Strolling perceptively through the Hamidiye Tomb and courtyard allows one to discover the physical components that came together to create this site, and leads one to ponder the impact this site was designed to create. In particular, two questions arise: why is this royal tomb and garden graveyard located in the heart of town; how was the average visitor expected to interact with this burial site?

The View from Outside

What the unheeding passer-by along the street outside the Hamidiye Tomb can easily miss are the subtle signals designed to announce the purpose for which this edifice was built, and that it was built for royalty.

Thanks to the cleaning undertaken around 2008, we can see that the exterior walls of the tomb are not some indeterminate black stone, as they appeared before then, but clad entirely, up to the cornice, in creamy white marble panels splendidly highlighted by overtones of grey. To clad the tomb's façade entirely in marble was a rare luxury indeed, most unusual in Ottoman architecture, made possible by the relative smallness of the building, which brought the cost of all this marble within reasonable bounds. Almost certainly the marble was quarried at the island of Marmara (so-called from the Greek word for marble) in its namesake the Sea of Marmara, the famed source of this coveted stone since ancient times.

From the street we perceive two domes, the dome over the portico recreating, on a smaller scale, the larger dome over the mausoleum. Just as the grey and cream colours of the marble complement one another, the domes tie the portico and mausoleum together by virtue of their similar shape and identical colour, both covered in grey panels of lead, the traditional material used to cover domes. The shiny brass finials at their peaks further unite the two domes. These traditional elements of Ottoman architecture crown domes over buildings in which visitors would pray – mosques and tombs – and are oriented in the direction of Mecca, which lies perpendicular to the crescent at each finial's top.