and understated. Abdülhamid kept a

strict and unchanging schedule of work, repose, diet, and an oft-cited bedtime ritual of listening

to detective novels by the French writer Émile Gaboriau (d. 1873) read to him by the keeper of

his wardrobe (esvapçıbaşı). The monotony of the sovereign’s day-to-day existence was so

ingrained in Yıldız’s administrative functioning that his aide-turned-biographers each

consistently dedicated a chapter to the sultan’s daily life in their publications.128 The inhabitants

of each of the apartments inside the spaces of the harem lived their own nuclear lives, and to a

great extent, their social activity mimicked that of the Ottoman elites outside the palace walls.

Despite their uncomfortable physical proximity, communication between the different daires

allotted to his wives, daughters, and married sons was still highly formal, and regulated by a

flurry of servants, and written invitations.

The different members of the sultan’s extended family had to see a lot more of each other

during religious holidays or on the anniversary of Abdülhamid’s accession to the throne (cülus),

when they were required to participate in the associated ritualized practices of these events.

Often, the large reception rooms (sofa) dividing the individual apartments became stages for

musical or theatrical performances, including recreations of the operas that the members of the

harem watched in Yıldız’s theater—favorites among which were Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida and Il

Trovatore, Georges Bizet’s Carmen, Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma, and Charles Gounod’s Faust.129

The children enacted pantomimes based on popular Victorian fairy-tales.130 On warmer days,

these performances would be held outside, on a small stage built on the garden side of the

128
Ali Said, 32; ʿOsmān Nūrī, vol. 2, 476-495.
129
Ali Said, 40; Ayşe Osmanoğlu, 68; Refik Ahmet Sevengil, Saray Tiyatrosu (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi,
1962), 117-139. İÜMK houses an inventory of the operas and librettos performed in Yıldız’s theater under the
catalogue number 8998.
130
Şakir, 289-290; and Leyla Saz, Harem’in İçyüzü (Istanbul: Milliyet Yayınları, 1974), 131-133.
 51

sultan’s private residence. A memoir highlights a remarkable if little known occasion when the

members of the harem devised an elaborate “public exposition” (umumi sergi), a globally

popular if demanding nineteenth-century phenomenon, in celebration of the twenty-fifth year of

the sultan’s accession.131 We are told that the women, dressed as merchants, turned the

zülvecheyn overnight into a bustling marketplace, selling everything from grains to cheese,

soaps, drapery, haberdashery, and sweets. A separate exhibition of imperial jewelry (not

available for sale but for the pleasures of viewing) was also curated, with dramatic electrical

lighting installed for the occasion. All the royal production facilities of the palace and beyond, its

dairy farm, kitchen gardens and greenhouses, the private safes of its members, the on-site

porcelain factory as well as the Hereke textile factory in İzmit were mobilized to contribute

goods and objects for this night-market.

The small palace theater, located in the zülvecheyn and literally squeezed between the

residence of the sultan’s mother and that of the eunuchs-in-waiting, served as another

recreational site for the members of the harem. Whenever a daire hosted an important visitor,

such as a high-ranking female member living outside of the palace such as Abdülhamid’s sister

Cemile Sultan, the Egyptian khedive’s mother (Valide Paşa), or the wife of a foreign ruler or

ambassador, the hazinedar usta and her servants would organize and execute the visit following

an admixture of European and traditional protocol.132 The sultan would request a performance to

be staged in the theater following the harem visit, and the sultan’s wives, daughters and other

close female relations would be expected to attend, looking on from its grilled second-floor

balconies. Inconspicuous as it was, the theater’s location meant that it served as an important

ceremonial threshold for the palace. A stripped-down triumphal arch next to its entrance
131
Şakir, 290-291.
132
Ibid., 290-291; Ayşe Osmanoğlu, 45-49.
 52

conducted the privileged guests of the Şale into the palace’s harem, and, passing through it, the

harem’s women were allowed to spend a day in the royal guest lodgings after the Bayram

ceremonies.

On the first day of each of the major religious holidays, the Şale was reserved for the

sultan’s immediate family to host their relatives. These incredibly prolonged visits always

commenced with a tour of its multiple rooms and apartments. In many ways, in fact, the female

members of the harem replicated the exact tour that the sultan devised for his royal guests. The

Şale, referred to more often as the ceremonial apartments (merasim dairesi) than by its

typological designation, was the tour’s shining glory. The first among other palace buildings to

be supplied with electricity (its massive generators still stand inside its garden compound), it was

furnished with lavish Hereke textiles and enormous carpets, and boasted Yıldız’s painting and

clock collections. The Şale appeared to members of the court and palace officials alike as a

permanent world exhibition, each one of its apartments designed in the style of a different nation

and intended to appear as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk: “ the Arab style, the work of the English,

or the French and German styles, with furniture equipped with that nation’s (kavim)

adornments.”133 While men enjoyed the sultan’s shooting range (known as the Poligon Kiosk) on

the far corner of this complex, or watched military parades from its adjacent miniature Gothic

castle, the Talimhane Kiosk, women took walks around the Şale’s grottoes, ponds, round

palmhouses and monumental greenhouses, which were fronted by bronze animal sculptures, gifts

from the compound’s first guest, the German emperor Wilhelm II (fig. 29).134

The urban make-believe played out in Yıldız’s harem was also observed inside its private

garden. The members of the court referred to this site as the inner garden (iç bahçe) or the garden
133
Ali Said, 44.
134
Ayşe Osmanoğlu, 58.
 53

of the selamlık (taking into the consideration that for members of the harem, the transitional zone

of the zülvecheyn was thought of as the sultan’s administrative quarter). This garden, which was

designed in the shape of “an attenuated ellipse” (ṭūlānī bir beyẓ),135 was laid out over a shallow

gradient between the platforms carrying the Hususi Daire on its north and Cihannüma

(Belvedere) Kiosk to its south. A thick retaining wall on the garden’s east side separated it from

the palace’s park below and bore a discrete portal that provided private access between these two

heavily landscaped spaces. The centerpiece of this private garden was a serpentine lake, built in

the late 1880s, which formed a moat around an island and supported docking stations for barges

and launches and pavilions for respite along its shores. Each of the docking stations was named

after a Bosphorus neighborhood, and in keeping with the desire to carry as much of life outside

the palace into the harem as possible, the single-room art nouveau pavilion on the island (Ada

Köşkü) was conceived as a neighborhood coffeehouse (fig. 1.30).136

Abdülhamid’s critics used this picturesque garden’s make-believe of artificial lakes,

grottoes, cascades, rustic bridges, railings and gazeboes (all poured concrete over iron)137 as a

metaphor for his ever-suspect mental state. In their eyes, the garden’s landscape, like its owner,

was “strangely crooked in form” (garīp bir ṣūretde iʿvicāclı).138 Georgina Müller, the first and

possibly only foreigner to record her time inside the then newly landscaped harem garden with

relative impartiality, would see it as it was intended to be understood, as a space that was “as

well kept as the best English gardens:”139

135
ʿOsmān Nūrī, vol. 2, 452.
136
McCullagh, 263.
137
Ann E. Komara, “Concrete and the Engineered Picturesque—The Parc des Buttes Chaumont (Paris, 1867),”
Journal of Architectural Education 58 (2004): 4-12.
138
ʿOsmān Nūrī, vol. 2, 454.
 54

Yildiz stands on the summit of the highest hill of the capital, and here before us lay a
large lake or artificial river, covered with kaïks and boats of all shapes, an electric launch
among others. The gardens sloped to the lake on all sides, the lawns as green, the turf
well kept as in the best English gardens. Exquisite shrubs and palms were planted in
every direction, whilst the flower borders were a blaze of colour. The air was almost
heavy with the scent of the orange blossom, and gardeners were busy at every turn
sprinkling the turf, even the crisp gravel walks with water. The Harem wall, now on our
right, rose no longer bare, but covered to the top with yellow and white Banksia roses,
heliotrope, sweet verbena, passion flowers &c. Thousands of white or silvery-grey
pigeons—the Prophet’s bird—flew in and out of a huge pigeon-house, built against the
walls, half hidden by the creepers…140

For individuals with intimate access to this inner garden, it was a place of miniature pavilions,

architectural landscaping feats, and aviaries, all housing the period’s most “precious novelties”

(bedāyi).141 The rarest of bird breeds, trees, plants and flowers, as well as the most popular

architectural styles of the day were reserved for this space (fig. 1.31). It contained the best of

what the recreational world of the nineteenth century had to offer.

The narrow southern strip of the Mabeyn courtyard (where the Imperial Library and

Çadır Kiosk were situated), along with the Şale compound on the complex’s northeast, formed

an imperfect crescent around the grand park of Yıldız. Two pathways at the tips of this crescent

led the members of the harem and Abdülhamid’s guests into the park’s woods and pavilions.

However, the real experience of the palace’s park—or “outer garden” (dış bahçe), as it is termed

in narrative accounts of the site—commenced after one had passed through Yıldız’s oldest gate,

the portal of Mecidiye situated behind the Çırağan that once provided access to the gardens when

they served the latter palace (fig. 1.32). The female members of Abdülmecid’s and later

Abdülaziz’s harems used a bridge rather than this door that was level with the street.

139
Müller, 53.
140
Ibid.
141
Tahsin Paşa’nın Yıldız Hatıraları, 316.
 55

Abdülmecid’s understated Mecidiye Mosque flanked it on the right, and the stone barracks of the

imperial guards on its left.

The park’s natural ravine (dere), or strait (boğaz), as an onlooker would call it, contained

a large lake, one hundred and fifty meters in length, with a cascading stream of varying widths of

ten to thirty meters, whose waters were pumped from the lake inside the harem gardens. Due to

its placement between the two hills of Yıldız, this artificial lake was called “the pool of the

valley” (dere ḥavuż) (fig. 1.33).142

The Çadır and Malta Kiosks, the two neoclassical pleasure pavilions built during

Abdülaziz’s conversion of the site into a miniature Bois de Bologne, were surrounded by the

heavy foliage of trees, and occupied the peaks of this ravine’s two hills. These pavilions afforded

protected views, allowing their royal occupants to repose in a contemplative daydream (meşgūl-ı

ḫayālāt).143 From their earliest incarnation as structures conceptualized within the grand project

to convert the hills of Çırağan into an English garden (discussed at greater length in Chapter 3),

they were conceived as hermitages complementing the Romantic landscape. Their secluded

siting also later worked in Abdülhamid’s favor when he used them to imprison the high-ranking

officials of Abdülaziz’s reign—most famous among them the influential Tanzimat statesman

Mithat Paşa (d. 1883), one of the creators of the first Ottoman constitution of 1876—while the

new government prosecuted them for conspiring to assassinate the late sultan.144 In the short and

ill-fated span of Murad V’s rule during the spring and summer months of 1876, whenever his

142
ʿOsmān Nūrī, vol. 2, 453. An archival document dated 1880 suggests the existence of a kiosk named after this
artificial lake in the valley of Yıldız named the Derehavuz Kiosk; BOA, Y. PRK. HH. 12/27.
143
ʿOsmān Nūrī, vol. 2, 453.
144
Ali Haydar Mithat, Hatıralarım, 1872-1946 (Istanbul: M. Akçit Yayını, 1946), 125-127; İsmail Hakkı
Uzunçarşılı, Midhat Paşa ve Yıldız Mahkemesi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1967), 134, 167, 171-172, 221, 231-
235, 253, 268, 296, and 307.
 56

mental illness visibly disrupted his ability to govern, he was rushed to the Malta Kiosk which

also functioned then as a kind of asylum or sanatorium, for treatment and isolation and to hide

him away from the prying eyes of a curious public and the bewildered members of his household

at Dolmabahçe, especially his ambitious mother Şevkefza.145

Yıldız’s pre-Hamidian use—a historically forgotten period spanning forty years of

pioneering imperial patronage and groundwork in the area—is consistently dealt with in

summary fashion. In the site’s scant historiography, its use by Abdülhamid II’s predecessors

consistently receives almost identical capsule descriptions.146 The chronological histories of this

hilly ground between Beşiktaş and Ortaköy often match each of the nineteenth-century sultans

and the structures that they commissioned for the site with their most hackneyed personality trait

or best-known imperial achievement. The spiritless list begins with Selim III’s construction of a

baroque fountain and prayer stone, Mahmud II then follows with the building of a pavilion from

which to command his new army after his destruction of the janissary corps. Later, the Romantic

lothario Abdülmecid builds a pleasure pavilion and installs one of his favorite concubines.

Finally, known for his indiscriminate construction of palaces, Abdülaziz and his Ottoman-

Armenian court architects transform this pavilion into the Mabeyn Kiosk, along with the Malta

and Çadır Kiosks, and connect the Çırağan Palace with Yıldız’s woods by a monumental bridge

(fig. 1.33).

If Abdülhamid’s Yıldız appeared medieval and discordant to many, it was because the

empire’s last palace constituted merely a layer of construction over a century of building history

145
For Şevkefza’s highly publicized competition with Abdülaziz’s mother Pertevniyal, see Nahid Sırrı Örik, “İki
Valide Sultan Arasında,” in Bilinmeyen Yaşamlarıyla Saraylılar (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları,
2002), 74-80.
146
The carbon-copy pre-Hamidian histories of Yıldız perpetuated in the work of Batur, Bilgin, Georgeon, and Ezgü,
which are all based on the chronology found in the unabashedly nationalistic survey of Ottoman palaces (elaborated
as Turkish Ottoman monuments) in Ahmed Ağın, Saraylarımız (Istanbul: Eyyübsultan, 1965), 128-131.
 57

that prefaced it. In the next chapter, I trace Yıldız’s architectural evolution through the works of

the Ottoman chroniclers and poets who commemorated the buildings and the patrons of this

hilltop estate. Yıldız’s location was historically tied to places and spaces belonging to the

eminent women of the Ottoman harem. A closer reading of these eulogies have shown that the

site grew out of and reflected the ambitions and predilections of the powerful mothers of the

century’s last sultans, a curiously forgotten and entirely overlooked aspect of its vibrant

architectural history.
 58

II.

The Yıldız Kiosk and the Queen Mothers of the Tanzimat Era: Gender, Landscape, and Visibility

If we were to point to a uniquely gendered space in the Ottoman capital from the late eighteenth

to early nineteenth century, the area demarcated by the Çırağan Palace on the waterfront and

extending up to the valley between Beşiktaş and Ortaköy fits the bill. This particular imperial

segment of the nineteenth-century capital, which eventually developed into Abdülhamid II’s

Yıldız Palace complex, was reserved exclusively for the powerful mothers (valides) of the

sultans for almost a century. Selim III’s mother Mihrişah Sultan (d. 1805),1 Abdülmecid’s

mother Bezm-i Alem Sultan (d. 1853), and Abdülaziz’s mother Pertevniyal Sultan (d. 1883) all

focused their philanthropic activities on this hilly site as part of the sultans’ increased preference

for the waterfront palace of Beşiktaş (that later come to be known as Dolmabahçe) over the

grand, but secluded Topkapı.

Here, the valides first erected fountains, principle infrastructural requisites for any newly

urbanizing neighborhood and easy perfunctory markers of ownership. Most importantly,

however, they pioneered a taste for imperial structures in the form of countryside retreats and

farming estates—a fact which has been surprisingly overlooked—thereby proving the existence

of a “pastoral ethos” that scholars have long hoped to see more vividly exemplified in the

1
Hilâl Uğurlu, a dear friend and colleague, first directed my attention to Selim III’s mother Mihrişah Sultan’s rather
obscure orchard estate, baǧ kasrı, located on the skirts of Yıldız’s hill and close to the convent of Yahya Efendi.
This reference sparked my interest in studying the developments in and around this estate, and my research on this
topic has gradually revealed a previously unknown aspect about the inner lives of the nineteenth-century valides:
they were avid gardeners and horticulturalists. Ayşe Hilâl Uğurlu, “III. Selim’in Istanbul’u: Siyâsî ve Askerî
Dönüşümler Işığında İmar Faaliyetleri,” PhD diss., Istanbul Teknik Üniversitesi Fen Bilimleri Enstitüsü, 2012, 261.
 59

eighteenth-century revival of the Ottoman court’s villegiatura practices.2 Throughout the

nineteenth century and right up to the point when Abdülhamid II made it his palace in 1878,

Yıldız was inhabited by a succession of these charitable, architecturally discerning mothers of

sultans, who frequented the site not only to enjoy its privileged views, but also to inspect their

adjoining farming estate while remaining close to the sacred sites of Beşiktaş that resonated with

their spiritual and religious sensibilities—sensibilities which, due to their inherently more

circumscribed and private lives within the patriarchal system of the Ottoman court, were

necessarily reserved.

a. WOMEN OF THE OTTOMAN COURT AND THE LURE OF BEŞİKTAŞ

The site’s first proprietors were the daughters of sultans. The consummate mid-seventeenth-

century traveler Evliya Çelebi was witness to the allocation of its waterfront, later known as the

yalı of Çırağan, to one of the court’s high-ranking women. In his voluminous description of

Istanbul, he records that the mansion and garden that was previously known as the garden of

Kazancıoğlı and located next to the imperial garden of Beşiktaş, was granted to Kaya Sultan, the

2
The intertwined leisure activities of gardening and other courtly pastimes in the Ottoman suburban retreats were
first historicized by Gülru Necipoǧlu, “The Suburban Landscape of Sixteenth-Century Istanbul as a Mirror of
Classical Ottoman Garden Culture,” in Theory and Design of Gardens in the Time of the Great Muslim Empires, ed.
A. Petruccioli, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997), 32–71.Tülay Artan’s dissertation, which has now become a reference to all
Ottoman architectural historians of the eighteenth century, documented the structural and formal continuations and
transformations in these gardens into more full-fledged palaces, and their increasingly more variegated proprietors
(prominent women most significant among these new elite groups), see “Architecture as a Theater of Life: Profile of
the Eighteenth-Century Bosphorus” PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989. Shirine Hamadeh has
deepened our understanding of how Istanbul’s suburbs expanded and urbanized in the eighteenth century with the
introduction of smaller but striking monuments such as fountains and sebils and the purposeful language of poetry
that was used to convey their centrality, see City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 2008). I borrow the wonderful phrase the “pastoral ethos” from her to describe the practice’s
continuation especially and most poignantly by the queen mothers in the nineteenth century; Hamadeh, 55.
 60

daughter of Murad IV.3 Evliya, who was a devoted member of the intimate courtly circle of Kaya

Sultan’s husband Melek Ahmed Paşa, knew this residence reasonably well, and he describes it as

“a mansion that needs to be seen” (vācibü’s-seyr bir yalıdır).4 Its singularity, according to this

diligent observer, lay in its unusual two-story fountain (fevḳānī şāzrevān).5

It is very likely that a pattern of property succession was put in place soon thereafter, or

had already been partially established, stipulating that this waterfront lot (with its ever-changing

buildings) should be allocated solely to the daughters and sisters of sultans. A parallel can be

drawn with the continual designation of a cluster of yalıs along the landing dock of Eyüp to the

same group of high-ranking women.6 Although Ahmed III’s grand-vizier Nevşehirli Damad

İbrahim Paşa’s celebrated nighttime festivals around illuminated flowerbeds in its gardens

forever sealed the mansion’s name as Çırağan (after the word çirāğ meaning lamp, light or

candle), and ascribed ownership to the vizier, the residence’s real proprietor was Fatma Sultan,

the sultan’s daughter and the grand-vizier’s wife.7 Ahmed III’s letters to his vizier inquiring after

3
Evliyâ Çelebi, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi: Topkapı Sarayı Kütüphanesi Bağdat 304 numaralı yazmanın
transkripsiyonu, dizini, ed. Robert Dankoff, Yücel Dağlı, and Seyit Ali Kahraman, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi
Yayınları, 2010), 191.
4
Evliyâ Çelebi, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, 191.
5
Ibid.
6
For the remarkably consolidated and prolific architectural patronage of the high-ranking women of the Ottoman
court in Eyüp (a previously elusive topic marked by patchy information) Tülay Artan’s work has been indispensable.
Kernels of discussion of these gendered spaces appear first in her dissertation, “Theater of Life,” 79-87, and deepen
and develop into focused and/or comparative studies of their role in the building of different segments of the
Bosphorus in later works; see Tülay Artan, “Sayfiye ve Sahil Saraylar,” in Eyüp: Dün/Bugün: sempozyum, 11-12
Aralık 1993, ed. Tülay Artan (Beşiktaş, İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1994), 106-114. Also see, Tülay Artan,
"Boğaziçi'nin Çehresini Değiştiren Soylu Kadınlar ve Sultanefendi Sarayları,” in İstanbul Dergisi 3 (October 1992):
109-118. This last article is also republished in English as: “Noble Women Who Changed the Face of the Bosphorus
and the Palaces of the Sultanas,” Biannual Istanbul 1 (1993): 87-97.
7
Unfortunately, information on the social lives, tastes, and internal worlds of these imperial women, as Tülay Artan
also frequently laments, are often found in fictionalized narratives of twentieth-century popular history that appeared
in the early days of the Turkish Republic as sensationalist newspaper serials. For an overly dramatized biography of
Fatma Sultan, see Ahmet Refik, Tarihte Kadın Simaları (Istanbul: Muallim Ahmet Halit Kitaphanesi, 1931), 59-
127. Refik, whose works popularized historical designations like the Tulip Era, also coined the phrase “women’s
 61

the health of his daughter, who was plagued with smallpox, offer an unusually intimate portrayal

of a father deeply anguished by Fatma Sultan’s sickness and desperate to discover antidotes.8

This intimate view of a father’s concern for his daughter is evidence of a belief—commonly held

by members of the court and promoted by the paterfamilias himself—that a princess held a

crucial position in the imperial hierarchy as a figure with political and institutional agency. Once

married, she was, along with her own household, a symbolic extension, a satellite of the sultan’s

court, and had to conduct her married life as such.9

Sedad Hakkı Eldem, who left behind the most comprehensive study on the Ottoman

waterfront residences, documents what this Çırağan mansion might have looked like in the time

of Kaya Sultan and how it may have changed over the course of the eighteenth century. As

evidence, he compares the descriptions and architectural sketches of Franz Philipp von Gudenus,

a member of the Austrian delegation that visited Mahmud I’s court in 1740, with an engraving

from the expanded second edition, published in 1842, of the French ambassador Marie-Gabriel-

Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier’s Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce.10 Gudenus’s sketch of

sultanate” (kadınlar saltanatı) in his lurid renditions of rivalries between the prominent mothers of sultans in the
seventeenth-century; see Ahmet Refik, Kadınlar Saltanatı (Istanbul: Kütüphane-Askeri/İbrahim Halimi, 1923).
Tülay Artan traces the property ownership of eighteenth-century princesses through archival research; for Fatma
Sultan’s Çırağan, see “Theater of Life,” 368-369.
8
Refik, Tarihte Kadın Simaları, 109-113.
9
Once Ahmed III and his retinue returned to Istanbul after the court’s decade-long retreat to Edirne due to frequent
insurgencies in the capital, he revived the practice of strategic marriage alliances with considerable vigor, see Tülay
th
Artan, “Istanbul in the 18 Century: Days of Reconciliation and Consolidation,” in From Byzantion to Istanbul:
8000 Years of a Capital, ed. Koray Durak (Istanbul: Sabancı Üniversitesi Sakıp Sabancı Müzesi 2010), 300-313.
Leslie Peirce’s seminal work on the political and socio-cultural history of the Ottoman harem’s composition from its
formation to the seventeenth-century traces the origins of this tactical practice in earlier periods and assesses the
context of shifts in the empire’s marriage-based political alliances throughout the centuries, see Leslie Peirce, The
Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
10
Sedad Hakkı Eldem, Köşkler ve Kasırlar: Survey of Turkish Kiosks and Pavilions, vol. 2 (Istanbul: Devlet Güzel
Sanatlar Akademisi, 1969), 213-222. The full title of Choiseul-Gouffier’s second edition reads as Voyage
pittoresque dans l'Empire Ottoman, en Grèce, dans la Troade, les iles de l'Archipel et sur les côtes de l'Asie-
Mineure.
 62

the property’s layout and accompanying narrative account, like Evliya Çelebi’s, focuses on the

site’s most distinctive feature, Kaya Sultan’s double-tier fountain with brass waterspouts shaped

as flowers, whose waters collected in a large marble pool embellished with prominent fish reliefs

(fig. 2.1).11 The erstwhile structures at this site, furthermore, read less like a hardy mansion and

more as light, exposed buildings to be used for temporary stays.

When superimposed, Eldem finds remarkable similarities between Gudenus’s plan and

Choiseul-Gouffier’s engraving of the mansion’s waterfront façade, especially in the layout of the

central assembly hall projecting over the water. During the time of the ambassadorial visit, the

site contained two small kiosks, one with the reception hall on the water and the other set back

against an arbor of vines and separated from the former by the central marble pool (fig. 2.2).

Overall, it appears that the site was initially used for semi-informal court ceremonies, when high-

ranking officials like the vizier and grand admiral hosted and entertained foreign delegations

with theatrical and circus performances on its lawns. The architecture of the kiosks, though

heavily gilded according to Gudenus, was still meant to provide temporary shelter and were not

generally intended for overnight stays. They were light, open, and often ephemeral timber

buildings. Outdoor structures like the fountain, pool, terraces and flower parterres were more

central to the use and overall experience of the space than the buildings themselves.

Selim III’s sister Beyhan Sultan (d. 1824) had become the owner of the wooden mansion

when Choiseul-Gouffier saw it a few decades later.12 Her residence was a considerably enlarged

11
Eldem, Köşkler ve Kasırlar, vol. 2, 214.
12
Selim III’s daily memoirist Ahmed Efendi refers to the site as the yalı of Çırağan that became the waterfront
mansion of Beyhan Sultan (the word yalı most likely meaning the plot of waterfront land rather than the structure
itself): “Beyhân Sultan Sâhilsarâyı olan Çırâgân Yâlısı.” Ahmed Efendi also informs us that Selim III visited the
site to inspect the construction in the spring months of 1794; see Sırkâtibi Ahmed Efendi, III. Selim'in Sırkâtibi
Ahmed Efendi tarafından tutulan Rûznâme, transliterated by Sema V. Arıkan (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu
Basımevi, 1993), 184. Two foreign travelers (among many) have described Beyhan Sultan’s version of the Çırağan
 63

version of the waterfront kiosk outlined by Gudenus, with two wings having been added on its

sides, in place of the two large flower parterres that had once served as makeshift stages for

performances during the hosting of foreign delegations. The expansion of the kiosk into a

mansion reflected the privatization of the property in the time of Selim III, exemplifying the

moment when the princesses began to take real ownership of their designated Bosphorus

mansions, forming their own sub-courts, and inhabiting them for long periods of time rather than

allowing their yalıs to be among the sites in constant circulation for various court ceremonies.

This was especially the case with widowed princesses like Abdülhamid I’s daughter Esma Sultan

(d. 1848), and Selim III’s sister Beyhan Sultan, both of whom never remarried and enjoyed

unprecedented levels of independence in presiding over their own households inside their

designated waterfront mansions.13 They entertained individuals such as the celebrated poet and

sheikh of the Galata Mevlevî dervish lodge, Şeyh Galib (d.1793) and brought in decorator-

architects and landscape designers to reinvent their interiors and their outdoors.14 The best

female tastemaker of the period is, of course, Selim III’s charismatic sister Hatice Sultan, who

notably employed Antoine Ignace Melling, the German draftsman, as her style-maker for the

see James Dallaway, Constantinople Ancient and Modern, with Excursions to the Shores and Islands of the
Archipelago and to the Troad (London: T. Cadell, junr. & W. Davies: 1797), 138– 41; and, J. C. Hobhouse, A
Journey Through Albania and Other Provinces of Turkey through Europe and Asia to Constantinople During the
Years 1809 and 1810, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: M. Carey and Son, 1817), 860.
13
Tülay Artan, "From Charismatic Leadership to Collective Rule: Introducing Materials on Wealth and Power of
Ottoman Princesses in the Eighteenth Century," in Toplum ve Ekonomi IV (1993): 53-94. Her second, shorter article
shares a similar introduction as well as the almost identical title (the first part of both are “From Charismatic
Leadership to Collective Rule”). They are both invaluable in discussing the economic power of the eighteenth-
century princesses, but diverge in that the longer one highlights their sources of income while the earlier version
focuses on the particularities of the deliberate ways they displayed their wealth.
14
Hafız Hüseyin Ayvansarayî, The Garden of the Mosques: Hafiz Hüseyin al-Ayvansarayī's Guide to the Muslim
Monuments of Ottoman Istanbul, translated by Howard Crane (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 274-275; Tülay Artan, “A
Composite Universe: Arts and Society in Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century,” in Ottoman Empire and
European Theatre I: The Age of Mozart and Selim III (1756-1808), ed. Michael Hüttler and Hans Ernst Weidinger
(Vienna: Hollitzer, 2013), 751-794.
 64

construction of an Empire Style tripartite addition to her Defterdar Burnu waterfront mansion in

Ortaköy (fig. 2.3).15 Her numerous letters to Melling continually and forcefully listing her

decorative needs reflect a dogged, if temperamental discernment.16 Among a plethora of

symbols, pediments, garlands, crests, monograms, eye-catching colors, heavy gilding and

copious amounts of silks and porcelain objects became the choice decorative markers for these

princesses, and by acquiring and displaying them they appear to have created a lively culture of

collecting and self-fashioning.17

The busy social lives of these princesses and the spaces they inhabited were intimately

bound by and located in specific neighborhoods of the imperial capital: they continually

crisscrossed between their mansions in Eyüp or others along the coastline from Tophane to

Kuruçeşme. Both the residential properties that were tenurially ceded to the female members of

the imperial household, and revenue sources such as agricultural lands and tax-farms assigned to

them, retained a remarkable degree of continuity in how they were inherited. For instance, the

yalıs in Eyüp were initially exclusively allocated to the daughters of Ahmed III and Mustafa

III.18 After the death of Ahmed III’s daughter Esma Sultan the Elder (d. 1788), a progressive host

15
A shorter version of Artan’s article referenced in footnote no. 12 analyzes the decorative vocabulary that these
women selected for themselves, see Tülay Artan, "From Charismatic Leadership to Collective Rule: Gender
Problems of Legalism and Political Legitimation in the Ottoman Empire," in Proceedings of the Sixieme congres
international d'histoire économique et sociale de l'empire Ottoman et de la Turquie (1326-1960), 1-4 June 1992, ed.
Daniel Panzac (Aix-en-Provence, 1995), 569-580. For Hatice Sultan’s Neşetabad Pavilion, see Antoine-Ignace
Melling, Constantinople et de rives de Bosphore, D’après les dessins de M. Melling (Paris, 1819).
16
Jacques Perot, Frederic Hitzel and Robert Anhegger, eds., Hatice Sultan ile Melling Kalfa: Mektuplar, translated
by Ela Güntekin (İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2001).
17
Artan, "From Charismatic Leadership to Collective Rule: Gender Problems of Legalism and Political
th
Legitimation in the Ottoman Empire,” 575. For their collector’s identities, see Tülay Artan, “18 Century Ottoman
Princesses as Collectors: Chinese and European Porcelains in the Topkapı Palace Museum,” Ars Orientalis 39
(2010): 113-147.
18
Artan, “From Charismatic Leadership to Collective Rule: Introducing Materials on Wealth and Power of Ottoman
Princesses in the Eighteenth Century,” 81.
 65

able to speak her mind to Baron de Tott’s wife about her dissatisfaction with arranged marriages

between young princesses and elderly statesmen, her agricultural properties were passed on to

her namesake, Abdülhamid I’s abovementioned daughter Esma Sultan the Younger. The latter

was an even more independent woman, who along with her bevvy of female courtiers sustained a

lively, autonomous court, and was renowned enough to be considered a regent, albeit

sardonically, when Mahmud II remained the sole male heir.19 A similar transfer of inherited

wealth occurred between Selim III’s sisters, Hatice Sultan (d. 1821) and Beyhan Sultan (d.

1824), and between Mustafa III’s wife Şebsefa Kadın and Hibetullah Sultan—an as yet

understudied pattern of property hand-offs that I believe continued into the nineteenth century.20

In a calculated move to curb the rising power of the military-administrative elite, Ahmed

III revived this revenue redistribution model and, through the enormous economic independence

it accrued for the princesses, encouraged them “to engage in public manifestations of dynastic

sovereignty” in the capital.21 A remarkable study on the sources of revenue of the eighteenth-

century princesses has linked a targeted redistribution of imperial wealth that favored them,

undertaken during that period, to the burst of imperial female patronage of lavish residential

architecture along the Bosphorus.22 It asserts that the increased visibility of these women as

pioneers of taste and consumers of novelty was connected with the state’s assignment of the

19
Enver Ziya Karal, Osmanlı Tarihi, vol. 5 (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1961-1983), 96; Melek-Khanum, Thirty
Years in the Harem. Autobiography of Melek-Khanum, Wife of H.H. Kıbrızlı Mehemed Pasha (London: Chapman
and Hall, 1872), 30; and Artan, “From Charismatic Leadership to Collective Rule: Introducing Materials on Wealth
and Power of Ottoman Princesses in the Eighteenth Century,” 66-68.
20
Artan, “From Charismatic Leadership to Collective Rule: Introducing Materials on Wealth and Power of Ottoman
Princesses in the Eighteenth Century,” 72.
21
Ibid., 62.
22
This study undertaken by Artan is first cited in footnote no. 13. For the genesis of this income allocation for the
women of the court, see Peirce, 126-127, 212-216, and 247-248.
 66

invaluable and increasingly precarious Rumelian properties as tax-farms to these women as a

way of safeguarding the most important revenue-generating sources within the family and out of

reach of more and more powerful local landlords. Furthermore, these princesses were married off

to influential dignitaries to secure the latter’s allegiance to the sultan, as in the case of Fatma

Sultan and Nevşehirli İbrahim Paşa. By the turn of the century, the imperial princesses had

attained unprecedented agency in the way they conducted their lives, which had tangible

repercussions on the layout of their mansions. The central spaces were designated as the

apartments of the sultan, who often frequented the courts of his sisters or nieces. Even the

stewards (kethüdas) hired to manage the incomes of these women received statelier lodgings

than the husbands, whose apartments were comparatively humble and inconspicuous.23

The wealth of the daughters and sisters of the eighteenth-century sultans was seemingly

so vast that they retained substantial disposable incomes to spend on their own sizable

households, residential architecture, and luxury objects that they did not have to protect through

monumental pious endowments. In contrast, the valides of the eighteenth century are curiously

less visible as patrons and consumers. It is only with Selim III’s mother, Mihrişah, that we begin

to see the reemergence of the status of the valide as a prominent personage of the court and a

savvy builder of residential and civic structures. The most monumental work attributed to

Mihrişah is the Valide Dam (Valide Bendi) in the Belgrade Forest, while the most intriguing one

in terms of its overall Baroque schema is her tomb and imaret in Eyüp.

23
Peirce, 91. Already in her dissertation “Theater of Life” Artan senses a pronounced hierarchy of public visibility
in the case of the sultans’ daughters over the sons-in-law, the latter group’s prestige would dwindle by the end of the
eighteenth century. Artan tells us that the separate yalıs of the husbands, often appended to their wives more visible
statelier versions, appeared “in an unassuming manner” even in the Bostancıbaşı defters that meticulously outlined
the wealthy occupants of the Bosphorus shoreline; Artan, “Theater of Life,” 381. On the eventual stripping off of
power of the sons-in-law definitively under Abdülhamid II’s rule, see the journalistic tell-all Nahid Sırrı Örik,
Bilinmeyen Yaşamlarıyla Saraylılar, 11-32.
 67

In the case of the two powerful valides of the nineteenth century, Bezm-i Alem and

Pertevniyal, we can identify—albeit cautiously, as we still know little of their lives let alone their

patronage patterns—a definitive turn towards the patronage of monumental civic and religious

architecture. While they do indeed build personal residences (and the developments in and

around Yıldız estate are a prime example), they are not of the level of ostentation seen in the

previous century; this is perhaps due to a possible shift in recommended courtly decorum to

channel more of their personal wealth into public service. The change in their sources of income

may have been caused by the loss of the lucrative Balkan territories, rather than by the kind of

profligate spending often attribute to the female members of the court and the interdependent

fraudulence of financial advisors and scheming non-Muslim moneylenders. For example, the

fact that the majority of the properties assigned to Bezm-i Alem’s largest endowment, her

hospital complex in Fatih, were olive orchards in in Edremit on the west coast of Anatolia

(probably among the most profitable lands then remaining in the empire’s domains), suggests

that geopolitical changes were behind the geographical shifts in the income sources assigned to

the powerful women of the court.24 These women might have had to rethink how they were

going to present themselves vis-à-vis their fiscal capabilities and their roles as the mothers of

reformist sultans; their architectural presence alongside their sons and daughters on the

Bosphorus waterfront, however, persisted well into the reign of Abdülhamid II.

b. THE FIRST YILDIZ KIOSK AND ITS ECHOES ACROSS THE SHORE

If Ahmed III revitalized the courtly practice of frequenting the royal suburban mansions and

gardens through his daughters, sons-in-law and various high-ranking officials, the patronage of

24
Nuran Yıldırım, Gureba Hastanesi'nden Bezmiâlem Vakıf Üniversitesi'ne (Istanbul: Bezmiâlem Vakıf
Üniversitesi, 2013), 38-55.
 68

Mahmud I (r. 1730-1754) firmly established it by meeting the infrastructural needs of the

European shoreline of the Bosphorus that stretched from the Imperial Foundry of Tophane to the

Çırağan palace.25 He built his monumental waterworks projects of 1732 on what his predecessor

Ahmed III had initiated by constructing a dam in Sarıyer’s Bahçeköy neighborhood. The water

was brought by aqueduct from the wooded hill close to the Black Sea, first to Taksim, named

after its distribution facility, and from there down to Fındıklı. An observer of the period noted

that before Mahmud I, the boroughs (kasaba) of Tophane and Fındıklı were blessed with good

weather, closeness to the walled-city of Istanbul, and a propitious orientation towards the qibla

(indicating the cardinal direction of Mecca, to the south), and their only shortcoming was a lack

of drinking water.26 Furthermore, by rallying many of the city’s elite including his mother, to

endow fountains and sebils in Tophane and Fındıklı, Mahmud I distributed water to a larger

swath of this shoreline and the suburban villages in its hills. The same observer counted an

estimated eighty fountains that benefited from this collective effort.27 What started out as an

intention to improve a very specific segment of the shoreline resulted in the increased

habitability of many neighborhoods of the imperial capital, from Galata to Kasımpaşa,

Dolmabahçe and Beşiktaş.

Yıldız Kiosk first appears in the late-eighteenth-century chronicle of Cabi Ömer Efendi

as a structure that was built by Selim III and came at the tail-end of two colossal building

projects that were completed in 1795: the restoration of the arsenal and the construction of the

25
For Mahmud I’s prolific yet understudied architectural patronage, see Ünver Rüstem, “Architecture for a New
Age: Imperial Ottoman Mosques in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul,” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2013, 91-226.
Also see Hamadeh, 76-78.
26
Şem’dânî-zâde Fındıklılı Süleyman Efendi, Mür’i’t-tevârih, transliterated by M. Münir Aktepe, vol. 1 (İstanbul:
Edebiyat Fakültesi Matbaası, 1976-), 30.
27
Ibid., 31.
 69

Imperial School of Engineering both along the Golden Horn. Lauding its views, the chronicler

describes Yıldız as a belvedere, “the world showing kiosk” (köşk-i cihānnümā).28 A few sub-

imperial pleasure pavilions in Arnavutköy and Akıntıburnu accompanied the construction of this

building. Built in succession, these residences shared the common feature of being constructed

on privileged higher ground as belvederes (nezâreti şâmil), overlooking the rapidly populating,

enlivened waterfront of the Bosphorus. Aware perhaps of the trendsetting patronage of Selim III’

sister Hatice Sultan and cousin Esma Sultan, Cabi Ömer lists their upland pavilions before the

sultan’s own. For these competitive patrons, the principal motivation to build these belvedere-

like structures was to enjoy their glorious vistas. In Selim III’s case, his Yıldız Kiosk was given

the name “north” after the cardinal direction also associated with the powerful north wind, called

Yıldız, that blew at this very spot and was coveted for its strength by Selim and his retinue of

expert archers and rifle-shooters.29

A concern for safety might have been another reason for the court’s pursuit of shelter in

the imperial hills. Selim III’s reign was notoriously plagued with janissary insurgencies in the

capital. A historian of a slightly later period spoke of the precarious position of the yalıs, noting

that they were often easy targets. A particular battalion of five thousand janissaries (Beş

Ortalar), greatly feared among Istanbul’s inhabitants, fled the capital by merchant ships, but not

before riddling the windows of the waterfront mansions of the notables living in Beşiktaş—

starting with the yalı of the famous diplomat and minister Halet Efendi (d. 1823)—and in

28
Câbî Ömer Efendi, Câbî Târihi: Târîh-i Sultân Selîm-i Sâlis ve Mahmûd-i Sânî: tahlîl ve tenkidli metin, ed.
Mehmet Ali Beyhan, vol. 1 (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2003), 49.
29
Atıf Kahraman, Osmanlı Devleti’nde Spor (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı Yay, 1995), 416-417. I thank Professor
Günhan Börekçi, an Ottoman historian and amateur archer, for this reference. For Selim III’s rifle-shooting and
archery hobby I have also consulted Ünsal Yücel, Türk Okçuluğu (Ankara: Atatürk Kültür Merkezi Başkanlığı,
1999). For a mention of the site’s renowned winds, see the Ortaköy description in Meḥmed Rāʿif, Mirʿāt-ı İstānbul
(İstānbul, [1314]-1896), 287.
 70

Ortaköy with bullets, until the residences were turned into “sieves” (misâl-ı gırbâl).30 Although it

may seem to be merely a colorful anecdote, events like these could have precipitated the building

of Mahmud I’s first belvedere behind Beşiktaş Palace, aptly named sāyebān (lit. gölgelik,

meaning both baldachin tent and shelter) for the shade and refuge it provided.31

Beginning with Selim III, we witness a pronounced display of reverence towards the

family matriarch—the valide reclaims her prominence above the sultan’s sisters. Her patronage

becomes complementary to the sultan’s empire-wide reforms and her position next to the sultan

clearly suggests an attempt at dual-rule that would become much more pronounced in the

nineteenth century. In comparison to Mahmud I’s personal upland refuge, what was most

remarkable about Selim III’s Yıldız Kiosk was the fact that it was built for his mother Mihrişah

Sultan, and was connected with a comprehensive royal project to redesign all of her residences.32

When the kiosk was erected, Selim III had already restored his mother’s apartments in Topkapı

Palace and renovated its harem gardens according to her liking.33 Yıldız Kiosk was to be her

retreat, positioned at the top of the hill, both literally and metaphorically, of a hierarchy of

30
Şânî-zâde Mehmed ‘Ata’ullah Efendi. Şânî-zâde Târîhî 1223-1237 (1808-1821), vol. 1 (Istanbul: Çamlıca, 2008),
1113-1114.
31 nd
Mustafa Cezar, Sanatta Batı’ya Açılış, 2 ed., vol. 1 (Istanbul: Erol Kerim Aksoy Kültür, Eğitim, Spor ve Sağlık
Vakfı, 1995), 110.
32
A Baroque fountain with an attenuated trunk and exaggerated eaves still remains from the time of Mihrişah’s
Yıldız Kiosk, which the landscape designers of Abdülhamid II at the end of the nineteenth century used as the focal
monument when they redesigned the inner, harem , and its artificial lake around it.
33
The redesigning of Topkapı’s harem seems to have been undertaken first by Ahmed III with the court’s return
from Edirne to Istanbul. We begin to see changes in the decoration of the queen mother’s quarters during the reign
of Abdülhamid I with a new aesthetic in wall paintings of part realistic and part imaginary landscapes with garden
pavilions. The foundational work on the subject is Günsel Renda, Batılılaşma Döneminde Türk Resim Sanatı, 1700-
1850 (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1977), 89-108. Selim III continues the process of renovating the
harem by building a new kiosk for himself in the private third courtyard of the palace and commissioning the
landscaping of the harem garden in the process. See my forthcoming article on his hire of a German head-gardener
Jacob Ensle for the project, Deniz Türker, “Ottoman Horticulture after the Tulip Era: Botanizing Consuls, Garden
Diplomacy, and the First Foreign Head-Gardener,” in Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Yota
Batsaki, Sarah Burke Cahalan, and Anatole Tchikine, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library Publications
(forthcoming).
 71

buildings that belonged to the princesses, which were located on the shores down below and

bracketing the sultan’s residence at Beşiktaş. To no one more than Selim III was this

architectural hierarchy—aided by the site’s topography—as central to the experience of this

imperial quarter: he spent an astoundingly large portion of his days shuttling between his official

summer residence and the waterfront residences of his sisters.

In 1803, Mihrişah’s Yıldız Kiosk quickly began to grow and transform into an estate. A

day-to-day account of Selim III’s life records that it was his mother (and not the sultan acting on

his mother’s behalf) who initiated the building of a “garden pavilion” (bağ kasrı).34 This building

was not at the very summit of the hill, which was held by the Yıldız Kiosk, but downhill and on

the meadows to its southwest, occupying the neighborhood of Yahya Efendi, named after the

sixteenth-century theologian and Sufi shaykh who had built his convent there. A fountain

inscription from 1797, today inserted into the façade of a modern apartment building (fig. 2.4),

attests to Mihrişah’s patronage of this segment of the site: “Our Mistress, the illustrious Mihrişah

Sultan, the mother of the sovereignty’s highest [Selim III], may glory be upon her, granted and

ordained to be included in her noble endowment half a māṣūra35 of fresh water to this fountain

from the large aqueduct that she had built as a duty to God’s munificence” (Mehd-i ʿulyā-yı

salṭanat, devletlü Mihrişāh Vālide Sulṭān ʿaliyyetü'ş-şān efendimiz ḥaẓretleriniñ li-vechillāhü'l-

kerīm müceddeden binā buyurduḳları bend-i kebīrden işbu çeşmeye daḫī yarım māṣūra māʾ-i

34
For a modest but insightful study on Ottoman Istanbul’s orchard typologies, see Süleyman Faruk Göncüoğlu,
Üsküdar ve Boğaziçi (İstanbul: İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi, 2015).

35
A measurement corresponding to the volumetric flow of water, which was one-quarter of a lüle (26 meter-cubes),
therefore about 6.5 meter-cubes of water per day. While masura was the preferred indication of quantity in judicial
documents, lüle was the preferred designation for the allusion of an abundance of water in prose; see Mehmet Zeki
Pakalın, Osmanlı Tarih Deyimleri ve Terimleri Sözlüğü, vol. 2 (Istanbul: Milli Eǧitim Basımevi, 1983), 372.
 72

lezīz iḥsān ve vaḳf-ı şerīflerine ilḥāḳ buyurdular).36 Her monumental aqueduct fed the fountain of

her estate.

Soon after this kiosk and orchard estate were built, Selim III added them to his busy

recreational itinerary in Beşiktaş, visiting his mother at least as often as he did his sisters.37

Çırağan also came to be Selim’s preferred summer residence. It presumably offered a more

intimate mabeyn for his male retinue than the sprawling and unwieldy Beşiktaş Palace next-door,

which by now had become a version of Topkapı with its collection of pavilions from different

periods. He used Beşiktaş only for official meetings with his ministers. Often, the sultan and his

prized halberdiers (serhengān) would take a quick trek up from Çırağan to his mother’s new

estate in order to practice archery and musketry, play the game of jereed, and watch wrestling,

javelin-throwing, and log-cutting (kütük darbı).38 If his mother joined the sultan in observing

these courtly pastimes, fireworks would follow suit until the early morning hours, when the

estate would be prepared for their overnight stay, instead of a return to either of the two

waterfront palaces.

On any given day in Selim’s court, leisure activities intended to display physical prowess

and strength were paired with religious ritual for the contemplation of the otherworldly. The

three royal properties, Çırağan, the estate of Mihrişah Sultan, and Yıldız, physically layered on

top of one another from waterfront to hilltop, offered a neat and balanced cohabitation of these

36
Egemen, 601. Egemen provides the inscription in full. The fountain was originally across from the non-extant
Topal Hoca Mescid in Çırağan. The inscription stone was later moved to an apartment’s entrance façade on Sinan
Paşa Mescidi Sokak.
37
I thank my advisor Gülru Necipoğlu for pointing out the very likely fact that the eighteenth-century Ottomans
continued to enact a hierarchy of decorum on Istanbul’s geography with their building patterns. While shores were
given to the princesses, the more remote elevated estates were reserved for the mother, the latter practice perhaps
being a sign of respectful veneration removed from the public gaze that emphasized their much loftier status.
38
Mihrişah’s orchard estate is mentioned with great frequency in the diary of Selim III’s unnamed scribe, see
Mehmet Ali Beyhan, Saray Günlüğü: 25 Aralık 1802-24 Ocak 1809 (İstanbul: Doğu Kütüphanesi, 2007), 122-126,
128-129, 145-146, 148, 150, 152 and 154.
 73

two courtly spheres, the Mevlevi lodge of which Selim III was a devoted member, Mevlevi poet

and composer also being located adjacent to Çırağan.39 In a way, the new imperial strip in

Beşiktaş replicated the same conjoining of worldly pleasure and material effusiveness that the

female members of the court exhibited in and through their Golden Horn yalıs, which were

likewise clustered deliberately close to the mosque-complex of Eyüp Sultan, a holy site central to

the ceremonial legitimation of the Ottoman house.40

The appearance of Mihrişah’s pavilion and the overall layout of her farm estate are

currently unknown. However, its typological designation as a bağ kasrı (garden or orchard

pavilion) appears to be a novelty in court chronicles otherwise preoccupied with waterfront

palaces and mansions. To translate the site’s designation as a garden pavilion is to deny its

singularity as a newly-formulated property type, which was probably more analogous to the rural

Palladian farming estates of sixteenth-century northern Italy, where austere but luxurious small-

scale neoclassical villas perch commandingly above cultivated lands full of fruit trees and

vineyards. While we also cannot know why Mihrişah Sultan wanted this kind of estate instead of

a waterfront palace or an inland urban konak—was it conceived as an infirmary or private

sanatorium, or simply an income-generating farm?—it subsequently served as a model for many

others that were constructed by the mothers of successive sultans. The most prominent among its

successors is the still extant Validebağ Kasrı in Acıbadem, a vast wooded retreat on a hilltop on

Istanbul’s Asian side attributed to Sultan Abdülaziz’s mother Pertevniyal, but a few decades

39
Talât S. Halman. Rapture and Revolution: Essays on Turkish Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
2007), 281; for Selim III’s patronage of the convent, see Ayvansarayî, The Garden of the Mosques, 422-423.
40
The intertwined practices of courtly pastimes and practices of faith has first been beautifully argued for Eyüp in
Tülay Artan, “Eyüp’ün Bir Diğer Çehresi: Sayfiye ve Sahilsaraylar,” 106-114. Mihrişah built her interconnected
tomb and imaret, a delicate Baroque complex, in Eyüp; see Uğurlu, 177-200; and, Gülbin Gültekin, “Mihrişah
Valide Sultan Külliyesi,” DBİA, vol. 5 (Istanbul: Kültür Bakanlığı ve Tarih Vakfı, 1993), 459-461. For a published
segment of her endowments, see Ahmet İnan, “Mihrişah Sultan İmareti,” in Eyüp Sultan Tarihi, ed. Mehmet Nermi
Haskan, vol. 2 (Istanbul: Eyüp Belediyesi, 2008), 720.
 74

earlier Mahmud II’s mother Nakş-ı Dil Sultan also built a lesser-known one in Çamlıca’s hills in

1813 that was celebrated during its time.41

Although very little is known about the person and patronage of Nakş-ı Dil Sultan, she

also seems to have preferred elevated sites on which to build her extra-palatial residences.42 It

has been suggested that Mahmud II’s court began to commission highland retreats in the capital

for medical purposes.43 Both suffering from tuberculosis, and later from a mystery disease with

41
Whether Mihrişah, Nakş-ı Dil and Pertevniyal’s Validebağ estates were one and the same or inhabited the same
plot of land is currently unclear. However, they seem to be incredibly close when Helmuth von Moltke’s Istanbul
map (1839) is superimposed onto the still extant Validebağ today. The plot given to Nakş-ı Dil might have been
expanded for Pertevniyal as in the case of Mihrişah’s Yıldız estate expansion for Abdülmecid’s mother, Bezm-i
Alem. There is persistent confusion of provenance with regards to the estates of courtly women that need to be
remedied through a detailed study of their endowments. Today, Validebağ’s ownership is attributed solely to
Abdülaziz’s sister Adile Sultan with no mention of a line-up of queen mothers who owned and cultivated the site, an
oversight which is all the more surprising given that the site’s designated name is derived from their title. Baha
Tanman, “Korular,” DBİA, vol. 3 (Istanbul: Kültür Bakanlığı ve Tarih Vakfı, 1993), 72-75. A brief entry on “Valide
Sultan Sarayı” places Selim III’s mother Mihrişah Sultan’s mansion in Çamlıca in Kısıklı where the first public park
would later be built; İbrahim Hakkı Konyalı, Âbideleri ve Kitâbeleriyle Üsküdar Tarihi, vol. 2 (Istanbul: Türkiye
Yeṣilay Cemiyeti, 1976-77), 273.
42
The apocryphal nineteenth-century stories that align Nakş-ı Dil with Empress Josephine’s missing cousin Aimée
du Buc de Rivéry, who was presumably caught by the Barbary pirates on her way from her native Martinique to
France and gifted to Abdülhamid I’s court, have a long and exciting history of their own. The made-up tale was
initially published in an English newspaper and quickly transformed into many corsair swashbucklers in France. The
Ottomans, perceptive of the story’s European popularity occasionally used it for their own benefit during their
encounters with the French. Ahmet Refik historicizes the reasons for this made-up genealogy as a tactical appeal to
the west, first in allying Mahmud II’s reforms with his half-European ancestry and later during Abdülmecid’s rule
when the court sought the support of the French in diplomatic negotiations around the Crimean War. The Ottomans,
whether they believed the story or not, willfully played with the ruse by unearthing it again during Abdülaziz’s visit
to the Napoleon III’s court, when French con-artists posing as Nakş-ı Dil’s French relatives expressed their desire to
meet with the sultan. Moreover, Abdülaziz, very much convinced of his French parentage, demanded that his men
find the remaining members of the Du Buc family, who then refused his invitation to meet. The most accurate
biography of the Circassian-born Nakş-ı Dil is found in the best biographical compilation of the Ottoman court’s
female members: Necdet Sakaoğlu, Bu Mülkün Kadın Sultanları: Vâlide Sultanlar, Hâtunlar, Hasekiler,
Kadınefendiler, Sultanefendiler (Istanbul: Oğlak Bilimsel Kitaplar, 2008), 355-361. Both Ahmet Refik’s corrective
essay, which I have not been able to locate, and Abdülaziz’s quest to find his relatives that first appears in Ali
Kemâlî Aksüt’s account of Abdülaziz’s trips to Egypt and European cities, are cited in this volume. Regardless of
the fact that the Nakş-ı Dil- Aimée connection is long-refuted, it is still replicated in less circumspect histories; see
Çağatay M. Uluçay, Padişahın Kadınları ve Kızları (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1980), 107-108.
43
The history of Ottoman medicine has yet to produce substantive material on how epidemics were managed and
perceived, especially with regards to the early-nineteenth century case of tuberculosis, when its etiology was
universally not well understood. However patchy, the nineteenth-century harem suffered greatly from the disparate
but devastating symptoms of tuberculosis, and it is agreed upon that Mahmud II and Abdülmecid both died of this
disease as well as many of their female relatives, mothers, sisters and daughters. For the suggestive links between
Nakş-ı Dil and her sanatorium-like estate in Çamlıca, see the introduction of Rahşan Gürel to the divan of the court
 75

varied symptoms (which was therefore impossible to diagnose without an autopsy), the sultan

and his mother sought curative airs in Istanbul’s hills, especially in the forested segment of

Çamlıca perched above the Beylerbeyi Palace.44 It is unclear whether they believed that

tuberculosis was contagious—-physicians of the era were split in their approach to the etiology

of the disease, majority still believed it was hereditary. If, however, the Ottoman court was aware

of the disease’s transmission from person-to-person, the construction of and subsequent retreat to

these imperial hideouts was a smart move on the part of the court’s most prominent members to

quarantine themselves and protect the other inhabitants of their crowded palaces.45

Yıldız Kiosk and its association with the mothers of sultans factored greatly in Nakş-ı

Dil’s residential commission in Çamlıca, where she appears to have built an identical structure. It

may be that by constructing a similar garden pavilion on the hill exactly opposite the one that

was previously linked with her predecessor, Nakş-ı Dil was instating herself as the new valide.

But, it may also be that with two of these royal sites in her name, she was laying claim to the

imperial capital’s two prominent hilltops; while the palaces of Beylerbeyi and Çırağan were her

son’s properties, the elevated sites above them were hers. Even though the first topographic map

of Istanbul, drawn up by the Prussian officer Helmuth von Moltke (d.1891), neither demarcates

the estate’s boundaries nor provides its layout, it still generously labels Nakş-ı Dil’s Çamlıca

estate as “the palace of the Queen Mother” (Valideh Sultan Serai) (fig. 2.5). In the German map,

this imperial site is the only residence reserved specifically for the valide.

poet Vasıf; Enderunlu Osman Vâsıf Bey ve dîvânı: dîvan-ı gülşen-i efkâr-ı Vâsıf-ı Enderûnî, ed. Rahşan Gürel,
(Istanbul: Kitabevi, 1999), 106.
44
Mary Wilson Carpenter, Health, Medicine, and the Society in Victorian England (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger,
2010), 54-70.
45
Katherine Bryne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2011), 21-30.
 76

An ode (kaside) composed by the renowned court poet Vasıf in commemoration of Nakş-

ı Dil’s Çamlıca pavilion—which we are told was built in her son’s name—stresses the fact that

in its hilltop siting it was modeled on Mihrişah’s Yıldız Kiosk, and commanded over the Asian

slopes like a beacon of light. “If the kiosk of Yıldız brought radiance to the neighborhood of

Beşiktaş,” wrote the poet, “this [building] bestowed grace to the quarter of Üsküdar” (Eğer

verdiyse Yıldız Köşkü fer semt-i Beşikṭaş’a, Bu sūy-ı Üsküdār’a zīb-baḫş-ı iftiḫār oldu).46 Playing

with astrological imagery, the poet finds that with respect to its high altitude, this royal pavilion

was no different from Yıldız in its closeness to the Pleiades, a star cluster most visible to the

naked eye. He therefore likens it to its predecessor in their mutual resemblance to a light-

scattering moon (Bunuñ beyne’s-Süreyyā ve’s-serā yoḳ farḳı Yıldız’la, Bu ḳaṣr-ı Yıldız’a nisbet

meh-i pertev-nisār oldu).47 Even though this unusually long ode does not provide detailed

architectural information beyond the usual Persianate allusions to the four-quarter gardens of

Isfahan and the forty-columned pavilion, it is still wonderfully awash in imagery befitting a

fecund rural villa. Vasıf revels in the color and taste of the estate’s cherries, its freshly sown

dewy saplings and moist earth, its pleasant balmy winds, and the overall capaciousness of its

structures. It is with this kind of imagery that the ode signals the typological novelty of this

imperial estate, and indeed, defines it quite precisely as such with the word meʾvā, meaning

shelter or retreat.48 These pastoral allusions were as much about the court’s desire to be close to

46
This Yıldız-Çamlıca connection through the valide estates is alluded to Vasıf’s kaside cited in Haluk
Şehsuvaroğlu, “Yıldız Kasrı,” Cumhuriyet Gazetesi, 5 July 1952, 5; for the transcribed version of this long poem,
see Gürel, 255.
47
Ibid.
48
More specifically, Vasıf calls this retreat that Mahmud II’s mother built for him the shelter of the just one, meʾvā-
yı ʿadlī, and ʿadlī being the pen name of the sultan.
 77

nature, a Romantic appeal, as they were reflective of the tubercular imperial family’s pursuit of

recovery in nature’s restorative potential.

c. THE FAVORABLE WINDS OF YILDIZ KIOSK, MAHMUD II, AND ARCHERY

In the early years of Mahmud II’s reign, the Yıldız Kiosk and especially its adjacent farming

estate almost completely disappear from the record. Only in 1811 do we find the fifteen-year-old

ruler using Yıldız to watch through binoculars the destruction of over one hundred bachelors’

rooms across the shore in Üsküdar, which was undertaken in an effort to crackdown on

prostitution and what appears to be a surge in venereal disease. In the same year, a historic

deluge seems to have caused a significant disruption to the court’s visits to Yıldız. The deluge

that “throttled forward a whirlpool of water” not only destroyed many buildings and bridges in

the famous promenade of Kağıthane, but also flooded streams in Beşiktaş, turning the latter

neighborhood into a sea (Beşiktaş gûyâ bir deryâ olmağla).49 A great number of properties

located in these two suburban villages were greatly affected with many ordinary lives lost.

Ottoman chroniclers record the destruction of the old stone bridge of Beşiktaş, the town’s mill,

public baths, shops, and the barracks of the gardeners’ corps. The deluge was strong enough to

bury all the upland gardens and orchards close to the Yıldız estates under water. Had Nakş-ı Dil

lived longer—she died in 1817—we surely would have seen her restore and repurpose this area

for her own use in the same way that she undertook the construction of the Çamlıca estate and

her modest yet exquisite Baroque tomb and adjacent sebil in Fatih (fig. 2.6).50

49
Şânî-zâde Mehmed ‘Ata’ullah Efendi, 474.
50
Haluk Şehsuvaroğlu, “Nakş-ı Dil Valide Sultan Türbesi,” in a bound compilation of his articles on Istanbul’s
forgotten architectural heritage for the newspaper Cumhuriyet, Asırlar Boyunca İstanbul: Sarayları, Camileri,
Abideleri, Çesmeleri (Istanbul: Cumhuriyet, 197-), 138.
 78

Mahmud II’s preoccupation with perfecting his archery and his relentless desire to

compete with the most skilled men in his retinue led to the reinstatement of Yıldız as a

prominent imperial retreat after 1818, when the sultan first picked up the sport.51 A curious little

diary, kept only to document the record-breaking ranges—measured in gez52—of the sultan and

his bowmen, clues us into the fact that Yıldız was second only to Okmeydanı (archery field), the

traditional imperial site for the sport established by Mehmed II (d. 1481).53 To document the

sultan’s fledgling hobby, professional archers began to publish detailed how-to guides54 and

court panegyrists quickly shifted their focus to Mahmud II’s mastery in bowmanship. Poets

popularized the phrase Yıldız havası referring to the aforementioned strong north wind that blew

in the hilltop site and provided the ideal currents for the longest shots. A couplet from the

statesman, poet and the court’s most prolific chronogram composer Sadık Ziver Paşa (d. 1862),

one of many, lauds the sultan’s talent aided by the wind of Yıldız: “By delivering his opening

arrow with the Yıldız wind, the shah made it apparent to us that he was the moon to the sign of

majesty” (Tīrine Yıldız havāsı ile virüp ol şeh güşād, Māh-ı burc-ı şevket oldıġın bize ḳıldı

ʿayān).55

51
Hâfız Hızır İlyas Ağa, Osmanlı Sarayında Gündelik Hayat: Letâif-i Vekayi'-i Enderûniyye, edited by Ali Şükrü
Çoruk (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2011),165; Süleyman Kâni İrtem, II. Mahmud Devri ve Türk Kemankeşleri (İstanbul:
Temel, 2005).
52
Each gez is sixty-six centimeters. An archer was only qualified for the title of kemankeş or tirendaz (master
bowman) once his shots with an arrow containing a metal spearhead (azmayiş oku) were able to reach eight-hundred
gez, and nine-hundred gez with an arrow made with a bone-edged tip (peşrev oku). Ünsal, 399; and Pakalın, 664.
53
Mehmet Zeki Kuşoğlu, Türk Okçuluğu ve Sultan Mahmud’un Ok Günlüğü (İstanbul: Ötüken Neşriyat, 2006).
Strangely, this publication, which provides a facsimile of the diary, does not cite its source.
54
Mahmud II commissioned his archery tutor and chamberlain Mustafa Kânî Bey to research and compile a
comprehensive guide, which was then written down by the period’s most celebrated calligrapher Yesarizade
Mustafa İzzet Efendi (d.1849); Mustafa Kânî Bey, Okçuluk Kitabı, Telhîs-i Resâ’ilât-ı Rumât, edited by Kemal
Yavuz and Mehmed Canatar (Istanbul: Istanbul Fetih Cemiyeti, 2010). This volume contains a facsimile of the
original manuscript.
 79

The physical boundaries of the imperial retreat of Yıldız expanded with Mahmud II’s

continual archery gatherings. Numerous stone inscriptions marking and celebrating his records

are found in the meadow of Ihlamur, the future site of another royal retreat built by Abdülmecid

and named Nüzhetiyye, to the northwest of the Yıldız Kiosk (fig. 2.7).56 Due to the fact that the

group moved in search of the best wind conditions, portable arbors (gölgelik) traveled with them

and were put up to provide shade on the selected spots. The archery diary also points to specific,

often highly localized names of places around Yıldız. It is here that we receive the first mention

of a still extant door belonging to this property, the “mountain gate” (daǧ kapısı), which

apparently faced the main road leading to Kağıthane (it appears that the property also had

another south-facing door). The diary also refers to a smaller structure, a kiosk visited for brief

excursions (biniş köşkü) in the estate and next to the fountain of Selim III that had a porch

(sundurma), from which the sultan shot arrows in the direction of the non-Muslim cemetery by

the Ortaköy stream.57 The biniş kiosk was a site from which they preferred to take shots towards

55
Ahmed Sâdık Zîver Paşa, Dîvân ve münşe'ât, transliterated by Mehmet Aslan (Sivas: Cumhuriyet Üniversitesi,
2009), 388-389. For the poet’s biography, see İbnülemin Mahmut Kemal İnal, Son Asır Türk Şairleri, vol. 3
(Istanbul: Türk Tarih Encümeni Külliyatı Orhaniye Matbaası, 1930), 2090-2094.
56
There are a great many books on the sculptural remnants of Selim III and Mahmud II’s archery and marksmanship
in Ihlamur. Sedad Hakkı Eldem provides the best topographic layout of the extant stones’ positions in the meadow;
Sedad Hakkı Eldem, Türk Bahçeleri (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 1976), 30. For an architectural history of the
meadow, see Çelik Gülersoy, Beşiktaş’da Ihlamur Mesiresi ve Tarihı̂ Kitabeler (İstanbul: Türkiye Turing ve
Otomobil Kurumu Yayınları, 1962). A much more specialized and beautifully illustrated study that has reenacted
Mahmud II’s recorded arrow and rifle ranges in order to identify the missing stones have shown that their sculptural
elements were carefully considered and merit an analysis all of their own; see Şinasi M. Acar, Osmanlı'da Sportif
Atıcılık: Nişan Taşları (Istanbul: YEM Yayın, 2013). Kahraman also draws out Mahmud II’s shooting geography,
579-585.
57
The diary refers to the cemetery rather nondescriptly as the “infidel cemetery” (kâfir mezarlığı), which is probably
one of the two Armenian cemeteries that existed at the time close to Yıldız. One of them, the Ambarlıdere Ermeni
Mezarlığı, which was set on a meadow to the north of the Yıldız complex, was confiscated by the municipality to be
turned into luxury apartments in the 1960s. The other possibility is the cemetery that was to the northeast of the
complex, which in the 1930s was absorbed into the military headquarters established next to the palace’s park, and
which has only recently been returned to its inaugural endowment. However, the diary might have also been
referring to the Jewish cemetery bordering the Armenian cemetery adjacent to the park. In fact, the diary is
occasionally more specific when it comes to location names and records at one point that the sultan shot arrows in
the direction of the Jewish cemetery by the Ortaköy stream.
 80

a granary (harmanlık), a storage facility that was probably connected with the valide farming

estate. Often, Mahmud II liked to shoot arrows from the corner of the orchard of Gazzazbaşı,

located next to the Yıldız Kiosk where he had placed an archer’s column (ayak taşı) called the

“orchard’s worth” (bağ bedeli), towards a cemetery that was locally known as Güvercinlik, the

pigeonry. On days when the sultan wanted to practice (meşk) and not compete, he gathered his

archers in front of a coffeehouse close to Yıldız and took aim at a group of mastic trees. The

coffeehouse also occasionally served as an informal shooting range in the direction of the extant

Muslim cemetery in Ortaköy. As evidence of this estate’s importance to Mahmud II, Moltke’s

map depicts it as a structure with a pronounced cross-axial layout set inside a garden surrounded

by walls. Moreover, the map also marks the spots that were important shooting locations for the

archers and identified in the sultan’s archery diary, such as the smaller pavilion with the porch,

the coffeehouse, and the surrounding cemeteries (fig. 2.8).

The Yıldız estate fell from Mahmud II’s favor in the tumultuous period of the Greek

Uprising of 1821. During this time, the court chose not to relocate to its summer estate on the

hills of Beşiktaş and Ortaköy, two neighborhoods that were traditionally inhabited by the

capital’s Greek Orthodox subjects, while the state searched for the Greek clergymen who had

been sent there from different European cities on a mission to incite support for their

independence movement.58 Şanizade Mehmed Ataullah Efendi, a historian born and raised in

Ortaköy, recorded having witnessed the rounding up and execution of six priests in the area.59

These executions drew tremendous crowds (especially women) that prevented the executioner

58
Karal, Osmanlı Tarihi, vol. 5, 107-124.
59
Şânî-zâde Târîhî, vol. 2, 1260.
 81

from finding an available public space for his act and delayed the court of Mahmud II from

moving to their summer palaces, Beşiktaş and Çırağan.60

d. YILDIZ AS THE QUINTESSENTIAL VALİDE ESTATE

The hilltop property was revived once again under the patronage of Abdülmecid’s mother,

Bezm-i Alem Valide Sultan. Sensationalist histories of the Ottoman harem as a site of continual

competitive scheming belie the fact that, not unlike their male counterparts, the affluent women

of the house of Osman were eager to model their disposition, legacy, and architectural imprint on

their female antecedents. This remarkable but understudied genealogical intent is most visible in

one of Bezm-i Alem Sultan’s first architectural undertakings. She erects an open-air mosque

(namāz-gāh) in Yıldız for her husband Mahmud II’s mother Nakş-ı Dil Sultan. The short

chronogram, which was once again composed by the court favorite Ziver Paşa, refers to Bezm-i

Alem’s successor as Nakşī Kadın, a name that the latter used only in the intimacy of the harem.61

It is also important to note here that more than twenty years had passed after the death of Nakş-ı

Dil before Bezm-i Alem took the title. This is a considerable amount of time for the harem to

remain without a head, so it must have made it all the more important for Bezm-i Alem to

commemorate her predecessor, the mother of her husband, and also be able to present herself as

the new queen regent.

We have a clearer picture of Bezm-i Alem’s architectural patronage than that of her

predecessors. She was a prolific builder of fountains and a philanthropist dedicated to the

improvement of public health and education in the capital. Her most significant contribution to

60
Şânî-zâde Târîhî, vol. 2, 1131-1135.
61
Ahmed Sâdık Zîver Paşa, Dîvân ve münşe'ât, 518. For the Nakşî designation, see Uluçay, Padişahın Kadınları ve
Kızları, 107-108.
 82

the mid-century capital was the richly endowed hospital in Fatih. This large complex was the

first healthcare institution to be called a hospital (the modern term ḫastaḫāne as opposed to the

outdated şifāḫāne) and was intended to target the treatments of smallpox and cholera, two

diseases that brought the worst global epidemics in the period. Smallpox, especially, was

believed then to be a disease carried by the poor; therefore, Bezm-i Alem’s demographic target

for the hospital was Muslim men in need.62 She also founded the first civil high school that

prepared its students for the capital’s university, which was being built at the time, as well as a

preparatory school for girls to which she donated her own manuscript library and for which she

established a lithographic press to print the school’s textbooks.63 The second bridge between

Galata and Eminönü was also undertaken at her initiative in order to relieve the congested

circulation on Mahmud II’s first wooden one.64

Bezm-i Alem’s numerous and grand public philanthropic works made her a very popular

presence among the Istanbulites. Adolphus Slade (d. 1877), the British admiral of Abdülmecid’s

navy, provides a moving account of her funerary procession that highlights the connection

between the queen mother, women and the poor, the capital’s most underprivileged

demographic:

as the procession passed along the streets, lined at intervals with troops, numerous female
spectators in open spaces sobbed audibly; and although Eastern women have ever tears as
well as smiles at command those shed on this occasion were sincere, for the sex had lost
65
that day an advocate, the poor a friend.

62
Carpenter, 103.
63
Can Alpgüvenç, Hayırda Yarışan Hanım Sultanlar (Istanbul: Kaynak Yayınları, 2009), 161. Alpgüvenç notes that
the library was later transferred to the Beyazıt State Library in Istanbul.
64
Alpgüvenç, 165.
65
Adolphus Slade, Turkey and the Crimean War: A Narrative of Historical Events (London: Smith, Elder and Co.,
1867), 87-88.
 83

The curative powers of water undergirded Bezm-i Alem’s charitable institutions in the

capital. She endowed the revenues of the Terkos Lake, which supplied a large portion of

Istanbul’s water needs, to the hospital complex.66 The poems dating her fountains and sebils refer

to her as a person of purity (zāt-ı pāk) alluding both to her virtuousness and her attention to

health and cleanliness.67 We understand from her surviving letters to her son Abdülmecid that

she frequented the natural springs of Yalova that supplied her with fresh air, a place where she

could breath (ferah ülemek), and enjoy the facilities by bathing and receiving mud treatments

(suya girdi, çamura süründü).68 Not unlike the contemporary German Romantics, she found

storms and gales exciting subjects to report to her son. She peppered her letters with references

to sublime meteorological events. It was unusual for members of the harem to take this kind of

balneological trip at such a considerable distance from the capital. Hence, this is indicative of a

further opening up of the court’s previously guarded private entertainment and medical practices

as well as the public presence of the queen mothers.69

66
Alpgüvenç, 167.
67
Ahmed Sâdık Zîver Paşa, Dîvân ve münşe'ât, 427 and 455.
68
Çağatay M. Uluçay, Harem’den Mektuplar I (Istanbul: Vakit Matbaası, 1956), 150-164.
69
In fact, one of the earliest portrayals of Bezm-i Alem comes to us from the letters of an Austrian physician,
Siegmund Spitzer, who served as Abdülmecid’s personal doctor from 1845 to 1850. Spitzer examines her one-on-
one in her quarters in Çırağan and remembers the visit as follows: “Once I had arrived in the court of Tschiragan, I
saw in the distance an armchair where a woman covered in a veil and jacket was sitting. It was the sultana-mother,
whom I respectfully approached, following behind my black escort. After he gave her the sultan’s message, she
received me warmly and invited me to sit down, though the only place I could sit was on the ground. Through the
half-transparent veil I could see a trace of the redness on her cheeks as I told her about the delicate scrupulousness
with which her noble son had mentioned her health that day. She answered my medical questions, calmly and freely,
and I couldn’t help but notice the perfect beauty of her fine, brilliantly white hand as well as the regularity and
energy of the features of this roughly thirty-five-year-old, very well-maintained Georgian woman. As she left, she
dismissed me graciously and told me to prepare the medicine she needed myself and took from the bag of her
feradsche a gold-filled purse, which she had the aforementioned eunuch hand over to me. I rushed immediately to
the sultan in Beylerbey to tell him about my visit. Emphasizing how important the treatment of his mother was, he
said in a moving tone: “We’re not talking about a tree here that should blossom and bear new fruit, but at least it
shouldn’t rot!” With naïve affability, he also asked me if I couldn’t also give his mother the same medication that he
had recently used (for a completely different indisposition) with great success. “So, did you need to be so nervous?”
he added. “The Europeans still judge our family life from a flawed point of view. Aren’t we all people like you?
 84

From 1842 onwards, Bezm-i Alem was definitely engaged in restoring Yıldız as the

valide estate. She not only erected the abovementioned open-air mosque in honor of her

predecessor, but also built a considerable number of fountains on the boundaries of the walled

estate and around the shrine complex of Yahya Efendi that aided in the neighborhood’s urban

transformation.70 The inscription poems of these fountains praised her as a benefactor who

improved the living standards of Beşiktaş. The grandest of her five fountains around Yıldız, a

meydan fountain with pronounced quoins and four embellished and inscribed façades, provides

its inauguration date of 1839 with this line by Ziver Paşa: “With water the Queen Mother

brought contentment to this quarter” (Bu semti ḳıldı Vālide Sulṭān āb ile dil-şād) (fig. 2.9).71

Most significantly for the architectural expansion of Yıldız, Bezm-i Alem built a second

kiosk next to the one that was constructed during the time of Selim III. Two commemorative

poems written by two different poets from 1842 and both referring to the site once again, after

Mihrişah’s time, as a bāğ (an orchard or cultivated land), competed for this new kiosk’s epitaph.

The competition pitted the court-endorsed Ziver Paşa against a lesser-known poet, İbrahim Raşid

Efendi (d. 1892). This poet kept his day-job as a lowly bureaucratic scribe, but fashioned his

artistic persona as a commoner, interspersed his poems with urban patois, and was beloved by an

extra-courtly readership.72

Have you ever heard something unpleasant about me or my people? Be unbiased, we’ve had the time to get to know
each other. Dost olduk (we’ve become friends).” Siegmund Spitzer, "Am Hofe Sultan Abdul Medjid's," Deutsche
Rundschau 99 (April-Mai-Juni,1899), 123-124.

70
For a complete list of her fountains, see Egemen, 208-215.
71
Egemen, 208. Also see Çetintaş, 139-140.
72
For an intimate and often amusing biography of this lesser-known scribe whose chronograms seem not to have
impressed the biography compiler, perhaps because they were too low-brow, see İbnü’l-Emin Mahmud Kemal İnal,
Son asır Türk şairleri, vol. 2, 1365-1369. İbrahim Raşid’s divan has been transcribed, though the list of his
chronograms is incomplete because it was compiled early in the poet’s career (1835), see Kamile Çetin, “Râşid (?-
1310?-1892) Dîvânı İnceleme-Tenkitli Metin” (Yüksek Lisans Tezi, Süleyman Demirel Üniversitesi, Isparta, 2006).
 85

Bezm-i Alem deliberately did not choose Ziver’s poem, which is otherwise laden with

sharp-witted and complex celestial metaphors, because it overlooked the prominence of her

urban project to rejuvenate the hilltop. Her landscaping in Yıldız ran in tandem with the rest of

her efforts to build and restore fountains in Besiktas in order to improve the neighborhood’s

water facilities. She also surely knew that Yıldız’s name was related to the wind and not the star;

therefore, to her, Ziver’s astrological imagery was a misreading, one that overlooked the most

important fact about the site, namely its function a royal archer’s favorite retreat. The poet had

changed the meaning of its imperial designation and that was unacceptable to Bezm-i Alem, who

was clearly driven by a commemorative impulse to preserve the legacy of Yıldız’s former

inhabitants, male and female. The valide’s rejection of this poem must have been especially hard

for the poet who prided himself on his knowledge of astronomy, and had even authored a treatise

on comets.73

In Ziver’s discarded poem, this new “pleasure pavilion” (meserret-gāh) was placed on

the summit of a hill (rütbe-mürtefiʿ) to replicate, together with the adjacent Yıldız Kiosk, the

formation of the twin polestars of the Ursa Minor constellation, Pherkad and Kochab: “That

elevated building of this lofty pavilion, / Is worthy of being a noble constellation for the stars in

the heavens” (O rütbe-mürtefiʿ bünyānı bu ḳaṣr-ı berīnüñ kim, / Felekde yıldıza burc-ı şeref olsa

sezā her ān).74 Sublime astral imagery derived from the adjoining placement of these two

highland pavilions and a play on the meaning of Yıldız as the Pole Star form the poem’s lyrical

73
İnal, Son Asır Türk Şairleri, vol. 3, 2092.

74
Ahmed Sâdık Zîver Paşa, Dîvân ve münşe'ât, 470. I am grateful to András Riedlmayer for helping me parse
through the difficult metaphors of this poem. He pointed to the fact that certain words contained double meanings.
For instance, burc means both constellation and battlement, and yıldız is both the Pole Star and the name of the
estate. Thus, the building's architecture and layout is equated in its height and nobility to a group of stars in the sky.
 86

apex: “Together with this pavilion, the pavilion of Yıldız is like Pherkad75, / It is as if this place

were made indistinguishable from the apogee of the sphere of the heavens” (Bu ḳaṣr ile berāber

ḳaṣr-ı Yıldız Ferḳādān-āsā, nola eylerse evc-i çarḫ ile bu mevḳiʿyi siyyān). The poem ends with

only the briefest of allusions to the site’s strong winds: “The new kiosk’s windows chime each

time the Yıldız winds stir with a rhythm that instills joy in Venus in the sky” (Ṣadā virdikçe her

bir revzeni yıldız hevāsıyla, o ahenġ ile lā-büdd eder gökde zühreyi şādān).

Bezm-i Alem’s intention to connect with her public is also apparent from the fact that she

chose the commoner’s poet over the upper-class court favorite. Compared with the language of

Ziver’s poem, Raşid’s invocation of the site is much more accessible and centered upon the

concrete changes the queen mother brought to this particular segment of the imperial Beşiktaş

neighborhood. Raşid’s poem—whose wooden epitaph still exists—aims to describe the new

building, and rather than making clever astrological connections to the site’s name, it accentuates

the patron’s piety and generous philanthropy (fig. 2.10). It reads:

Abdülmecid Khan of celestial rank, king of the kings of the world,

The mother of this Shah is Bezm-i Alem, of the noblest name,

When she, who is as virtuous as Hācer 76, as chaste as Ṣıddīḳa77, and of the disposition of
Rābi‘a78,

extended her munificent hand, it became a fount of benefaction to the garden of the

75
A bright star in the constellation of Ursa Minor that appears to revolve around the Pole Star in the night sky. For
the role of Pherkad/Farqadān in celestial navigation, see Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An
Encyclopedia, ed. Thomas Glick, Steven J. Livesey, and Faith Wallis (New York: Routledge, 2005), 365-366.
76
Hagar, the mother of Abraham’s first-born son Ismā‘īl (Ishmael), a forebear of the Prophet Muhammad.
77
Meaning “Truthful, veracious,” as well as “a title of honor given to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and to Ā’isha, wife
of the Prophet Muhammad.” Sir James W. Redhouse. A Turkish and English Lexicon (Beirut: Libraire du Liban,
1996), 1172.
78
Rābiʻa al-ʻAdawiyya, Muslim saint, Sufi poetess; see Margaret Smith, Rābiʿa the Mystic and her Fellow-Saints in
Islām (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928; reprt. 1984). İbrahim Raşid seems to have used the model of
Rābi‘a frequently for the funerary chronograms he composed for women, see Çetin, 91-92.
 87

world.

When she bestowed her favor on Yıldız, it is wondrous how a mountaintop turned into an
orchard.

There she also built an ornate mansion, of lofty structure,

whose gentle breeze is so soul-reviving, its water so delicious, and its views so grand

that next to it the Arch of Chosroes79 remains but an aged edifice.

What a sublime pavilion, its appearance so exalted, and its garden so exquisite that

If Sinimmār80 were to see its layout he would place his finger on his mouth [in
wonderment].

As long as that munificent [lady] dwells there, grant o Lord, in good health,

That each moment spent inside it may bring nothing but pleasure

The one who utters this prayer is her slave Rāşid,

As do the singing nightingales that always keep watch over its rose garden

Seven planets came and told the following chronogram81

79
The Arch of Chosroes (Ṭāḳ-ı Kisrā), a sixth-century Sassanian monument from the ancient city of Ctesiphon
located in today’s Iraq, is perhaps the most commonly used archetype for palatial architecture in poetry from the
Islamic world along with the castle of Khawarnaq. The structure’s monumental arch, one of its only remaining
segments, boasted the largest single-span brick vault of its time Not only in poetry but in the actual building
practices starting with the Lakhmids and the Abbasids, this building was a source of inspiration and spolia; see
Lionel Bier, “The Sassanian Palaces and their Influence in Early Islam,” Ars Orientalis 23, A Special Issue on Pre-
Modern Islamic Palaces, ed. Gülru Necipoğlu (1993), 59-60; also see Eva R. Hoffman, “Between East and West:
The Wall Paintings of Samarra and the Construction of Abbasid Princely Culture,” Muqarnas 25 (2008), 123.
80
For the legend of the Greek architect Sinimmār, the Lakhmid King Nu‘mān ibn Imru al-Qays and the building of
the castle of Khawarnaq, see Encyclopaedia Iranica, s.v. "Kawarnaq"
http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/kawarnaq: “Traditions on Ḵawarnaq castle can mostly found in Arab historical
works, in cosmographies, where famous buildings are dealt with, and in geographical literature. There exist three
legendary accounts that are closely related to it. The first is connected with the building of the castle. Noʿmān
engaged the Greek architect Senemmār to construct it. After completion, the king and Senemmār climbed to the
pinnacle of the castle. What followed is told in three versions. The king either asks Senemmār if he is able to
construct an equal castle, and Senemmār answers in the affirmative; or Senemmār, delighted at his princely
payment, confides to the king that he would have constructed a more splendid palace if he had been aware of the
king’s generosity before; or Senemmār reveals that he knows of a certain stone in the wall which, if removed, would
let the whole building collapse. The king asks him if someone else knows this stone, which is not the case. The
outcome is always the same: Noʿmān crushes Senemmār by throwing him down from the battlements. This story
prompted the proverbial saying “Senemmār’s repayment,” often quoted in the form jazāhu jazāʾa Sinimmār “he
repaid him as they had repaid Senemmār,” that is, ‘he repaid him good with evil’ (Maydāni, I, pp. 159-60, no. 828).”
For a more condensed account of this ill-fated Greek architect and his domed palatial construction, see Gülru
Necipoğlu, “An Outline of Shifting Paradigms in the Palatial Architecture of the Pre-Modern Islamic World,” in Ars
Orientalis 23, 4.
 88

The mansion of the sultan’s mother is as a moon to Yıldız. 82

Raşid pronounces her role as a builder, who transforms an otherwise arid mountaintop. The poet

alludes to the sudden verdancy of the site by calling it an orchard with an exquisite layout (bāğ-ı

raʿnāʾ), a world of gardens (riyāż-ı dehre), and, using a recurrent and familiar trope, a rose

garden (Gülistān). It appears that Bezm-i Alem initiated the first radical transformations at the

site and it is with her that Yıldız’s history as an important imperial garden complex really begins.

It is also with her that the quest to outfit this sui generis hilltop estate with the requisite farm

typology starts, a quest that continued to shape Yıldız’s palatial development, when unceasing

architectural experiments with chalets, suburban cottages, and French hôtels particuliers were

81
Here, I am indebted once again to András Riedlmayer for his help in figuring out the correct ebced calculations
for the chronogram providing the building’s date. Raşid seems to have composed an incomplete chronogram
(tamiyeli tarih), in that the sum of the letters in the final line is supposed to be intentionally seven short, i.e. 1251.
The Seven Planets of classical Islamic astrology, heralds of fortune, mentioned in the penultimate line, enter and
should add the missing numbers, and thus give the total of 1258, which equals the date of construction of the Queen
Mother's Pavilion. However, when the numerical values of the letters in the last line are added up we get the date
1241, which leaves us ten short. Rieldmayer points to the fact that if the final vowel of Ḳamerdir were spelled with a
yā (numerical value 10) that would supply the amount missing from the total. But writing -dir plene is also the less
common spelling, so perhaps the woodcarver followed the more usual orthography and by the time it was noticed it
was too late to redo the entire inscription.
82
Şehinşāh-ı cihān Abdülmecīd Ḫān-ı felek-pāye
O şāhıñ māderidir Bezm-i ʿĀlem nām-ı ʿālī-şān
O Hācer-haṣlet Ṣıddīḳa-ʿiffet Rābiʿa-ṭabʿıñ
Yed-i cūdu riyāż-ı dehre oldu menbaʿ-ı iḥsān
Edince Yıldız’a raǧbet ʿaceb ṭāğ üstü bāğ oldu
Ki yapdı hem de bir ḳaṣr-ı müzeyyen şāmiḫü’l-erkān
Nesīmi cānfezā ābı laṭīf neżżāresi āʿlā
Bunuñ yanında ḳaldı Ṭāḳ-ı Kisrā bir kühen bünyān
Zehî kāḫ-ı muʿallā resm-i vālā bāğ-ı raʿnāʾ kim
Sinimmār ṭarḥını görse olur engüşt-i leb-i ḥayrān
Nişīn olduḳça yā Rabb ʿāfiyetle ol kerem-pīrā
Derūnuñda ṣefādan başḳa bir şey görmeye her ān
Duʿāsıñ bendesi Rāşid gibi vird-i zebān eyler
Gülistānıñda dāim bekleyen hep bülbül-i gūyān
Gelüb seyyāre-i sebʿa bu gūnā söyledi tārīḫ
Ḳamerdir Yıldız’a gūyā bu ḳaṣr-ı vālide sulṭān
1258 (1842)
 89

undertaken.

The model for both Nakş-ı Dil’s and her devoted successor Bezm-i Alem’s hilltop

orchard estates was perhaps the garden palace of Nurbanu Valide Sultan (d. 1583), the

formidable wife of Sultan Selim II (d. 1574). In fact, Nakş-ı Dil may have inherited the actual

property of this sixteenth-century valide. Nurbanu’s extra-palatial summer residence

accompanied her hilltop mosque in Üsküdar, which came to be known as Atik Valide Sultan

(Old Queen Mother).83 Having outlived her husband, Nurbanu became the first queen regent to

take on the title of valide, and her mosque complex was the first valide project that the court

architect Sinan designed. A sixteenth-century Ottoman geographer would describe Nurbanu’s

building project in Üsküdar as one attracting interest in this suburb, a practice (and literary trope)

that we observe in the charitable acts of her nineteenth-century successors.84

A waterfront view of Çırağan executed in marquetry and embellishing an imperial pen

box gives us a distant view of Bezm-i Alem’s estate and her new pavilion erected next to the

Yıldız Kiosk, both of which are circumscribed by a wall (fig. 2.11).85 Her endowment measures

this complex of two pavilions to be around eighteen hectares.86 The same pen box also depicts a

fragmented view of the farm building adjacent to, but not included in, the walled complex of the

83
Gülru Necipoǧlu, The Age of Sinan, Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (London: Reaktion, 2005), 280-
292.
84
“Before the above-mentioned lady established these charitable buildings, their site and environs had been vacant
plots. With the construction of new housing, they attracted around them a large population, and they augmented
Üsküdar’s inhabited region by at least one-third.” Aşık Mehmed’s description of the site cited in Necipoǧlu, Sinan,
292.
85
When Von Moltke’s map is overlaid onto today’s extant Yıldız structures, Bezm-i Alem’s new pavilion coincides
with the Azizian Mabeyn, while the site of Selim III’s Yıldız Kiosk is replaced by Abdülhamid II’s private
residence. However, the small masonry pavilion that was designated to the chief eunuch of Abdülhamid II’s harem
due to its elegant neoclassical stuccos is reminiscent of Mahmud II’s Çırağan and was likely a part of the original
Yıldız complex.
86
Şehsuvaroğlu, “Yıldız Kasrı,” 6.
 90

two pavilions. A later Ottoman reworking of Von Moltke’s map calls Bezm-i Alem’s farming

estate vālide çiftliği and marks the site with an elongated building fronted by a fountain.87 This

farming estate was probably an expanded version of the one that Selim III’s mother Mihrişah

retreated to in order to convalesce when in ailing health. Contrary to her predecessors, Bezm-i

Alem was a keen and respected horticulturalist, personally involved in producing as many

different varietals of each fruit and vegetable as possible, and hence always in need of more land.

The products of her farm at Yıldız were substantial enough to be sold, to great demand, in the

city’s markets.

Another map, which was drawn to formally demarcate the fields designated for Bezm-i

Alem’s use and accommodate her farm’s expansion, shows us that they were large enough to

surround the walled in Yıldız Kiosk to its north, west and south—the east being divided between

the endowment of the Yahya Efendi convent and the grove cascading down to Çırağan (fig.

2.12). This map also highlights the same coffeehouse indicated both on Von Moltke’s map and

in Mahmud II’s archery diary, which fell outside of the south-facing walls of the Yıldız Kiosk,

and aligned with the open-air mosque that Bezm-i Alem erected for her predecessor Nakş-ı Dil.

The court’s head physician, Hekimbaşı Salih Efendi (d. 1895), sparked Bezm-i Alem’s

horticultural interests. Salih Efendi was one of the first graduates of the imperial medical school

founded by Abdülmecid and an expert botanist, whose mansion and botanical gardens in

Üsküdar were renowned as a facility for the production of herbal remedies.88 He was also a

87
I thank Hilal Uğurlu for providing me the reference of a source that contains a reprint of the Ottoman reprint of
the original Von Moltke map. The reprint is also only a fragment of the original, which otherwise covers Istanbul,
Galata, Üsküdar, and all of the city’s urbanizing coastline; Çetintaş, 32.
88
Aslan Terzioğlu, “Hekimbaşı Salih Efendi ve Onun Prof. Dr. Joseph Hyrtl’e Yazdığı Fransızca bir Mektup,”
Tarih ve Toplum: Aylık Ansiklopedik Dergi 118, 20 (Ekim 1993): 214-215; Feza Günergün ve Asuman
Baytop, "Hekimbaşı Salih Efendi (1816-1895) ve Botanikle İlgili Yayınları" Osmanli Bilimi Arastirmalari 2 (1998):
 91

celebrated instructor of natural sciences in the capital’s imperial high schools, who even

bewildered students in the school of civil service like Ahmed İhsan—the future journalist and

founder of newspapers—with his expansive knowledge of botany.89 The physician and the

valide not only collaborated on her hospital project, but also put together the capital’s largest

collection of fruit specimens. All the gardens in Istanbul and beyond were mobilized to

contribute to Bezm-i Alem’s orchard, which in its completed state boasted five hundred and

seventy three different kinds of fruits: “206 types of pears, 98 types of apples, 25 quinces, 43

peaches, 13 sour cherries, 31 cherries, 21 apricots, 9 pomegranates, 11 figs, 11 mulberries, 15

medlars, 59 grapes, 31 oranges.”90 Each varietal had a particular name conjured up by the valide

and her botanical advisor Salih in accordance with its color, weight, country of origin, taste or

scent. Thirty-one types of cherries came from a certain İbrahim Bey’s garden in İstinye, medlar

the size of an egg from the garden of İzzet Ağa the gardener (but grafted from Europe), Lebanese

peaches from Beirut, large, smooth-skinned and tart pope’s peaches from the Tarabya Pavilion,

apple-scented pears weighing three-hundred drachmae from Varna, grapes from as close as

Erenköy and as far as Erzurum. Seeds and flowers continually circulated between the imperial

gardens of Istanbul for Bezm-i Alem and Salih Efendi’s joint ventures. And, although there is

currently no indication that Abdülmecid came to inspect the produce of his mother’s farms, it

293-317; Erdem Yücel, “Hekimbaşı Salih Efendi Yalısı,” DBİA, vol. 3 (Istanbul: Kültür Bakanlığı ve Tarih Vakfı,
1993), 41-42.
89
Ahmet İhsan Tokgöz, Matbuat Hatıralarım, 1888-1923 (Istanbul: İletişim, 1993), 31. The journalist remembers
his instructor as follows: “The words he [Salih Efendi] uttered carried the most profound rules of philosophy. With
his worn-out fez bearing the blue fringes worn only by a handful of others at that time, he was an invaluable
“Turkish” type. The garden of his yalı in Kanlıca boasted the first botanical garden in Turkey. When he presented us
with scientific explanations of the plant lives of flowers and leaves that he culled from his garden he would wipe
clean our minds filled with empty beliefs.” See also Şerif Mardin, Religion, Society and Modernity in Turkey (New
York: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 113.
90
Şehsuvaroğlu, Asırlar Boyunca Istanbul, 171.
 92

was his father Mahmud II’s common practice to do so regularly for the imperial estates that had

cultivated lands.91

Even though we have no information on what Bezm-i Alem’s new wooden pavilion next

to the Yıldız Kiosk would have looked like (besides the pedimented roofs shown on the pen

box), a grand marble fountain (later moved to the district of Topkapı outside of the city walls) in

the form of a triumphal arch that she had erected beside these two structures reflects a taste for a

classical idiom with simple but striking iconographic sculptural reliefs (fig. 2.13).92 Two

Corinthian pilasters carry the inscription stone, and five oval medallions framed by floral wreaths

crown the fountain. A niche was created through a high-relief arch on the ornamental slab above

the spout, which bears a classroom globe resting on a sturdy pedestal and surrounded by a halo

of rays. Though at present smoothed by erosion, it is easy to imagine that the globe at one point

bore an outline of the imperial domains. Bezm-i Alem’s iconographic intent with this fountain

was to convey her philanthropic drive as the complement to her son’s institutional reforms, and

in accordance with this vision of dual-rule through shared-patronage, the inscription poem by

Ziver Paşa lauds their collective charitable acts and not just those attributed specifically to Bezm-

i Alem.93

To the artists under the sultan’s and his valide’s joint-patronage, this dual-rule was

evident. When Guiseppe Donizetti (d. 1856), the Italian composer and director of the imperial

band, composed a hymn in “the new style” (şarḳı-i cedīd) for Abdülmecid I, he also created one

91
Hâfız Hızır İlyas Ağa, 316.
92
Bezm-i Alem erected this fountain on the outer wall of the Yıldız complex, between the site of her new pavilion
and the farmlands belonging to her estate. Eyewitness accounts from Abdülhamid II’s reign recall that the fountain
was located across from the Hamidiye clock tower, a corner which probably marked the entrance to her Yıldız
complex. Egemen, 211-212. A beautiful freehand rendering of this strikingly tall fountain can be found in Reşat
Ekrem Koçu, “Bezmiâlem Vâlidesultan Çeşmesi,” İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, vol. 5 (Istanbul: İstanbul Ansiklopedisi ve
Neşriyat Kollektif Şirketi, 1958-1971), 2736-2737.
93
Egemen, 214.
 93

for Bezm-i Alem.94 The presentation copy of the song for the valide is embellished with

depictions of garlands and bouquets bursting with flowers, a knowing nod to her green thumb

and her own brand of imperial imagery, while the Turkish lyrics of the song allude not only to

her mirage-like gardens (serāb), but also her beneficence as a patron (elṭāf, feyż, cūd, and

ʿinÀyet).

e. YILDIZ, OTTOMAN WOMEN, AND PROFLIGACY

Ahmed Cevdet Paşa (d. 1895), perhaps the shrewdest historian of the nineteenth-century empire,

attributes part of its economic downturn to the increase in competitive consumption between the

women of the Ottoman court and the female members of the Egyptian viceroyalty.95 The latter

group’s display of their family’s newfound fortune (derived from cotton production during the

worldwide shortage caused by the American Civil War) through the building of lavish residences

along Istanbul’s shores fueled their rivalry with their Ottoman counterparts, inciting conspicuous

profligacy, especially in the acquisition of European goods.96 The death of Bezm-i Alem, the

principal authority of economic and social life inside the harem, was an important factor in the

94
Emre Aracı, Donizetti Paşa: Osmanlı Sarayının İtalyan Maestrosu (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2006), 127-
133; Emre Aracı, “ ‘Each Villa on the Bosphorus Looks a Screen New Painted, or a Pretty Opera Scene’: Mahmud
II (r. 1808-1839) Setting the Ottoman Stage for Italian Opera and Viennese Music,” in Ottoman Empire and
European Theatre I, The Time of Joseph Haydn: From Mahmud I to Mahmud II (r. 1730-1839), ed. Michael Hüttler
and Hans Ernst Weidinger (Vienna: Hollitzer, 2014), 624.
95
Ahmed Cevdet wrote two works on the history of the Ottoman state in the nineteenth century, unusual in their
presentation of historical accounts, which then found two very different audiences. He prepared a copy of his
Tezākir (meaning notes-to-self or advice), a text written in the form of forty-some individual letters, as a preparatory
source for his successor in the role of the official court historian, Ahmed Lütfi Efendi (d. 1907). Ahmed Cevdet
wrote a version of the Tezākir, which he named Maʿrūẓāt for Abdülhamid II as a narrative of private council on the
sultan’s succession and at his request. The first of the five notebooks that make up Maʿrūẓāt is today missing, but
we do know that Abdülhamid kept this compilation close at hand throughout his rule. The two works touch upon
almost the same historical events of the eras of Abdülmecid and Abdülaziz, but Maʿrūẓāt is more loquacious due to
the fact that it was an imperial commission. Cevdet Paşa, Tezâkir, ed. Cavid Baysun, vol. 1 (Ankara: Türk Tarih
Kurumu Basımevi, 1986), 20.
96
Tezâkir, vol. 1, 20.
 94

emergence of this unchecked extravagance, which led Abdülmecid, a sultan portrayed by Ahmed

Cevdet as subservient to the whims of his women, to seek the first foreign debt.97

According to Cevdet Paşa, one of these women in particular, a wife of Abdülmecid called

Serfiraz, was the main offender.98 This shockingly libertine woman apparently lodged herself

unannounced in the now unoccupied Yıldız, took up lovers from Beşiktaş’s marketplace like a

Victorian demi-mondaine, appeared unchaperoned in the capital’s public promenades and

gardens, and led Abdülmecid by the nose, often not allowing him inside her hilltop mansion. We

can never know whether all of these allegations are true, or whether they were part of a recurrent

trope in patriarchal history writing where women, especially those with considerable power, are

seen as easier targets than their male counterparts and derided as figures of debauchery, moral

decay and, its frequent companion, unbridled spending.99 Selim III’s sisters were critiqued by

their contemporaries in exactly the same manner, as was Abdülhamid I’s daughter Esma

Sultan.100 However, this incomplete story of a woman who one way or another declared her

independence from the court, still underscores an important fact about Yıldız. This imperial

property held a coveted position among the female members of the harem, because it was an

autonomous space with spacious gardens and farms designed for and used specifically by

women, and not a part of a small segment of a palace with a much more congested shared harem

quarter.

97
Tezâkir, vol. 2, 131.
98
Ibid., 3-4, 8, 59, 64-65, 100, and 131.
99
A number of revisionist family histories have been published in recent years. A good example of an attempt at
clearing Serfiraz’s name is in one such modest publication; see Harun Açba, Kadın Efendiler (Istanbul: Profil,
2007), 71-73.
100
The inspiration for my argument that women were frequently scapegoated during times of economic downturn is
th
another Artan article: Tülay Artan,“18 Century Ottoman Princesses as Collectors: Chinese and European
Porcelains in the Topkapı Palace Museum,” 138-139.
 95

The public prominence of the valide reemerges—and Yıldız’s rightful ownership is once

again restored—during Pertevniyal’s tenure (1861-1876). Like most of her antecedents,

information on her life is fragmented, and like Bezm-i Alem her similarly sizable charities and

monumental endowments are overshadowed by the opulent palaces and mansions of her son.101

Even her mosque in Aksaray—a structure unique for its time due to its church typology with two

minarets and unusual Gothic ornaments flooding all of its surfaces—is often discussed as the

best example of a new state-sanctioned architectural idiom, and not as an instance of a valide

participating in making formal and stylistic decisions (fig. 2.11).102 In one of the many popular

history narratives, a genre to which the lives of high-ranking Ottoman women are all too often

relegated, we are told that Pertevniyal wanted her mosque’s courtyard to surpass Bezm-i Alem’s

mosque in Dolmabahçe and employed her kethüda Hüseyin Hasib Bey to see the project through

to its completion.103 However, unlike Bezm-i Alem who was not present at the opening of her

hospital, Pertevniyal attended the inauguration of her mosque.104 Another publication mentions

that this kethüda was also appointed the mayor (şehremini) of Istanbul and consulted the

dowager queen on matters related to the capital’s infrastructure.105 In trying to understand how

Pertevniyal conceived of herself when navigating such disparate pieces of insight, one should not

101
Pertevniyal’s patronage pattern closely resembled that of Bezm-i Alem. She established a women’s only hospital
in Mecca, initiated another preparatory school in Istanbul, and donated an even larger library of manuscripts to her
mosque in Aksaray; Alpgüvenç, 172-178.
102
To begin to find answers to the question of nineteenth-century valides’ involvement in the architectural choices
for buildings bearing their name, their extant correspondences with their financial advisors, the kethüdas, are sources
of great potential. We need not resort to attributing unusual decorative motifs to distinctly gendered taste as naively
argued by Ülkü Bates, “Women as Patrons of Architecture in Turkey,” in Women in the Muslim World, ed. L. Beck
and N. Keddie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 249-250.
103
Şehsuvaroğlu, Asırlar Boyunca Istanbul, 155; Sakaoğlu, 392.
104
Ahmed Lûtfî Efendi, Vak’a-nüvis Ahmed Lûtfî Efendi Tarihi, transliterated by M. Münir Aktepe, vol. 14 (Ankara:
Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1988-), 15-16.
105
Sakaoǧlu, 392.
 96

lose sight of the fact that she lived during the heyday of Queen Victoria’s long reign and was

informed of her European counterpart’s popularity. Inhabiting the monumental apartments built

specifically for her use in the Dolmabahçe Palace, surely Pertevniyal saw parallels between her

matriarchal role and the British monarch, especially after her son Abdülaziz personally met the

English queen during his European trip—a historical first for the Ottoman court.106

From her frequent employment of the Bavarian gardener Christian Sester, and her

practice of tipping him for performing services that lay outside the duties of his official post as

the head-gardener of Çırağan, we can gather that Pertevniyal sustained the farming activity next

to her Yildiz estate. The closest we get to understanding Pertevniyal’s taste in residential

structures is through the Yıldız estate and its almost identical pair on the hills of Üsküdar (figs.

2.14-2.15). She selected the same typology of the eighteenth-century French urban mansion for

her two wooded estates—analogous to the way that her predecessor Nakş-ı Dil had once seen the

two as a pair, Yıldız serving as a model for her pavilion in Çamlıca.107

Selim III’s much-publicized attachment to his mother was in all likelihood a part of his

new imperial self-fashioning, a dual-rulership based on filial piety. This pairing would continue

to be highlighted in the reigns of all the succeeding sultans. Abdülaziz and his mother

Pertevniyal made the strongest impression on the Ottoman public, not only in their co-patronage

of mosques, palaces and mansions, but also and most importantly during the sultan’s tumultuous

and very public dethronement. News quickly circulated that Pertevniyal’s harem quarters were

ransacked, the jewelry she was wearing forcibly removed, and the deposed valide was dragged

without her veil to the police station. Istanbulites became even more preoccupied with the

106
Ali Kemâlî Aksüt, Sultan Azizin Avrupa ve Mısır Seyahati (Istanbul: A. Sait Oğlu Kitabevi, 1944); Cemal Kutay,
Sultan Abdülaziz’in Avrupa Seyahati (Istanbul: Boğaziçi Yayınları, 1991).
107
See a description of Pertevniyal’s identical French mansions in Chapter 1.
 97

grieving Pertevniyal after her deposed son committed suicide, so much so that a brief but

dramatic fictionalized memoir of her recollections of her son’s tragic death titled Sergüzeştnāme

(“An Account of Events”) was published soon thereafter.108 The former dowager, who dedicated

her life to children, prayer and flowers after the death of her son, strikes uncanny parallels with

Queen Victoria, the widow who lived in eternal mourning following the death of her husband

Prince Albert in 1861.109

During their short but memorable co-rule, this mother and son cohosted banquets

celebrating high-ranking governmental appointments. The sultan’s favorite retreat, the farming

estate in Izmit was the preferred setting of these royal celebrations, and Pertevniyal coordinated

the preparations there (İzmid tarafında kâin çiftlik-i hümâyûnda Vâlide Sultan hazretlerine

mahsûsen ziyâfet tertîbi).110 In the Ottoman official histories, Pertevniyal also appears as a

central figure in the court’s frequent diplomatic encounters with the khedival family of Egypt.111

When Abdülaziz officially sanctioned the title that the Egyptian governors had selected for

themselves, he bestowed on the newly appointed khedive Ismail Paşa (d. 1895) the right to

succession from father to son, rather than from brother to brother. With the Ottoman

acknowledgment of their title, the Egyptian family attained an elevated status in the Ottoman

108
Baha Gürfırat, “Pertevniyal Valide Sultan’ın Hatıratı: Sergüzeştnâme,”in Belgelerle Türk Tarihi Dergisi 2
(1967), 57-59. It has been argued that she dictated this account for the trial, which ensued after her son’s death, and
was coordinated by Abdülhamid II to turn his uncle’s suicide into an assassination and oust the old-guard ministers
like Midhat Paşa. Therefore, the document—likely a testimony—found its way into the Yıldız archives, and was
later copied by Ahmed Tevfik Bey, the brother of the prolific historian İbnü’l-Emin Mahmud Kemal İnal. Her
account was fictionalized in Mehmet Coral, Konstantiniye’nin Yitik Günceleri (Istanbul: Doğan Kitap, 1999), 85-
108.
109
Ayşe Osmanoğlu, 112. On Queen Victoria as the archetypal eternal widow, see Pat Jalland, Death in the
Victorian Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 318-338; also, David Cannadine, “War and Death,
Grief and Mourning,” in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 190-191.
110
Ahmed Lûtfî Efendi, vol. XIV, 122.
111
Ibid., 47-48, and 137; also, Ahmed Lûtfî Efendi, vol. XV, 21.
 98

courtly order and a tangible presence in Istanbul’s social life. Whenever the Egyptian vice-royals

initiated their prolonged summer sojourns in Istanbul, Pertevniyal would welcome them to the

capital, and undertake the first of many gift exchanges in familial recognition. Personal family

ties also bolstered Pertevniyal’s role in this otherwise novel diplomatic task as she was the sister

of Khedive Ismail Paşa’s mother, Hoşyar Kadınefendi (d. 1886), who was the first to carry the

title, Valide Paşa.112

Ottoman men of letters were very much aware of Pertevniyal’s centrality in Ottoman

politics and administrative decisions. In an ironic twist of faith, Ahmed Cevdet, the otherwise

ruthless critic of women’s improvidence (especially in the Ottoman and Egyptian courts), sought

a patronage relationship with Pertevniyal. In the same advice manuals that he would eventually

present to a newly enthroned Abdülhamid II, he mentions sending her lavish textiles from

Aleppo and a pony for her grandson, the future heir to the throne Yusuf İzzeddin, but perhaps

more unusually, he made sure that she received the first copy of each of his voluminous

works.113 By ingratiating himself with the sultan’s mother and often appearing at political

gatherings in her Dolmabahçe quarters, Cevdet would eventually obtain his desired post of

governor of Syria, although Abdülaziz’s deposition forced him to relinquish it after only a short

time.

112
The title, meaning the mother of the governor of Egypt, designated considerable status, because the Egyptian
khedive was the highest-ranking of all Ottoman paşas. The valide paşa came after the Ottoman valide in court
ceremonies.
113
Tezâkir, vol. 4, 91-93. 120-123, 126-127, 132-133, and 152.
 99

f. THE YAHYA EFENDİ CONVENT AS YILDIZ’S SPIRITUAL CRUX

As noted above, an important factor that made Yıldız and its waterfront dwellings so compelling

for the female patrons of the Ottoman harem was the connection that these women felt towards

this neighborhood’s principal spiritual nexus: the tomb, mosque, and dervish convent of the

sixteenth-century Sufi scholar and polymath Yahya Efendi (fig. 2.16). A foster brother to Sultan

Süleyman, Yahya Efendi acted as an adopted father to the sultan’s daughter, Raziye, who was

the first female member of the court to be buried there.114 This devotional bond between the

revered Sufi scholar and a courtly female disciple must have strengthened the spiritual

significance of the site for the succeeding women of status, because the cemetery of the shrine

complex eventually developed into one exclusively reserved for the women and children of the

court throughout the nineteenth century. 115 There is a compelling parallel between the

attachment that the nineteenth-century dowager sultans had to this holy site, and the eighteenth-

century mothers, sisters, and daughters of sultans building of their royal waterfront retreats in

Eyüp in proximity to the tomb and mosque of the seventh-century saintly figure, Ayyub al-

Ansari.116

The legends regarding Yahya Efendi portray him as an ascetic, who after having fallen

out of favor with Sultan Süleyman chose to live out his days as a recluse, building his home

outside of the imperial capital. An auspicious dream would guide him to Beşiktaş where he

bought a sizable property from a pauper for a dime and built himself a dervish lodge that also

114
Referred to as “ṭāsasız Rāẓiye” (Raziye without sorrow), Sultan Süleyman’s coffin shares the same space as that
of her spiritual guide, Mirʿāt-ı İstānbul, 291. Şehsuvaroğlu, Asırlar Boyunca Istanbul, 146; M. Çağatay Uluçay,
Padişahların Kadınları ve Kızları (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1980), 39.
115
Şehsuvaroğlu, Asırlar Boyunca Istanbul, 147-148.
116
Artan, “Theater of Life,” 81.
 100

served as a makeshift medical facility to seekers of health.117 The land that Yahya Efendi owned

was much larger than the tiny walled-in park that his complex inhabits today. The seventeenth-

and eighteenth-century literary surveyors of Istanbul’s coastlines mention that the only structure

on the hill between Beşiktaş and Ortaköy was the little domed tomb of Yahya Efendi.118

Well into the last decades of the eighteenth century, Yahya Efendi’s property still

covered a large swath of land that extended from the waterfront Ferʿiye Palaces into the valley

that stretched behind them.119 Gradually, segments of the property got absorbed into the imperial

projects that within a century became the parkland of Abdülhamid II’s palace. Aşık Çelebi, the

sixteenth-century biographer of poets, described the Herculean building efforts that Yahya

Efendi personally undertook on the uninhabited hilltop of Beşiktaş as follows: “For years, he

built buildings and took them down, made landfills, dug the earth, and carried stones” (Niçe nice

yıllardur ki ol diyārda gāh yapup gāh yıkup deñizler ṭoldırup ṭopraḳlar ḳazdırup ṭaşlar

ṭaşıdur).120 When describing his choice of a life in seclusion, Yahya Efendi wrote about himself

in the third-person as someone “playing with soil in his Beşiktaş.”121 Evliya Çelebi describes this

property of Yahya Efendi, apparently a miracle-working gardener, as a vast mountainous

meadow, inside of which sunlight never penetrates, and which is adorned with grand plane trees,

willow trees with their heads turned down, mastic trees, cypresses, and walnuts of Rum.122 It is

117
Ayvansarayî, The Garden of the Mosques, 424-425.
118
Ghukas Inchichean, XVIII. Asırda Istanbul, trans. Hrand D. Andreasyan (Istanbul: Baha Matbaası, 1976), 114.
119
Nazmi Sevgen. Beşiktaşlı Şeyh Yahya Efendi: Hayatı, Menkıbeleri, Şiirleri (Istanbul, 1965), 5.
120
Âşık Çelebi, Meşârʿirü’ş-Şuʿarâ, vol. 2 (Istanbul Araştırmaları Enstitüsü, 2010), 796.
121
Yahya Efendi cited in Mirʿāt-ı İstānbul, 293.
122
Evliyâ Çelebi, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, vol. 1, 192.
 101

quite tempting to think that the site and its landscapist owner served as models for the queen

mothers as they conceived of their own verdant retreats.

Yahya Efendi believed that his newly adopted home was where Moses, guided by God to

find the one man wiser than him, encountered Hızır (Khidr). Much in the way of Moses, Yahya

Efendi saw himself as a disciple of Hızır in his theological pursuits. He must have reveled in

imagining the topography of Beşiktaş as the exact embodiment of the rocky junction where Hızır

finally revealed himself to Moses. It was a meeting site that like Beşiktaş saw the convergence of

the two seas (mecmaʿ’ül-baḥreyn) described in the Koran. Yahya Efendi stipulated in his will

that he should be buried at the exact spot where he imagined the two prophetic figures met. For

the courtly figures of the later centuries, who frequented his tomb inside the complex, the

Koranic story must have resonated and imbued the site with talismanic power—not just for the

valides and their sons, but also for outsiders like the Bavarian landscape designer Christian

Sester who, when hired by Mahmud II to transform this hill into a Romantic garden, was asked

to find water sources, expressly like Moses and Hızır, to accommodate more fountains, lakes,

and ponds.

Furthermore, water in the poetic chronograms of the era—especially those installed by

the sultans and their mothers in the neighborhood of Beşiktaş—alluded to Hızır and his

association with springs as the discoverer of the “water of life” (āb-ı ḥayāt) or the “spring of

life” (ʿayn’ül-ḥayāt) on a “mountaintop” (Ḫıżırlıḳ ṭaġı) that gave this elusive prophetic figure

immortality. These chronograms also often referred to the origin story of Hızır as a vizier to

Alexander (Ḫıżır-ı İskender), who at the end of Alexander’s life went on a quest to find the

source of immortality, only to upstage his king and vanish expected only to reappear in mystical-

religious narratives to steer the spiritually misguided.

 102

The valides continually contributed to the restorations of this shrine, whose lands

gradually shrunk into a hamlet nestled inside a garden full of trees, as their surrounding pavilions

and farmlands grew and absorbed it. The earliest example of the patronage links between the

mothers of sultans and the Yahya Efendi shrine complex speaks to this give and take, and comes

to us in a chronogram composed by the court’s poet Vasıf. It states that Selim III “beautifully

restored” (raʿnā-ı tecdīd) the mosque in 1806 for which he used funds from his mother Mihrişah

Sultan’s endowment.123 The court’s piety did not always mean that it left properties belonging to

a different endowment untouched. The large parcel of land that once belonged to the sixteenth-

century dervish seems to have been gradually taken over by the imperial properties. The first

Yıldız Kiosk, farming estate, and fountain of Mihrişah Valide Sultan were all, it seems, parceled

out of the high plateau that belonged to Yahya Efendi.

Bezm-i Alem also took great interest in the upkeep of this complex. As stipulated in an

addendum to her endowment deed from 1842, her generosity implied that a shaykh in the dervish

convent of Yahya Efendi in Beşiktaş had to recite the Koran in accordance with the practice of

the Naqshbandi sect and mention her name during the prayers. The mosque’s imam, cantor and

caretaker, on the other hand, each had to participate in the recitation by reading a surah.124

Pertevniyal followed suit and took an active role in repairing the mosque-cum-shrine. A visitor

on his or her ascent to the mosque would pass through a portal bearing an inscription that not

only announces her repairs to the mosque at the site, but also lists her four most visible public

123
Gürel, 579.
124
Tülây Duran, ed., Tarihimizde Vakıf Kuran Kadınlar: Hanım Sultan Vakfiyyeleri (Istanbul: Istanbul Araştırma
Merkezi, 1990), 537-547.
 103

works as the valide: a sebil, a school, a mosque, and, what appears to be most exciting to the poet

Hayrî,125 a state of the art pool in the arsenal to receive the imperial battleships.

At the time when it served as Abdülhamid II’s palace, Yıldız continued to be surrounded

by small religious convents of symbolic importance, which should not necessarily be ascribed

only to Abdülhamid’s reinstitution of his caliphal role and his desire to unite all Sunni Muslims

under his leadership. Pertevniyal was a politically adept queen mother, and having foreseen that

Abdülhamid was a likelier candidate for the throne over the clinically anxious Murad, she

cultivated an intimate relationship with Abdülhamid while he was the crown prince and retained

considerable sway over his personal choices regarding his family life as well as his personal

religious affiliations. Even though access was forbidden to princes who had passed adolescence

to freely enter the harem quarters, Pertevniyal encouraged Abdülhamid to pay her frequent visits

to converse and play the piano.126 It was during these visits that she introduced the future ruler to

Müşfika, an orphan girl she had fostered from a young age, who would eventually become

Abdülhamid’s favorite and most devoted wife.

Prince Abdülhamid found his spiritual guidance in the teachings of Shaykh Muhammed

Zafir Efendi of the Shadhiliyya Sufi order from Tripoli also through Pertevniyal’s mediation.127

She was the patron of the order’s first convent in Unkapanı, but soon after Abdülhamid became

the sultan, he moved the order’s headquarters close to Yıldız, and assigned the shaykh two large

mansions in the same garden as the dervish convent’s mosque—one for his immediate family

125
Though I am not certain about the identity of this poet selected by Pertevniyal, he is most likely Süleyman Hayri
Bey (d. 1891), a bureaucrat educated in the palace school (enderun mektebi), who was known for the eulogies that
he composed for Sultan Abdülaziz annually that resulted in his promotions; see İnal, Son Asır Türk Şairleri, vol. 2,
606-610.
126
Şakir, Sultan Hamit, 76-77.
127
Hüseyin Vassaf, Sefîne-i Evliyâ, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Seha Neşriyat, 1990), 259-260.
 104

and the other for the sheikh’s incessant stream of North African guests, mentioned in the Chapter

1. In maintaining such a close relationship with Abdülhamid, bound both through marriage and

through faith, she was able to continue to live in the imperial center in one of the Ferʿiye Palaces

in Ortaköy instead of being confined to the cramped harem quarters of the Topkapı Palace, and

to maintain her attachment to the two convents on the outer rims of Yıldız.

It is also important to note here that women of rank, especially the valides, were political

agents perhaps not necessarily in the international arenas of war, debt or trade, but in maintaining

marriage alliances indispensable to the court’s order and the continuation of tradition. Even in

the nineteenth century, the sultan’s wives (kadınefendiler) and most of the other women who

were employed to serve the members of the harem were exclusively selected from among certain

Circassian families of the North Caucasus. This continued to be a region of strategic importance,

which the nineteenth-century Ottomans maintained as a buffer against Russia as the latter

intensified her encroachment upon the Orthodox Christian subjects of the Ottoman state.

Tribal affiliations contributed greatly to the composition of the retinues of the sultans’

mothers, sisters, and principal wives. Loyalty to their erstwhile family members often prompted

them to secure administrative posts for their male relatives, and many of those who retained their

familial ties channeled their charity work solely to their villages of origin.128 Recent scholarship

of a modest scale, which is based on the recollections of the wives of the last sultans, has

highlighted the fact that most of them were the daughters of Circassian tribal nobility. These

women continued to maintain their inherited aristocratic rank even after joining the Ottoman

court, most visibly in the preservation of their family crests and in their practice of following

128
Açba, Kadınefendiler, 43, 56, 62, 87, 142.
 105

exclusive patterns of socializing.129 In line with this exclusivity, the valides groomed members of

their own retinues, daughters of their own tribes, for their reigning sons as well as future heirs.

Once adopted by the harem, these girls were given elaborate new names by the most erudite,

bibliophilic women of the court.130 Mahmud II’s sister Esma Sultan’s presentation of Bezm-i

Alem to her brother Mahmud II, and later of Perestu—who would become Abdülhamid II’s

beloved foster mother and the empire’s last valide—to her nephew Abdülmecid, as well as

Pertevniyal’s abovementioned introduction of Müşfika to Abdülhamid II, are three of the more

conspicuous examples of such in-house marital politics.

After encountering a few assassination attempts in rapid succession soon after his

accession, Abdülhamid II decided to make Yıldız his palace. He moved his immediate family

and personal servants to the modest, pedimented two-story mansion that functioned as the harem

structure to Pertevniyal’s hôtel particulier, which in turn became his administrative quarters, the

Mabeyn. The site did not yet have enough accommodations to support a large household, so

before the move the harem was downsized: the retinues of the wives, unmarried sisters, and

married sons shrank, as did the sultan’s number of household attendees. Abdülhamid had

appointed his foster mother Perestu to the post of valide immediately after his accession

ceremony (cülus). From then on, this extremely reserved woman became the head of his harem

and, apparently much to her dismay, had to preside over all the court ceremonies. Her carriage

was always first in line in a harem cortège, and every diplomatic visit to the harem had to begin

with a requisite first reception at her apartments. As more structures were fitted into Yıldız’s

harem, the building that Abdülhamid had initially moved into was appointed for her use. But

Perestu, equipped with the freedom that her predecessors had secured for the post of valide,
129
Leyla Açba, Bir Çerkes Prensesin Harem Hatıraları (Istanbul: L&M, 2004).
130
Esatlı, 345.
 106

frequently retreated to her mansion in Maçka (fig. 2.17). The latter was a building that her

husband Abdülmecid had appointed for her years ago, at a time when another of his wives, the

presumed libertine Serfiraz chose Yıldız for her own residence.131

CONCLUSION

The Ottoman gardening culture in the first half of the nineteenth century revolved around these

women as much as, if not more so than their male counterparts. And Yıldız, in particular, was

manifestly a product of their personal efforts, created and used by them for almost a century.

Furthermore, it was a visible architectural signifier of their status as queen mothers, often paired

with their estates in Çamlıca. While Bezm-i Alem expanded the Yıldız estate with her botanist

advisor Salih Efendi, her son Abdülmecid continued in his father’s footsteps in converting the

hills between his mother’s residence and Çırağan into a grand Romantic park. The next chapter

will follow the landscape history of Çırağan’s gardens under Mahmud II and Abdülmecid, and

through a description of the site’s physical transformations, it will also discuss the evolution of

the court’s gardeners’ corps throughout that time. Like the valides, Mahmud II and Abdülmecid

saw this vast and central site as ripe for rebuilding. With a complete redesign, it would be the

poster palace for the court’s new imperial image, which it was in dire need of after the

elimination of the janissaries and the subsequent initiation of empire-wide reforms. A court poet,

who was an early witness to the project to make Çırağan and its gardens the royal residence

nonpareil, built to reflect the state’s radical restructuring, praises Mahmud II alternately as a

131
For descriptions and photographs of the Maçka mansion of the last valide Perestu see Çetintaş, 240-241; and
Esatlı, 440-441.
 107

renovator (müceddid) and a capable architect (miʿmār-ı ḳudret) both referring to his building of

the palace and government of the empire at large.132

132
Ahmed Sâdık Zîver Paşa, Dîvân ve münşe'ât, 422-423.
 108

III.

From the Backyard of Çırağan to the Heart of the Gardening Corps: Yıldız and its Gardeners

This chapter is as much about the evolution of landscaping on the grounds that would become

the Yıldız palace, as it is about the ambitious European head-gardener (bostāncıbaşı), Christian

Sester (d. 1866), who installed a large portion of the site, and the horticultural legacy he left

behind in the Ottoman capital.1 The site’s tandem development from the valide estate as

described in the previous chapter and from the backyard of the Çırağan with Sester’s

involvement—the principal subject of this chapter—speaks directly to the new imperial image

quest of the century’s first two rulers, Mahmud II and his son Abdülmecid. As two reform-

centric sultans, they eagerly sought out advisors to transform their environments to befit the

enlightened, politically engaged, and blatantly public role they cast for themselves. The site that

they chose as their new residence would become emblematic of this imperial refashioning.

Yıldız and its makers, most of whom were Sester’s self-taught recruits, instituted a

predominantly German dynasty of gardeners—a new kind of corps crafted from the long-

established Ottoman state institution of the bostancıs—that would only be disrupted at the turn

of the nineteenth century when the court began to value different modes of horticultural expertise

and directed its attention to France. If, in very broad strokes, nineteenth-century Ottoman garden

history is characterized by grand landscaping projects modeled on Yıldız, the twentieth century

marked an obsessive attention to cultivation and acclimation of plants inside the intimacy of the

1
An abridged version of this chapter has been published, see Deniz Türker, “ ‘I don’t want orange trees, I want
something that others don’t have’: Ottoman Head-Gardeners after Mahmud II,” International Journal of Islamic
Architecture (IJIA) 4:2, Special Issue on the Conception and Use of Expertise in the Architecture of the Islamic
World since 1800, (July 2015): 257–285.
 109

most technically advanced greenhouses and palmhouses. Ultimately, these shifts of interest were

not only related to matters of taste, but also always tinged with the competitive spirit of changing

diplomatic alliances, as well as national and international political networks.

By narrowing its focus on the European members of the nineteenth-century gardening

corps, this chapter aims to complement the extant scholarship on Ottoman garden and

landscape.2 Using strictly Ottoman sources, existing scholarship has inevitably shrouded the

names and identities of these figures in paleographic puzzles and under nationalistic sentiment.

In many ways, my emphasis on these individuals—who found long-term employment in the

Ottoman court—comes as a corrective.

Until Mahmud II’s overhaul of the janissary corps in 1826, Ottoman imperial gardening

history, from its variegated designs to aspects of its production and associated expenses, was tied

to one of its most prominent branches—the bostāncı ocağı (imperial corps of gardeners), whose

members were conscripts largely of Christian origin (ʿacemī oğlān).3 From their inception, the

bostancıs were an indispensable part of the military state organization: when needed they would

graduate into the janissary corp. It is no coincidence, then, that a few months after the janissaries

were violently disbanded, the gardeners’ corps was completely (but, much more innocuously)

2
Here, I refer to the dated, but oft-cited Gönül Aslanoğlu Evyapan, Tarih İçinde Formel Bahçenin Gelişmi ve Türk
Bahçesinde Etkileri (Ankara: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, 1974), 28-29; and for a reading that takes Evyapan’s
transcriptions to heart and tackles the context of the nineteenth-century gardens uncritically and dismissively within
the paradigm of Ottoman Westernization as a loss of local identity and vernacular taste, see Nurhan Atasoy, A
Garden for the Sultan: Gardens and Flowers in the Ottoman Culture (Istanbul: Aygaz, 2002), 299-302.
3
İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devletinin Saray Teşkilâtı (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1988), 465-
487, on the corps’ employees responsible for the upkeep of the imperial gardens, and referred to as gilman, usta or
üstad (experts) and their organizational composition, see specifically, 467-468. For an overview of the Ottoman
gardens and their varied typologies in the capital, see Gülru Necipoğlu, “The Suburban Landscape of Sixteenth-
Century Istanbul as a Mirror of Classical Ottoman Garden Culture,” in Theory and Design of Gardens in the Time of
the Great Muslim Empires, ed. A. Petruccioli, E.J. Brill, 1997, 32–71.
 110

restructured under a military charter (niẓāmnāme) on August 5, 1826.4 The eldest members were

made to retire with lifetime pensions (ḳayd-ı ḥayāt), while the able-bodied ones were redeployed

to train with Mahmud’s new army (ʿasākir-i manṣūre-i Muḥammediye), and serve as officers

(żābiṭ) in the gates, barracks, and police offices on the Dolmabahçe-Ortaköy shoreline where the

court now resided full-time.5 A decade later, members of Sultan Mahmud’s retinue, who

undertook ambassadorial trips to European capitals, returned with an idea that addressed the

upkeep of the many imperial gardens: a European garden-director, a professional with

knowledge of the latest practices and trends in landscape design, botany, and horticulture, would

restore the vacant post of the court’s bostancıbaşı (translatable to head or chief-gardener) to its

erstwhile garden-centered métier. This practice would continue until World War I with Yıldız,

the longest serving imperial palace of the nineteenth century, transformed in half a century into

its operational headquarters.

In the corps’ earliest incarnation under Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1444-46/1451-81), its

members attended to the palace gardens and royal retreats, while their superior, the bearded

bostancıbaşı, held the privileged position of helming the sultan’s boat during the latter’s

maritime excursions along the Bosphorus.6 The structure of this corps would undergo drastic

transformations, and shed the fifteenth-century horticultural requisites of the young non-Muslim

janissary conscripts converted to Islam. Especially with the increase of the janissary corps’

unrest in the seventeenth century, the corps of bostancıs became responsible for the personal

4
Vak'anüvîs Ahmed Lûtfî Efendi Tarihi, vol. 1, 146-147.
5
Ibid.
6
See Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devletinin Saray Teşkilâtı, 475.
 111

security of the sultan and his household.7 By the time Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de

Choiseul-Gouffier (d. 1817), the French ambassador to the court of Abdülhamid I (r. 1774-1889)

and dilettante-antiquarian of ancient Greek artifacts, published his Voyage pittoresque en Grèce

(1782), the head-gardener had become la police intérieure du sérail, who presided over the

Bosphorus in an austere waterfront building in Kuruçeşme, which was allocated to his office and

in the immediate vicinity of the sultan’s summer retreat in Beşiktaş (fig. 3.1).8 (The allocation of

an office for the head-gardener physically close to the court’s newly favored palace was in

keeping with the corps of gardeners guarding the Topkapı palace in its walled fortress towers.)

As proof of Sultan Selim III’s trust and dependence on his bostancı-bodyguards, the first recruits

of his new model army, the ill-fated niẓām-ı cedīd, wore the easily recognizable red-felt barata

headgear of the gardeners’ corps.9

In the rapidly expanding eighteenth-century capital, the head-gardener’s function of

policing the shores of the Bosphorus and Golden Horn also included granting residential and

commercial construction licenses. The head-gardener kept track of the growing geography under

his jurisdiction by keeping track of the proprietors of the shorelines, each one filled into one of

the boxes inside his defters’ easy-to-read checkerboard layout.10

7
Mustafa Nuri Paşa, Netayic ül-Vukuat, Kurumları ve Örgütleriyle Osmanlı Tarihi, vol. 3 (Ankara: Türk Tarih
Kurumu Basımevi, 1980), 122-123. A recent publication has further explored the transformation of the gardeners’
corps into the sultan’s personal police; see Murat Yıldız, Bahçıvanlıktan Saray Muhafızlığına Bostancı Ocağı
(İstanbul: Yitik Hazine Yayınları, 2011).
8
Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier, Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce, vol. 2 (1782-[1824]), 489.
9
Georg Oghulukyan, Georg Oğulukyan'ın Ruznamesi; 1806-1810 İsyanları. III. Selim, IV. Mustafa, II. Mahmud ve
Alemdar Mustafa Paşa, transl. and notes, Hrand D. Andreasyan (İstanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi, 1972), 2-3.
10
The first historian to alert us to the existence of these documents is Reşat Ekrem Koçu, see his “Bostancıbaşı
Defterleri,” İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, vol. 6 (İstanbul Ansiklopedisi ve Neşriyat Kollektif Şirketi, 1958-1971), 2979-
2995. Tülay Artan’s dissertation, “Theater of Life,” has accentuated the importance of these records in not only
understanding the pattern of ownership along the coveted shores of Istanbul in the eighteenth century, but also
highlighted the centrality of this geography in the growing visibility and centrality of the extra-courtly elite in urban
 112

Information on actual gardening work that was undertaken in the eighteenth-century

imperial outdoors is lackluster, and most of the Ottoman garden histories of the century are

preoccupied with the sources for (rather than the makers of) the cascading marble pool of Ahmed

III’s Saʿdabad residence in Istanbul’s Kağıthane meadow, or more recently, with the changing

social dynamics between the court and its public.11 (In fact, Ottoman garden history comes to a

standstill after Saʿdabad’s inception as the ultimate social space, and declinist narratives usurp

the empire’s later two centuries, vibrant especially for the built environment.) Ignatius

Mouradgea d’Ohsson (d. 1807), the Armenian historian of the Ottoman state and dragoman of

the Swedish court, speaks of a dissipated interest and a loss of taste among the capital’s grandees

in garden-life after Mahmud I (r. 1730-54)––the last of the practitioners of the tulip illuminations

(çerāġān) instituted by his predecessor Ahmed III and the grand vizier Nevşehirli Damad

İbrahim Paşa. He informs us that Istanbul’s mid-eighteenth-century gardeners were mostly made

up of émigré Greek islanders.12 These eighteenth-century migrants, who, it appears, were not a

part of the official gardening corps and were possibly the unrecorded first group of non-Muslim

life. For a facsimile of one of these defters from 1803, see Murat Bardakçı, Üçüncü Selim Devrine Ait Bir
Bostancıbaşı Defteri (Istanbul: Pan Yayıncılık, 2013).
11
The work that spoke of the Ottoman ambassador Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi’s visit to France as the empire’s
erstwhile opening up to the West, and selected Ahmed III’s garden residence as its material symbol is, Fatma Müge
Göçek’s East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987). Two most recent works of architectural history have problematized this assertion by
demonstrating the site’s reliance on traditional building methods, familiar sources, and as Ottomans’ response to the
Safavids. See Shirine Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century; and, Can Erimtan, “The
Perception of Saadabad: The ‘Tulip Age’ and Ottoman-Safavid Rivalry,” in Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee:
Leisure and Lifestyles in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dana Sajdi (London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies,
2007), 41–62. The temptation to link all the European garden treatises in the Topkapı Palace Library, with disparate
publication dates spanning the entirety of the eighteenth century, to Yirmisekiz Mehmed’s ambassadorial bounty
from the 1720s, is evident in Gül İrepoğlu, “Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Hazine Kütüphanesindeki Batılı Kaynaklar
Üzerine Düşünceler,” Topkapı Sarayı Yıllık 1 (İstanbul, 1986), 56-72, and 174-197.
12
Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson, Tableau général de l’Empire Ottoman, divisé en deux parties, dont l'une comprend
la législation mahométane, l'autre l'histoire de l'empire othoman, vol. 2, part 2 (Paris: de l'imprimerie de Monsieur
[Firmin Didot], 1787-1820), 176-178.
 113

experts to infiltrate the gardening arts in the capital. D’Ohsson does not provide much

information beyond their origin, but a reason for their nondescript origins and backgrounds may

be due to the fact that they did not serve the Ottoman court, but the extra-courtly elite. We are

told, however, that they were experts in grafting, maintenance of trees, crop cultivation, and the

preservation of fruits, flowers and vegetables, but had very little to offer, in the various ways that

could transform land into artifice that had already taken rest of Europe by storm in the eighteenth

century. It is also d’Ohsson who mentions two new palace posts under Abdülhamid I: the

superintendents of fruits (Yémischdjy-Baschy) and flowers (Tschitschekdjy-Baschy), who were

tasked with supplying the sultan’s table with the finest of their products, and attended to the

hothouses to satisfy the off-season cravings of the pregnant women in the harem.13

a. THE FIRST EUROPEAN HEAD-GARDENERS IN THE OTTOMAN COURT

It was during Selim III’s reign that the court first experimented with a foreign head-gardener for

its imperial gardens in the capital. Later on, Mahmud II’s revival of most of the novel offices that

Selim had instituted extends to this post as well. The now widely known story goes that the

terraced gardens of the Russian and Danish consuls to Istanbul, Monsieur de Bulgakoff and

Baron von Hübsch, layered over the verdant groves behind their summer residences in

Büyükdere on the Bosphorus, had gained such popularity among the affluent Muslim and non-

Muslim residents along its shores that even a female member of the court––Selim III’s intrepid

sister Hatice Sultan––paid multiple visits to the latter’s home (fig.2.4).14 Diplomatic decorum

13
D’Ohsson, Tableau général de l’Empire Ottoman, 177.
14
Antoine Ignace Melling, Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople et des rives du Bosphore, ed. Rezan Benatar,
transl. Irvin Cemil Schick and Ece Zerman (İstanbul: Denizler Kitapevi, 2011), 231. I have used this trilingual new
edition, based on the 1819 Treutel and Würtz edition for ease of access.
 114

prevented Sultan Selim from visiting these two sites, but like his sister, who commissioned a

garden maze in her Defterdarburnu yalı from her dessinateur Antoine Ignace Melling and his

collaborator-engineer François Kauffer, the sultan himself demanded a gardener be found to

create a “European” garden in the summer quarters he started to construct for his harem at

Topkapı’s sloping, peninsular tip.15

Baron von Herbert, the Austrian internuncio to Selim’s court, imported a gardener from

Rastatt called Jacob Ensle (d. 1832), who was fortunate enough to be in residence with his

stepbrother (the distinguished naturalist Franz Boos, botanical gardener and menagerie director

of the Schönbrunn palace in Vienna) during von Herbert’s recruitment efforts. Ensle, who

appears to have led many a late-eighteenth-century European traveler through the doors of the

Topkapı palace’s new sections, but remained anonymous as “M. Jacques from Rastadt” in their

accounts, himself left a narrative of his time at the Ottoman court. He boasts that “through the

skillful leveraging of a connection [he] managed to achieve an assignment as the chief-gardener

of the Bostandjis [der Obergärtners der Bostandgi’s] in the palace.”16 He continues to say that

he was the first Christian to fill this post only because Selim III’s mild regime made it possible.

In the autumn of 1794, after a swift journey down the Danube and a short stop in the

Ottoman vassal principality of Wallachia, governed at the time by the Greek Phanariote

15
For the lesser-known Kauffer, see Frédéric Hitzel, “François Kauffer (1751?-1801), ingénieur-cartographe
français au service de Selim III,” Science in Islamic Civilization 7, ed. Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu and Feza Günergun
(Istanbul, Research Centre for Islamic History: Art and Culture, 2000), 233-243. For biographical information on
Jacob Ensle, the first foreign head-gardener to the Ottoman court, see Franz Gräffer, Historische Raritäten, vol. 2
(Wien: Tendler und v. Manstein, 1825), 153-172. However, the expanded German edition of Joseph Eugène
Beauvoisins’s travel account, footnoted by Ensle, also contains the full biographical text of the gardener’s time at
the Ottoman court; Joseph Eugène Beauvoisins. Nachrichten über den Hof des türkischen Sultans, sein Serail,
seinen Harem, die kaiserliche Familie, sein Militär und seine Minister. Nebst einem historischen Versuch über die
mohammedanische Religion, ihren Kultus und ihre Priester, transl. Johann-Friedrich Kessler (Karlruhe: C.F. Müller,
1811).
16
Gräffer, Historische Raritäten, vol. 2, 157.
 115

dragoman Alexander Mourosis (d. 1816), Ensle found his way into the comfortably interstitial

and convivial life of the dragomans and their diplomatic employers in Istanbul. Once settled and

with a plush six-thousand piaster salary, he had to go native in order to better adapt to his three-

year appointment––he ended up serving for eight. For his initiation into courtly life, Baron von

Hübsch would aid in shaving his head and gird him with Turkish clothing. Instead of a turban,

however, he would be made to wear a “kalback” (kalpak) as worn by the dragomans, the ultimate

go-betweens in the Ottoman world. A timber house “in the light style of the Turkish art of

building” (im leichten Styl türkischer Bauart) with four spacious rooms and a kitchen was built

for him along the garden wall of the palace. 17 Ensle was assigned to bostancıbaşı Ahmed Ağa, a

favorite among Selim’s courtiers, whom the gardener calls the chief-overseer of the palace

garden (Oberaufseher der Gärten im Serail). An exceptionally rare rapport must have developed

between the two, because Ensle recalls Ahmed to be his “source of support and protector” during

his undeniably challenging service as the only foreigner in-residence inside the palace with such

a high official post: “no one aside from [Achmet] in the government had the slightest authority

over me.”18

I have described his work inside the Topkapı palace elsewhere.19 It is also traceable in the

detailed map that Melling provides in his Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople et de rives du

Bosphore (1819), and the description that the Austrian historian of the Ottoman empire, Joseph

von Hammer-Purgstall, provides in his Constantinopolis und der Bosporos (1822). But Ensle

also contributed to the gardens in Selim III’s Beşiktaş palace and Eyüp. In Topkapı, he worked

17
Gräffer, Historische Raritäten, vol. 2, 157.
18
Ibid.
19
Deniz Türker, ““Ottoman Horticulture after the Tulip Era: Botanizing Consuls, Garden Diplomacy, and the First
Foreign Head-Gardener,” in Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library
Publications (Spring 2017, forthcoming).
 116

on a set of terraced spaces reserved for Selim and for the women’s quarters, and as per the

sultan’s request, instituted the “French and Dutch conventions [Sitte]” rather than the picturesque

landscapes that the Europeans had begun to install in their estates (fig. 3.2). With Hübsch’s

considerable involvement, Ensle built flower parterres, which were traversed by linear gravel

walks, trellised arcades, the requisite jets d’eau, and hothouses for exotic fruits. It appears that

the Ottoman court wanted, first and foremost, to display the rarest and finest of flowers, so Ensle

grew “16,000 florins worth of hyacinth bulbs sent from Holland, and planted more than 6,000

florins worth of Persian buttercup and anemone.”20 Like the tulip, hyacinthus orientalis had

traveled over to the Netherlands in the sixteenth century and came back to the empire as an

import.21 He potted all of this expensive naturalia in glistening Chinese porcelain, imported by

the thousands for “150 to 200 piasters per pot.”22

If Napoleon had not conquered Egypt in 1798, an event, which came as a total shock to

the unsuspecting Ottomans, Ensle’s work in the gardens of Topkapı and other summer dwellings

of the court would have had a chance to flourish. Kauffer and Melling had plans to build a

completely new palace over the previously mentioned new sections, and Ensle, a member of

their artistic clique, was going to have the opportunity to make a grander aesthetic statement.23

However, not wanting to remain in an environment suddenly hostile to foreigners and volatile

due to ceaseless uprisings against Selim’s reforms, he left for his fatherland in 1802. At the end

20
Gräffer, Historische Raritäten, vol. 2, 160. Hyacinths were previously imported in huge quantities from Caffa in
the Crimea, what differs is the place of import now Europe, not the act of importation which was standard imperial
practice; see Necipoǧlu, Topkapı Palace, 202.

21
In the sixteenth-century, Istanbul was a botanical paradise visited by European botanists such as Joseph Pitton de
Tournefort (d. 1708). For a description of the gardens of the Topkapı Palace in the sixteenth as a botanical paradise
and a microcosmic representation of the empire’s floral diversity, see Necipoğlu, The Topkapı Palace, 202-203. In
the eighteenth century, the east to west flow of specimen was completely reversed.

22
Ibid.
23
Hitzel, “François Kauffer (1751?-1801),” 242.
 117

of his letter, he paints a devastating picture of the Balkan geographies in turmoil, torn between

Pasvantoğlu Osman, a powerful provincial notable, Russia, and the plague.24 Unlike his swift

arrival, this time Ensle had to dress up like a Tatar to traverse northern locales now under

Russian control, and make it to the Danube river port of Silistra where he could obtain passage

back to Vienna.

The subsequent decades pitted a young Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808-1839) against

influential viziers, powerful provincial rulers, Balkan insurgencies, Russian advances, and most

significantly, insubordinate janissaries, and seem to have been devoid of another prominent

foreign hire to calibrate the taste of the court. These events also made the kind of Eastern

European crossing that Ensle had undertaken impossible for even the most adventurous

Westerner. Aside from a few European renegades, expatriates were hard to come by in an

increasingly unstable Istanbul.25 The English travel-writer Julia Pardoe observed that foreign

gardeners of varying European nationalities were attending to each of the terraces of Mahmud

II’s garden in the Beylerbeyi palace in 1836 (fig. 3.3).26 It was only after a beleaguered but

resolute Mahmud restored a semblance of order in his empire through a complete overhaul of the

military and political bodies, that the multi-lingual Ottoman bureaucrats of his newfangled

administration began a hunt for foreign experts to furnish the backdrops of their homes. It seems

that after the 1830s the capital was once again better habitable for European expatriates.

24
Gräffer, 168.
25
Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream, The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923 (London: John Murray, 2006),
437.
26
Julia Pardoe, The Beauties of the Bosphorus (London: G. Virtue, 1839), 59. For Pasvantoğlu, see Virginia Aksan,
Ottoman Wars 1700-1870, An Empire Besieged. (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), 219-224.
 118

b. CHRISTIAN SESTER AND THE ENGLISH GARDEN IN THE OTTOMAN CAPITAL

Ahmed Fethi Paşa (d. 1858), Mahmud’s Anglophile son-in-law, an enterprising industrialist of

glass factories, and longtime marshal (müşīr) of the Tophane armory, signed a contract with a

Bavarian called Christian Sester, while serving as ambassador to Austria (fig. 3.4).27 According

to the loosely worded agreement, once the thirty-one-year-old landscape gardener arrived in

Istanbul, he would begin “ordering the grounds” (arżıñ niẓām ve intiẓāmına mübāşeret eylemek)

allotted for the sultan’s imperial gardens, “draw out the plans appropriate for growing

multifarious trees” (gūnāgūn eşcār yetişdirmeğe iḳtizā iden zemīn ve resimleri çıḳarmaḳ) and

“closely supervise all aspects related to gardens and their walkways himself” (bāğçe ve yollarıñ

her bir huṣūṣuna kendüsi bi’n-nefs neẓāret itmek).28 Promised a generous annual stipend of two

thousand florins, comfortable lodgings, candlewax, coal, and firewood, “protection from any

hindrances to his work” (bāğçe tanẓīmine dāʾir huṣūṣlarıñ icrāsıyçün kendüsine bir ruhṣat-ı

kāmile olaraḳ hīç bir ṭarafdan kimesne māniʿ ve müzāḥim olmamaḳlıġı), and an option to quit

with a six-month notice, Sester arrived in Istanbul in 1835 along with an assistant (muʿāvin). He

was given, or, rightfully borrowing from his European precedents—the lofty title of “Imperial

Garden Director” (großherrlicher Gartendirektor).29 Until his death in 1868, Sester would

remain in the service of three of the four nineteenth-century sultans, Mahmud, Abdülmecid and

Abdülaziz, and transform most of the imperial gardens of the period in Istanbul.

27
Biographical information on Ahmed Fethi Paşa is divided. Positive ones focus on his diverse cultural enterprises
to rekindle empire-wide artisanal production; see Münevver Ayaşlı, Dersaâdet (Istanbul: Bedir Yayınevi, 1993),
109-110; his opponents exaggerated his western leanings by spreading rumors that he supplied Sultan Abdülmecid
with medicine from Europe to improve his sexual potency; Ahmed Cevdet Paşa, Ma‘rûzât (Istanbul: Çağrı
Yayınları, 1980), 10.
28
BOA, D. DRB. İ 2/12.
29
Sester’s provisions are outlined in the contract. His girding as a garden director in Vienna is described in his
obituary: A.W., “Ein unterfränkischer Landsmann als Gartendirektor des Sultans,” Erheiterungen, Belletristisches
Beiblatt zur Aschaffenburger Zeitung, December 17, 1867, 1194.
 119

The Bavarian parvenu’s résumé played a significant role in his selection to the Ottoman

post. Born and raised in Aschaffenburg, he descended from a family of gardeners employed in

the upkeep of the picturesque park of Schönbusch palace, then belonging to Karl Theodor von

Dalberg (d. 1817), the prince-primate of a confederation of Rhenish states that, in alliance with

Napoleon I, had declared their independence from the Holy Roman Empire. At a very young age,

Sester abandoned training in Latin in order to completely devote himself to “the noble art of

gardening.”30 He grew up amid a world of affluent provincial patrons and their German garden

experts, who traveled around Europe to master the various branches of the practice.31 His

obituary, published in a local Aschaffenburg newspaper, mentioned Sester’s hereditary calling

for the garden arts from a very young age: “The seed that slept in him, suddenly awoke to unfold

itself into a blossom, which shone forth as alone in its kind.”32 With this familial predisposition,

he first apprenticed in his hometown under Schönbusch’s head-gardener Christian Ludwig Bode.

Under his supervision, Sester honed his skills “as a gardener in general, and as a landscape

gardener [Landschaftsgärtner] in particular.”33 Soon after that young Sester initiated his

scholastic grand tour (often referred to as the gardener’s “journeyman years”)34 with the

botanical gardens of Munich-Nymphenburg, which were conceptualized by Schönbusch’s first

30
A.W., “Ein unterfränkischer Landsmann als Gartendirektor des Sultans,” 1194.
31
Ibid. For Schönbusch’s garden history, see Schönbusch bei Aschaffenburg Amtlicher Führer, herausgegeben von
der Verwaltung der staatlichen Schlösser, Gärten und Seen (ehemaliges Krongut); bearbeitet von Heinrich Kreisel
(Aschaffenburg: Verlag der Wailandtschen Druckerei A.G., 1932). For a description of Schönbusch in the wider
context of Weimar landscaping, see John Dixon Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe (New York: Thames &
Hudson, 2002), 163-164.
32
A.W., “Ein unterfränkischer Landsmann als Gartendirektor des Sultans,” 1194.
33
Ibid.
34
For a good overview of a European head-gardener’s training trajectory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
and their so-called “journeyman years,” see Toby Musgrave, The Headgardners: Forgotten Heroes of Horticulture
(London: Aurum, 2007), 75-78.
 120

landscape gardener, Carl Ludwig von Sckell (d. 1828), as extensions to the Baroque summer

palace of the Bavarian rulers.35 Bode was a discipline of Sckell, and was entrusted to create

English gardens with a German bend––a complete turn to nature, and an economical use of

garden structures––which he must have imparted to his apprentice in Schönbusch. Following his

training in Munich, Sester was appointed head-gardener to Dalberg’s smaller country estate in

Bohemia––his first venture into the Habsburg domains—and then back to Bavaria in 1832 when

he was “tasked with the supervision of the gardens of Frauendorf’s horticultural society (dem

Sitze der praktischen Gartenbaugesellschaft). He had only recently been hired as a head-

gardener (Obergärtner) by the Prince von Dietrichstein to lay out the gardens of his new

Viennese summer residence— a neoclassical structure with an uncanny resemblance to the

Dolmabahçe palace, if the latter were to be stripped of its sculptural reliefs—when his eastern

adventure beckoned. Having interacted with diplomatic circles, Dietrichstein had recommended

him to Sultan Mahmud II.

Although I have not yet identified a drawing or plan from Sester’s own hand of the

Ottoman gardens he created, he has left behind a short ekphrasis from 1832, which appeared in

Frauendorfer Blätter on July 3, 1845, on how he envisioned the gardens while he served as a

head-gardener. Borrowing from the hackneyed European parlance of describing the Tanzimat

courts of Mahmud and Abdülmecid as stalwartly progressive, Sester’s erstwhile hosts in

Frauendorf heralded him in this news item as the artistic counterpart to these two reform-oriented

sultans. The piece was republished in 1845 with a lengthy prologue praising his international

success:

A letter from Constantinople that was printed in the daily newspaper on the 12th of last
month emphasized that the young Sultan [Abdülmecid], like his father [Mahmud II],

35
Carl Ludwig von Sckell, Das königliche Lustschloss Nymphenburg und seine Gartenanlagen mit einem Plane.
(München: In Commission bei George Jaquet, [between 1837 and 1840?]).
 121

found a great deal of pleasure in everything new and better. For example, when setting up
his palaces, the Sultan expressly ordered on numerous occasions that he no longer wanted
the Old, but rather the New according to better European taste. Thusly, the garden at
Tscheragan Palace, which was installed some six years ago by one of our countrymen,
Herr Sester of Aschaffenburg, pleased the Sultan so extraordinarily that while he was
recently moving from his palace to Beylerbeyi, he ordered that Tscheragan should be
outfitted for the next winter so that he could spend fall and also the winter there... We are
pleased by this news all the more because we have not heard from our old friend Herr
Sester for quite some time. What a wonderful direction human fate can take! In 1832,
Herr Sester was still helping to install the gardens in Frauendorf. While this garden was
later destroyed by high winds and hail, we can take solace in the fact that the spirit of
progress managed to transplant [verpflanzt] a refined taste for gardens in Turkey in the
form of Herr Sester, placing him at the summit of that country’s artistic reform [Herr
36
Sester mit großartigen Mitteln an die Spitze der schöpferischen Reform gestellt].

In Sester’s ekphrasis, titled “On the Cliff Bench in Frauendorf, May 8, 1832,” appended

to this flattering introductory exposé, the gardener describes his walk through the garden of his

own creation in a manner resembling a musical composition. The sentimental tone of the

narrative, what the gardener intends to evoke with his garden, is in dialogue with those of his

literary companion Hirschfeld, and with Pückler-Muskau whose treatise reads like a real-time

walk through his own gardens, where each view fosters different sets of emotions. From a stage-

like vast clearing, Sester enters a steep and narrow path lined with a thick mass of conifers with

only a “handrail made of bark-stripped branches” to hold onto, having been seduced by the

violets under the shade of a spruce tree down below. As he descends, he gently exposes his

horticultural knowledge by pairing up plants that share a symbiotic relationship—cherry trees

against the pine, hardy berries with delicate dayflowers, primrose entwined about the pear tree—

but the experience is so immersive and natural that the environment belies the human hand that

put it together. At some point, he comes across a bench, where he sits to listen to the sounds of

starlings, blackbirds and the rushing creek and contemplates the moss-covered precipice and

what lies beyond. As night descends and nature’s sublime takes over, Sester reveals his

36
“Wohlgefallen des türkischen Kaisers an englischen Gärten,” Frauendorfer Blätter, July 3, 1845, 202-203.
 122

philosophical inspiration: Herder’s short prose titled Kalligenia, Die Mutter der Schönheit (1803)

which inquired into the aesthetic qualities of nature and its laws, and the happy convergences

between an artist and scientist when studying them.37 The gardener, who crafted himself from a

bit of both of these professions, writes: “The philosopher should hurry to this spot, disdaining the

trinkets of the masses, and devote serious contemplation to the purpose of man; and celebrated

goddess will come to him (as Kalligenia did to Kallia) in the dreams of Herder.”38 The article

ends with the author’s appeal to the Persian king to hire a professional of Sester’s caliber to

“refine their taste for decorative garden arts among the masses there,” because he suggests,

“progress in the garden arts and garden culture [der Fortschritt der Gartenkünste und

Gartenkultur] is in all countries a measure of the level of cultivation of their people!”39

Frauendorfer Blätter’s push to connect the English landscape garden with liberal rule

might not be too much of a stretch, and in fact, is reflective of the sentiment of the era. German

writers of garden treatises, who were Sester’s contemporaries as well as his literary and technical

primers, believed in the close correlation between an enlightened, benevolent ruler, and the

manner in which he laid out his estate. One of the most widely read among these figures, a

member of the landed nobility from the north and an obsessive landscape designer himself,

Prince Hermann Ludwig von Pückler-Muskau (d. 1871) propounded that the best garden model

37
Johann Gottfried von Herder, “Kalligenia, die Mutter der Schönheit: Ein Traum” in Johann Gottfried von Herders
sämtliche Werke, zur schönen Literatur und Kunst, vol. 6 (Carlsruhe: Im Bureau der Deutschen Klassiker, 1821),
224-234. For a broader historical context on the German Romantics and their conceptualizations of the East, see
Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2009). For the strong interconnection between German aesthetic theory and landscape
design, and the argument that German landscapists found a middle-ground to call their own between the English and
French garden traditions, see Michael G. Lee, The German “Mittelweg”: Garden Theory and Philosophy in the
Time of Kant (New York: Routledge, 2007).
38
“Wohlgefallen des türkischen Kaisers an englischen Gärten,” 203.
39
Ibid.
 123

for an estate-owner was the English one, because with all of its philosophical connotations it

offered the best contrast to Le Nôtre’s Versailles and Vaux-le-Vicomte that had become one of

the preeminent paragons of French autocratic rule alongside the structures they circumscribed.40

By deliberately including the working lands of the ruler—a hint of a peasant here, a farm there—

and with untouched nature, the English landscape garden was for Pückler-Muskau a “microcosm

of the civilized world.”41 So, if Mahmud II, and later Abdülmecid, strove to make distinctive

visual claims about transformations to their rule as reform-oriented sovereigns eager to instate a

completely new administrative, judiciary, and cultural system for their public, it is not unlikely

that they selected a similar aesthetic scheme to the benevolent German gentry for their

surroundings that best fit their newfangled, reinvented image.

It is not surprising that Sester was acquainted with the writings of German philosophers.

Excerpts from their most popular texts would be printed and circulated even in the monthly

gardener’s almanacs of Frankfurt. Herder’s Kalligenia, written close to his death, was one of

these short but evocative narratives that also made its way into the homes of the working

classes.42 Starting with Kant, figures like Herder, Goethe, and Schiller upheld garden art among

the highest plastic arts of their time. For them, and their minstrel in all-things related to

landscape art, C. C. L. Hirschfeld who penned his popular Theorie der Gartenkunst (1779 to

1785), a gardener was equal to, if not more privileged than, a landscape painter in his command

over space, light, and sound. He would write:

40
Linda B. Parshall, “Introduction,” in Hints on Landscape Gardening, Together with a Description of Their
Practical Application in Muskau by Hermann Prince von Pückler-Muskau, transl. John Hargraves (Basel:
Birkhäuser Verlag, 2014), 11.
41
Ibid., 14.
42
“Retrospect of German Literature,” in The Monthly Magazine: Or, British Register, vol. 14, issue 2, 1803, 653.
 124

On the strength of these comparisons of the two arts, it is easy to see that at base the art
of gardening is as superior to landscape painting as nature is to a copy. None of the
mimetic arts is more entwined with nature herself, which is to say more natural, than the
art of gardens. Here the portrayal is merged with the actual. Movement is not merely
perceived as suggestion but truly felt. Water, which in a landscape painting is animated
only through reflections, offers the pleasure of its presence through site and sound. The
eye is offered colors glowing or shimmering with a luster, gaiety, and warmth unrivaled
by the magical power of any Titian. The gradual experience of garden scenes offers more
protracted and entertaining pleasure than the most lovely and detailed landscape painting,
43
which the eye can only quickly encompass.

These thinkers of aesthetics not only gave the gardening profession incredible agency in shaping

nature, but also fueled the garden artist’s creative powers with the German proto-national ideas

of freedom of the mind and creative expression. Rustic, seemingly untouched landscapes were

the perfect backdrop for their fiery ideas, their best visual representatives. Sester was also

geographically close to these members of the Sturm und Drang movement of arts and letters,

preoccupied with the shackles of Enlightenment rationalism, and was certainly spurred on by the

romantic fervor of their aesthetic inclinations. If Goethe’s novella Elective Affinities (Die

Wahlverwandtschaften) of 1809 is any indication, the patrons of garden estates were also deeply

involved in the landscape projects alongside their gardeners.44 They would look through

“volumes on English country houses, with the engravings then [the patron’s] map of the

estate,”45 survey the terrain, and make planning decisions together. Dalberg, who was Sester’s

first patron and his family’s benefactor, was a close-friend, intellectual equal, and travel

companion to Herder—they journeyed together in the Tyrolean Alps and Italy—who would find

gainful employment for this ubiquitous theologian, because as a powerful political figure
43
C. C. L. Hirschfeld, Theory of Garden Art, transl. Linda B. Parshall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2001).
44
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities, translated with an introduction and notes by David Constantine
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 46. For the German adoption of the English garden, see Elizabeth Barlow
Rogers, Elizabeth S. Eustis, and John Bidwell, eds., Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design (New
York: The Morgan Library and Museum, 2010), 133-148.
45
Elective Affinities, 46.
 125

Dalberg (later the Archbishop of Regensburg) also held great sway in ecclesiastical

appointments.46 Therefore, Schönbusch afforded a young garden-artist both the practical and

intellectual stage to develop his creative inklings.

His obituary also recounts Sester’s first interactions with Mahmud II, who unlike Selim

III did not want orange trees in his gardens—an eighteenth-century fad, now too commonplace—

and instead desired something that “others did not have.”47 In their four-year interaction, Sester

installed a spacious portico on the side of Mahmud’s wooden Dolmabahçe palace. Under this

section, and protected from the “icy winds that the Pontus not so seldom sends, a fantastical

artwork [fantasiereiches Kunstwerk] arose, whose depiction we encounter only in a Thousand

and One Nights.”48 He installed waterfalls with alcoves molded out of grottoes, and planted

flowering evergreens––azaleas, rhododendrons, and only recently acclimatized dryandra, a

native of Oceania––alongside his beloved exotic conifers, the araucaria.49 The gardener’s

undertakings did not end with simple gardening; he won a building commission over the costly

proposition of the unidentified imperial architect for a garden house. When it was discovered that

the new garden lacked the necessary running water––unclear whether a stream, lake, or water for

the newly built pavilion—Mahmud asked him to find closer wells or springs (Quellen). Sester’s

response, which the translator was reluctant to convey to the Sultan was, “Lord, I am not

Moses.”50 The obituary claims that Mahmud took his statement as a sign of honesty, but he must

46
Robert Thomas Clark, Herder: His Life and Thought (Berkeley: University of California, 1955), 233, 245-246,
288, and 355-356.
47
In Sester’s obituary, Mahmud is personified and declares, “Ich will keine Orangenbäume, ich will Etwas was
Andere nicht haben,” see A.W., “Ein unterfränkischer Landsmann als Gartendirektor des Sultans,” 1195.
48
Ibid.
49
Ibid., 1194.
50
Ibid., 1195.
 126

also have appreciated Sester’s biblical reference to Moses, who struck a desert rock from which

water flowed, a story from the life of a prophet shared in the Koran which was certainly familiar

to and that resonated with the Ottoman ruler. This nineteenth-century anecdote unknowingly but

compellingly participates in the Ottoman saintly narratives (menāḳıbnāmes), especially the

sixteenth-century architect Sinan. In his biography, Sinan was compared to the miracle working,

immortal Hızır (Khidr) because of his discovery of “life-giving springs” and the hydraulic feats

he achieved when building the Kırkçeşme aqueducts.51

Sester also laid out the designs for the Ihlamur Pavilion in the valley behind Dolmabahçe,

which would later serve as a favorite inland retreat for Abdülmecid, and restored Ensle’s

additions to the Topkapı palace.52 His horticultural contributions to Sa‘dabad are found in the

construction expenses from the summer of 1863, where, referred to as the chief-gardener

(bāġçıvānbāşı), he supplies the site with rose and linden trees and a set of rustic railings

(fig.**).53 He was also assigned semi-imperial commissions from wealthy bureaucrats like

Abdülmecid’s minister of war, serasker Rıza Paşa, who wanted an identical version of the

sultan’s English-style garden for his own residence.54 Moreover, Mahmud II’s wife and

51
Gülru Necipoğlu, “Sources, Themes, and Cultural Implications of Sinan’s autobiographies,” in Sinan’s
Autobiographies: A Critical Edition of Five Sixteenth-Century Texts. Critical Edition and translation by Howard
Crane and Esra Akin (Supplements to Muqarnas, Leiden, 2006), x.
52
A.W., “Ein unterfränkischer Landsmann als Gartendirektor des Sultans,” 1194.
53
BOA, HH. 19355.
54
“Wohlgefallen des türkischen Kaisers an englischen Gärten,” 202. I have not, yet, been able to locate the
whereabouts of this yalı, and gardens. However, Ahmed Lutfi Efendi’s chronicles of the Mecidian era often pit the
seemingly more conservative Rıza Paşa against the dandyish ambassador to many European capitals and Sester’s
sponsor Ahmed Fethi Paşa. Although we cannot identify the exact location of Rıza Paşa’s waterfront mansion, we
get insights on his gardens through an English woman’s visit to his inland mansion and interactions with his wife
“Madame Riza,” who would describe her the newly constructed gardens of her yalı to her foreign guest: “There are
hanging gardens with a stream leaping from rock to rock amongst the orange-trees…there are also beautiful
fountains, and rose-gardens.” Mrs. Edmund Hornby, In and Around Stamboul (Philadelphia: James Challen & Son,
1858), 258.
 127

Abdülaziz’s mother, Pertevniyal Valide Sultan’s monthly domestic expenses from 1857 to 1858

list the gardener from Austria (Nemçeli baġçıvān), consistently on top of the ledger. His work on

her residence in the walled-off hilltop pavilion that contained sizable market gardens especially

for strawberries was not inexpensive compared to the boatmen’s fees, the kavasses (armed

attendants of an ambassador or consul), and maintainers of water conduits (ṣu yolcu).55 The

earliest map drawn up by the Ottoman-employed Prussian officer, Baron Helmuth von Moltke,

from 1839, of which we also have the Ottoman Military School’s redeveloped versions,

identifies two small structures perched on the elevated grounds behind Çırağan. One is labeled

the kiosk of Valide Sultan, and the other, smaller, cross-axial one, Yıldız (fig. 3.5). These two

structures were the earliest incarnations of what would develop into a country estate (labeled as

çiftlik in the above-mentioned map), surrounded by a multitude of arable fields (tarlā) and

protected by guard posts (ḳaraġolḫāne) in the map mentioned in the preceding chapter, which

were allotted to the mothers of sultans from Selim III to Abdülaziz (fig. 2.13).56 This latter map,

although drawn without topographic conventions, not only shows the generous sprawl of the

nineteenth-century valides’ income-generating properties in the new imperial zone of the capital,

but also clarifies the site’s relationship to Çırağan on the shore: they are connected by a grove

(Çerāġān nām sarāy-ı hümayūnuñ Yıldız Köşkü ṭarafında ḳoruluḳ maḥalli). By the time the map

was made, the wall that separated the two kiosks on the hill belonging to the valide estate from

the waterfront palace was taken down. Its drafting must have coincided with the second stage in

Sester’s landscaping of the grove during Abdülmecid’s reign when the gardener connected the

two sites to form a majestic garden-boasting complex.

55
İstanbul Atatürk Kitaplığı (İAK), Pertevniyal Valide Sultan Evrakı (PVSE) 757, 1086, 1125, 1126, and 1128. The
vast strawberry fields are identified in an undated map from the Topkapı Palace, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Evrakı
(TSME) 9494.
56
Again, TSME 9494.
 128

Indeed, Sester’s biggest contribution to the capital’s outdoors was his gradual two-step

conversion of the ravine-bisected hills behind Mahmud II’s marble colonnaded Çırağan palace

that cupped the shoreline between Beşiktaş and Ortaköy to form a sprawling romantic landscape.

Under Sultan Mahmud, Sester had to work within the bounds of the traditional terraced aesthetic,

but also naturalized these spaces as much as he could by turning the large flower parterres into

uneven lawns and adding multiple bodies of water with undulating frames. Ziver Paşa composed

an ode to mark the completion in 1839 of the first round of landscaping done under Sultan

Mahmud for the garden behind Çırağan, which was once inscribed on the door opening out to the

garden. The ode is unusual not only because it was for a garden gate suggesting perhaps that the

court wanted to emphasize the importance and physical centrality of its construction, but also

because it highlights, briefly but eloquently, the site’s terraced architecture:

The exalted Mahmud Khan, the spring season of the garden of imperial grandeur,

Made a new rose garden full of embellishment and glory.

When he commanded this meadow to be adorned in layers [ḳat ḳat],

Without a doubt, it became the envied and agreeing [ṭıbāḳ]57 garden of paradise.58

An undated oil painting from the Dolmabahçe palace collection offers a view from this

hillside garden looking onto the back of the crenellated palace, the delicate footbridge that

57
By selecting this particular word, the poet not only alludes to the overall harmony of the design, matching the
garden of paradise, but also intends to reiterate the poet that it was physically stacked like plates, a reiteration of the
phrase ḳat ḳat that appears in the previous line.
58
“Nev-bahar-ı bâġ-ı şevket Ḥażret-i Maḥmūd Ḫān
Eyledi bu baġçeyi nev gülşen-i pür-zîb ü şān
Ḳat ḳat bu ravżayı tezyîne fermân idicek
Oldı maḥsûd-ı ṭıbaḳ-ı bâġ-ı cennet bî-gümân.” Ahmed Sâdık Zîver Paşa, Dîvân ve münşe'ât, 452.
 129

connects it to the garden, and the walled elevation of the terraced parterres. It captures the early

phase of Sester’s work comprising the swelling ha-has that hold up the two ponds, a white

classical temple-like fabrique, which must have been one of his architectural commissions, and

mounds of soil removed to open up the pools occupying the foreground (fig. 3.6). On the flatter

ground, immediately behind the Dolmabahçe palace’s administrative structure (mabeyn), the

painting reveals a fragment of a garden developed for private use with similar pools. Julia

Pardoe, who likened the horticultural activity in the gardens of Beylerbeyi to a tower of Babel of

gardeners, also witnessed the frenzied activity behind Çırağan. Sester and his assistant must have

started on the projects within months of their arrival since her travel account was published in

1836, only a year after his contract signing. Her description of what Sester pursued behind

Çırağan animates the content of the undated painting, as well as the engraving corresponding to

the traveler’s account (fig. 3.7):

The gardens of the palace are extensive, but will require time to make them worthy of
description; at present, a great portion of the hill-side, behind the building is left in its
original state, boasting for all ornament sweeps of fine cypresses, and here and there a
tuft of almond trees, a group of acacias, or a majestic maple; while the white tents of the
Bulgarian workmen employed upon the walls, give to the scene the picturesque and
cheerful appearance of a summer encampment.59

Sester’s obituary further expands on his accomplishments in this “great compound [die groβe

Anlage] of Ortaköi,” the region where the palaces of the royal were sited, hence the connection

with the queen mothers in nearby Yıldız.60 Under his supervision, “mounds had to be removed,

rocks blown up, and basins filled in,” in order to properly realize “the conceits of painterly

garden scenes, and to faithfully imitate the images of nature.”61

59
Pardoe, 18
60
A.W., “Ein unterfränkischer Landsmann als Gartendirektor des Sultans,” 1195.
 130

The famous Weimar botanist Karl Koch (d. 1879) included a visit to Turkey in one of his

three pioneering scientific quests to collect plant specimens in the Caucasus. In 1843, he was

perhaps the first to leave an account of Sester’s gardening work in Çırağan. With a

horticulturalist’s eye for landscaping, tempered with a bit of hearsay, he spots the already extant,

walled-in parterres that Sester had to work with, and the earliest phase of the gardener’s attempt

at building up the foliage with trees and shrubs:

As soon as one reaches Fündüklü [sic, Fındıklı] and the rifle factory that borders it, the
royal winter palace of the pumpkin garden (Dolmabaghdsche), gradually comes into
view. This palace was used by Mahmud II during a large portion of the winter season.
Mahmud was responsible for the way in which the palace is currently set up. The current
Sultan now prefers to live on the Asian side of the city, as if he sensed the extent to which
he and his people now no longer fit in in Europe. At this point the visitor encounters a
series of developed areas, some of them enclosed by high walls, while others are open for
the enjoyment of the public. The pleasure garden Wiegenstein (Beschiktasch) then
follows, which boasts an excellent location between two ravines. A stream flows through
each of these ravines. Adjoining this garden is Tschiragan [Chiraghan] Palace, which was
built by Sultan Mahmud II. It is here that the current sultan [Abdülmecid] lives during a
portion of the hot summer months with his royal retinue. A German gardener was
commissioned with the job of landscaping in European style the inner areas that are
enclosed by walls. And, as far as one could see from the outside, the gardener seemed to
have a particular liking for green lawns, while trees and shrubs were relegated to the
background. Viewed from our distant vantage point, the garden did not appear to be
particularly handsome due to the stark contrast between its spartan appearance and the
surrounding naturally thick vegetation. Yet it was said that the garden was particularly
beautiful up close. Mahmud II spared no expense in order to improve the gardens that he
had created. The servant of the church, Abdul-Medschid, had bountiful shipments sent
each year to Constantinople from Vienna containing seed stores and decorative bushes.
However, I think that Constantinople possesses such beautiful plants that one does not
have to rely on foreign varieties. But man is rarely satisfied with the beautiful and
wonderful things that he possesses in close proximity, and is hardly able to resist the
inner drive to possess the foreign, even if it is not as beautiful.62

Foreign visitors privileged enough to visit the site with the imperial gardener in tow,

stress its terrain’s pre-Sester aridness, and provide insight into stages of its progress under his

command. Before Sester began the second phase of forestation for Abdülmecid, and only seven

61
A.W., “Ein unterfränkischer Landsmann als Gartendirektor des Sultans,” 1195.
62
Karl Heinrich Emil Koch, Wanderungen im Oriente, während der Jahre 1843 und 1844, vol. 2 (Weimar: Druck
und Verlag des Landes-Industrie-Comptoirs, 1846), 367-368.
 131

years into his directorship, Countess Ida von Hahn-Hahn (d. 1880), novelist to the German

aristocrats and a pen-pal to Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, met Sester by chance at the

lodgings of the Pera proprietress Madame Balbiani in the Fall of 1845. The gardener, a frequent

guest of the Balbiani boarding house, offered to take his compatriot on a tour of Mahmud’s

Çırağan. In a letter to her mother, after providing a lengthy description of the palace interiors,

from its porcelain collection to its sundry mirrors and clocks, the Countess lets her in on the

garden that was only recently being developed:

The garden of this palace is quite new, situated on the steep and totally bare side of a hill,
where as yet, nothing is to be seen that would give us the idea of a garden—no flowers,
no shade, no verdure, no water, nothing but the heavenly view of the Bosphorus; perhaps
in ten or twelve years it may be transformed into a garden. In the centre, between the
pavilions, is a parterre of flowers, where, however, you see nothing rare or handsome but
what you find in ours—climbing roses, dahlias, and the like. Orange and lemon trees
stand in pots, as with us, and are kept in winter in hot-houses.63

Prince Leopold, Duke of Brabant (and the future king of Belgium), who was hosted by

Abdülmecid in 1860, who took a guided tour of the palace garden with Sester and recorded its

transformation into his travel diary on April 13.64

After lunch, we went down the Bosphorus by boat to the gardens and kiosks of
Tschéragan. This garden, drawn by a German, is large and handsomely created. One sees
Constantinople, the Bosphorus, and even a bit of the Sea of Marmara. The soil, rocky
here, is not overly favorable for vegetation, also the garden provides no shade. Near here,
in the lower part of the garden, is another kiosk of the Sultan, all in white marble and
richly adorned, but in bad taste.65

Both the Countess and Duke’s observations over the garden’s barrenness, and lack of shade find

its representation on the lid of an Ottoman writing box. Executed in oil by the Armenian artist

63
Gräfin Ida Hahn-Hahn, Letters from the Holy Land (London: J. & D. A. Darling, 1849), 246.
64
Léopold II, Voyage à Constantinople, 1860. (Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 1997), 56-57.
65
Ibid. “Après déjeuner, nous descendîmes en caïk le Bosphore jusqu’aux jardins et kiosques de Tschéragan. Ce
jardin, tracé par un Allemand, est grand et joliment établi. On voit Constantinople, le Bosphore, et même un peu de
la mer de Marmara. Le sol, rocailleux ici, n’est pas excessivement favorable à la végétation, aussi le jardin ne
possède pas d’ombre. Tout près d’ici, dans un fond, se trouve un autre kiosque du Sultan, tout en marbre blanc et
orné d’une façon très riche, mais de mauvais goût.”
 132

and marquetry specialist Mıgırdıç Melkon, the painting is not only a rare local depiction of

Mahmud’s version of Çırağan, but also the single mid-century visual proof of Sester’s completed

output (fig. 3.8).66 (An earlier version of this object, a painting by Melkon is mentioned in the

previous chapter, but depicts the site without the addition of a central circular pavilion.)

Melkon’s painted lid shows the full span of the garden that reaches all the way up to a second,

larger, green-painted kiosk that has the exact same billowy roof resting on thin columns as did

the tent [çadır] kiosk, once perched right besides Sa‘dabad’s canal. This structure is likely the

earliest incarnation of the brick and stone pavilion that would later replace it during Abdülaziz’s

additions to the garden, but maintain its original shape-derived designation (fig. 3.9). The artist’s

pronouncement of Sester’s winding paths and burgeoning saplings presents a sharp contrast to

the even more arid hilltops to the garden’s right, and the urban sprawl to its left. A curious dun-

colored wall behind the southern wing of the palace appears to support a greenhouse, whose

glass panels are visible next to the temple-like garden folly––the same structure from the undated

oil-painting in Dolmabahçe’s collection. Small greenhouses indeed began to be imported from

England with Fethi Paşa’s initiative in Abdülmecid’s time.67

A recently discovered painting by the Italian painter Carlo Bossoli (d. 1884), more or less

taking the same bird’s-eye-view side glance of the reworked backyard with its aforementioned

undated other, depicts Mahmud II’s terraced first segment and the English garden behind it under

brilliant, saturated sunlight (fig. 3.10).68 To access this terraced section, the palace inhabitant

66
For Mıgırdıç Melkon, see Garo Kürkman, Armenian Painters in the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1923, vol. 2 (İstanbul:
Matüsalem Publications, 2004), 619-631.
67
Deniz Türker, ‘On Dokuzuncu Yüzyıl Diplomasisinin Kristal Saray Serüveni,’ Milli Saraylar Belgeler Dergisi 2
(2014): 83-98. Also, see Selman Can, Belgelerle Çırağan Sarayı (Ankara, T.C. Kültür Bakanlığı, 1999). 30-31.
68
Bossoli was an itinerant artist looking to find lucrative patronage in Europe’s east much like Melling. He painted
for the Russian aristocracy, and spent a considerable time in the Crimea working on the construction of the Odessa
 133

either had to use the covered footbridge that crossed over the public road, or if on horseback or

in a carriage, the ramp that was leveled with the road. Bossoli’s painting also tells us the heavily

landscaped terrace is separated from the Romantic garden above it (where figures are depicted

strolling the grounds) by a stately one-story stone greenhouse with a façade consisting of

pediments and pilasters and potted plants lining its entrance. The terrace itself contains a

carefully laid out set of round flower parterres with a central pool bearing a cascading fountain.

It is very likely that with his unusual ode to Mahmud’s new garden, “adorned in layers,” Ziver is

referring to the site that Bossoli foregrounds in his painting.

What these paintings do not show, however, is how Sester filled up the barren valley that

was sandwiched between the valides’ walled in, hilltop residence, and the thicket of cypresses

surrounding the saintly precinct of Yahya Efendi’s tomb, nestled on the northeast of Çırağan.

This was the second phase of Sester’s expansion, commissioned under Abdülmecid. Although no

paintings like the two previously mentioned examples have survived of what would first become

the forested extension of the Çırağan gardens with lakes and waterfalls, and later the centerpiece

of Abdülhamid II’s Yıldız palace, there are seventy-five, single-page expense accounts spanning

weekly work that started on February 5, 1849, that indicate intense gardening activity in the area.

Each of these expense accounts only sparsely fills a single page and lists the day laborers’ rates

(rençber yevmiyesi), without unfortunately providing a detailed plan of Sester’s overall

undertaking. However, they all bear his Ottoman seal, which identifies his position in

Abdülmecid’s court as the chief-gardener of the Çırağan waterfront palace, Çerāġañ sāḥilsarāy

opera house. His work in Istanbul is largely unknown and unpublished, unlike his celebrated genre scenes of the
Crimean War and lithographs depicting the Second Italian War of Independence (1859); see, Carlo Bossoli, The
War in Italy (London: Day & Son, 1859); and, Cristina Vernizzi, et. al. eds., Carlo Bossoli: cronache pittoriche del
Risorgimento (1859-1861) nella collezione di Eugenio di Savoia, principe di Carignano (Torino: Artema, 1985