A visit to Yıldız Palace today is a somewhat dispiriting experience. The coherence of the whole has long been lost: some buildings serve as government offices, as they did in the late nineteenth century, or as museums, but much of the palace's former grounds is parcelled out. With talk of the site becoming the latest of the president's Istanbul residences, the threat of effective privatization of the remainder looms. A notable virtue of Deniz Türker's book is that it enables us to capture some of the former magic of Yıldız, a place first conceived of as a retreat for the mothers of sultans.
The history of Yıldız has often been one of sultans escaping the constraints of public life, and in particular of Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) attempting to secrete himself far from the assassin's bullet: Türker 's fascinating and richly illustrated study tells a more complex story. Her wide-ranging research into visual and written sources establishes that a pavilion – a belvedere – first appeared here in 1795, built by Selim III for his mother. Soon, the hilltop became a suburban estate, accessible from the palaces on the Bosphorus shore below. Mahmud II (r. 1808–39) practised archery at Yıldız, but it was his consort, Bezm-i Alem, who re-emphasized the distaff connection, once she became co-ruler with her son Abdülmecid, Mahmud's successor. Famous for her public endowments, Bezm-i Alem built an open air mosque here, and a second pavilion. Her patronage provided Yıldız with a farm, an orchard and garden complex, and chalets, cottages, and French-style urban mansions. Contemporary records show that the orchards produced a remarkable 581 different kinds of fruit.
The image of the Ottoman nineteenth century as an era of gloom and dysfunction is belied by events at Yıldız. In 1835, a Bavarian landscape gardener named Christian Sester arrived, and worked first at Çirağan, Mahmud's European-style Bosphorus shore palace where he built grottoes and planted exotic species, then at Yıldız. In the hands of Bezm-i Alem and Abdülmecid, the valley and long slope behind Mahmud's European-style Çırağan, became a grand Romantic park. The visionary remaking of the landscape continued once Abdülaziz (r. 1861–76) was on the throne, and his mother and co-ruler, Pertevniyal, became Sester's patron.
Sester's approach to gardening was philosophical, and attuned to the political inclinations of the Ottoman royals at this time. Once the janissaries, ultimate symbol of the ancien régime, had been expunged (in 1826) and the age of reform was underway, the dynasty sought a new imperial image. Eschewing French formality in garden design, which smacked of authoritarianism, the more liberal rule that the empire now aspired to was to be exemplified in the English garden – conspicuously titivated, yet emphasizing untouched nature. Sester was joined by other German gardeners, who fostered his legacy after his death in 1866. Abdülhamid's reign brought change in the corps of gardeners: he employed men from Kastamonu (in northern Anatolia) and Albania, and French experts now replaced German. Needless to say, Istanbul's elite competed to outdo one another in innovation and ambition in the garden arts.
It was a short step from the rustic landscape Yıldız had become, to the “Alpine” aesthetic that Abdülhamid embraced, with wooden structures in the Ottoman vernacular echoing the “country cottages” popular in highland sanctuaries elsewhere. This was “a homier, more light-hearted, more picturesque idiom” than that of Abdülaziz's grandiose, neoclassical Mabeyn Pavilion. The “lifestyle publications” of the time made international architectural taste and design accessible: the history of prefabricated buildings predated Abdülhamid, but they caught his interest. His most visible essay into this technology was his state-of-the-art Yıldız hospital for war veterans, which was possibly locally made. The hugely damaging 1894 earthquake underlined the appeal of light, prefab, structures – again, like the craze for gardening, inventively detailed, portable, buildings found wide favour.
Abdülhamid made of Yıldız a palatial complex, albeit one where he could indulge his simple tastes, outdoors as much as possible. The photograph albums he commissioned to showcase the empire are famous, but Türker has located a hitherto unknown album by an unnamed photographer, dating from 1905, with 64 images of the imperial sites of Istanbul. The early 1890s had seen the renovation of these sites, as Abdülhamid impressed on the public mind the achievements of his forebears and his own unbreakable link to a glorious past.
The images in the album relating to Yıldız document the end stages of its transformation from garden retreat to the heart of the empire's administration. Hedges, walls and fences are often seen in the photographs, and Türker suggests they symbolize the status and virtue inherent in social order, and act as metaphors for the boundary between manmade and natural terrain, between civilization and rusticity.
By contrast with the mood of restfulness pervading much nature photography, the album induces the feeling of the effort of movement between the sites depicted – including those where Abdülhamid stayed in his early years. As Türker writes: “Almost every image in the album is framed to elicit a jolt in the armchair traveller”. She detects an appeal to female sensibility, and opines: “This entire album could be assessed as a depiction of one of the Friday-afternoon outings of the Sultan's harem …”. Türker proposes that the architecture embodied in its images is closely tied to Abdülhamid's biography and to his own particular connection to his surroundings.
The contribution of Türker's book to landscape history generally, as well as to our understanding of the changing face of Istanbul, is immeasurable. She explores to effect the interplay between the personal taste of the sultans of the Ottoman nineteenth century and their imperial and political vision, humanizing them, and giving the royal women, and their gardeners, who all stamped their mark on Yıldız, their place as historical actors. Abdülhamid II has fared better of late in the public mind: here he is revealed as being as innovative as many another landowner seeking to transform his built and natural environment. The Ottoman idiom was specific, but cultural trends were international, and those at the apex of society, here as elsewhere, were receptive to the zeitgeist, and indulged their whims in creative and enriching ways.
