Strolling Through Istanbul: The Classic Guide to the City (14 page)

One enters into a room with a pretty fountain under the dome, which opens by a huge arch into the second room. Here are displayed the bow of the Prophet Muhammed and the swords of the first four Caliphs, Abu Bekr, Umar, Othman and ‘Ali; farther on is one of the doors of the great mosque at Mecca. In the room to the left are some beautiful ancient Kurans; the solid gold covering for the Hacer-i Esved, the stone which fell from heaven and is built into the Kaaba at Mecca; also water-gutters from Mecca of chased and moulded silver-gilt, and other precious objects. Returning to the room with the fountain, we pass into another chamber where are preserved the more personal relics of the Prophet: hairs from his beard, one of his teeth, his footprint, his seal, and so on. Through a grilled door in this room one looks into (one cannot enter) the room where the Holy Mantle itself is preserved in a golden coffer under a magnificent golden baldachino, and in another coffer is the Holy Standard, unfurled at times when a holy war was declared against the infidel. This room has the most superb tiles of the greatest Iznik period, but has been somewhat marred by the heavy rococo fireplace added by Mahmut II.

Leaving the room by the door opposite that by which we entered, we find ourselves in the open L-shaped Portico of Columns. This portico surrounds two sides of the Pavilion of the Mantle and opens onto a marble terrace bordering a pool with a fountain; at one end is the Rivan Kö
ş
kü, at the other the Circumcision Room. This is one of the most charming parts of the Palace and commands excellent views of Pera and the Golden Horn. It was here that Thomas Dallam set up the famous mechanical organ which Queen Elizabeth I had sent as a gift to Sultan Mehmet III. The Rivan Kö
ş
kü at the east end of the portico was built in 1636 by Murat IV to commemorate his capture of Rivan, or Arivan, in Persia. It is a cruciform room entirely revetted with Iznik tiles dating from just after the greatest period but still beautiful; the outside has a polychrome revetment of marble. At the other end of the portico is the Circumcision Room (Sünnet Odas
ı
) built by the mad Sultan Ibrahim in 1641; it is entirely sheathed inside and out in tiles. They are rather a puzzle, for they date from several different periods from the greatest Iznik style in
cuerda seca
technique through the great period in the second half of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; few if any belong to the time of Ibrahim himself; as it is they form a sort of museum of Turkish tiles of the best periods. The marble terrace with the pool is the meeting place of the Third and Fourth Courts.

THE FOURTH COURT

The Fourth Court is not really a courtyard but a garden on various levels, adorned with kö
ş
ks or pavilions. In the centre of the balustrade of the marble terrace stands the Iftariye, a baldachino with a magnificent gilt-bronze canopy erected by Sultan Ibrahim in 1640. The balcony receives its name from the
iftar
, or evening meal, which is taken after sunset in the holy month of Ramazan. Beyond it stands the famous Baghdad Kö
ş
kü, a sort of grander replica of the Rivan Kö
ş
kü, built by Murat IV in 1639 to commemorate his capture of Baghdad. Cruciform like the other, it, too, is sheathed in tiles both within and without and is surrounded by a columned portico. The tiles are chiefly blue and white and some may antedate the kö
ş
k itself. Its enormous bronze chimney-piece is very fine and its dome splendid with elaborate arabesques on a crimson ground, painted on leather.

A staircase beside the pool leads down into what was once the tulip garden of Ahmet III. This garden was the site of the famous tulip festivals of the Lâle Devri, the Age of Tulips, that delightful epoch in the first half of the eighteenth century. It is still a pretty garden and on the north side is a charming rococo kö
ş
k called Sofa Kö
ş
kü, or sometimes, for no good reason, the Kö
ş
k of Kara Mustafa Pa
ş
a. It seems to have been built or thoroughly reconstructed by Ahmet III, doubtless to enjoy his tulips from, and again redecorated in 1752 by Mahmut I; it is a very pretty example of Turkish rococo. Farther on is a low tower called variously Ba
ş
lala Kulesi and Hekimba
ş
ı
Odas
ı
, the Tower of the Head Tutor or the Chamber of the Head Physician; it doubtless served different purposes at different periods. Across a road that leads down to the outer gardens, there stands on a marble terrace the Mecidiye Kö
ş
kü, the latest addition to the buildings of the Saray. This was constructed in about 1840 by Abdül Mecit I, not long before he built the Palace of Dolmabahçe on the Bosphorus; it is entirely western in style. On its lower floor and terrace, overlooking the Marmara, there is an excellent restaurant; if one has spent the morning in the Saray one would do well to fortify oneself here before visiting the Harem.

THE HAREM

We now return to the Court of the Divan to visit the Harem, the public entrance to which is through the Carriage Gate under the Divan tower. The Harem is a veritable labyrinth of passages, courtyards, gardens, staircases and rooms – some 300 of them almost all surprisingly small – on half a dozen levels. It includes not only the women’s quarters or Harem proper, but also the quarters of the Black Eunuchs who were in charge of the Harem, rooms and schoolhouses for the young princes, the Sultan’s private apartments, and the apartments called the Cage (Kafes) where the Sultan’s brothers lived in relatively honourable confinement. To inspect it all even cursorily would take many days of arduous exploration. Perhaps fortunately, only about two dozen rooms, passages and courtyards are at present open to the public, including most of the more important and impressive ones; the rest of the area is still undergoing restoration. We shall therefore confine this account principally to those rooms which are now open.

The Harem was not an original part of the Palace as laid out by Fatih Mehmet. Fatih seems to have designed Topkap
ı
Saray
ı
as a kind of glorified office-building for the transaction of the public business of the Empire and for the training of the Civil Service, reserving the Eski Saray on the Third Hill for his domestic life, his wives and concubines. His immediate successors, Beyazit II, Selim I and Süleyman the Magnificent for most of his reign, maintained this arrangement. Süleyman is said to have allowed his wife Roxelana (Haseki Hürrem) to install herself in Topkap
ı
Saray
ı
, but probably in wooden pavilions, like many of those at the Eski Saray; and their son, Selim II, seems to have followed suit. At all events, the earliest buildings in the Harem which can be definitely dated belong to the reign of Selim’s son and successor, Murat III (r. 1574–95).

The Carriage Gate receives its name from the fact that the Harem ladies here entered their carriages whenever they were allowed to go for an outing. Above the gate there is an inscription giving the date A.H. 996 (A.D. 1588). The gateway opens into a small, dark room called Dolapl
ı
Kubbe, the Dome with Cupboards, and this is followed by a room revetted with quite fine tiles, which served as a guard room. On the left a door opens to a long passage leading down to the gardens of the Saray, and another gives access to the mosque of the Black Eunuchs; while on the right a door opens into the Divan tower. We now enter the long, narrow, open Courtyard of the Black Eunuchs, also revetted with tiles and with a colonnade on the left, behind which are the rooms of the eunuchs. Both the guard room and the courtyard have inscriptions dated A.H. 1079 (A.D. 1668–9), showing that these areas were reconstructed or redecorated by Mehmet IV after the great fire of 1665. The living quarters of the Black Eunuchs are arranged around an inner covered courtyard in three storey with a tall fireplace at one end. There are ten or twelve little rooms on each floor, but even so they must have been very crowded since there were several hundred of them; doubtless they served in watches and slept in relays. Returning to the open courtyard, we pass on the left a staircase that leads up to the Princes’ Schoolrooms where the young sons of the Sultan received their instruction; these are pretty rooms with good tiles, but they are not now open to the public. Just beyond, a door leads to the apartments of the Chief Black Eunuch or K
ı
zlar A
ğ
as
ı
(literally Lord of the Girls); he was a most important and powerful official in the Harem, but his apartments (also closed) are very small and gloomy.

At the far end of the open courtyard is the Cümle Kap
ı
s
ı
, or Main Gate, into the Harem proper. It leads into a second guard room, from the left side of which a long, narrow corridor stretches to the open Courtyard of the Cariyeler, or women slaves. This courtyard is a pleasant one with a colonnade on one side; round the far end of it stretch the dormitories of the slaves on two floors. On the right are three suites of rooms for the chief women officials of the Harem; the Kahya Kad
ı
n, or Head Stewardess, an important functionary who under the Sultan’s mother ruled over the Harem; the Harem treasurer; and the Harem laundress. Their rooms are very attractive, domed and tiled, and with a good view over the gardens, not at all like the stuffy rooms of the eunuchs. (One of these suites is open to the public.) The long staircase just beyond the three suites leads down to a large courtyard on a much lower level occupied by the Harem hospital. It is very picturesque, but unfortunately it is not yet open to the public.

Retracing our steps a little way we come to a short passage that leads to the large open Courtyard of the Valide Sultan. At the north-west corner of the courtyard a doorway leads into Ocakl
ı
Oda, the Room with a Hearth, a tiled chamber dominated by a splendid bronze ocak, or chimney-piece. On the right a door leads into the apartments of the First and Second Kad
ı
ns, the two highest ranking wives of the Sultan. On the left a door opens into a smaller chamber called Çe
ş
meli Oda, the Room with a Fountain, named for the pretty çe
ş
me that adorns one of its walls. This and Ocakl
ı
Oda served as ante-rooms between the Harem and the Sultan’s own apartments.

The apartments of the Valide Sultan occupy most of the west side of the courtyard that bears her name, with four rooms on the ground floor and four more above, all of them dating to 1666–7. The rooms on the ground floor, the only ones open to the public, are her salon, reception room, bedroom and sitting room. Her bedroom has Iznik tiles dated 1667, with floral panels of quite magnificent design for this reatively late date. A long and narrow hall known as the Corridor of the Baths leads north from the Valide’s sitting room to the Sultan’s apartments. This passes through an elaborate suite of rooms and baths, partly on two floors, separating the baths to the east from the living rooms to the west. There are two baths, the one on the south belonging to the Valide and the other to the Sultan. Only the Sultan’s bath is open to the public. The two baths are almost identical, their decoration baroque but simple; the actual bathing place screened off by a gilt-bronze grille.

At its north end the Corridor of the Baths leads to the imperial reception room known as Hünkâr Sofas
ı
, the Hall of the Emperor, the largest and grandest room in the Palace. Divided by a great arch into two unequal sections, the larger section is domed, the smaller, slightly raised, with a balcony above. The upper part of the room – dome, pendentives and arches – has been restored to its original appearance in the late sixteenth century, while the lower part retains the baroque decorations with which Osman III (r. 1754–7) unfortunately adorned the entire room; the contrast is not altogether happy. This Hall was a reception room where the Sultan gave entertainments for the women of the Harem, the balcony being used by the musicians. It was evidently built somewhat later than the adjacent Salon of Murat III, which is dated by an inscription to 1578. The tradition that this room, like Murat’s, is by Sinan is not impossible; Murat may well have decided to add an even grander room to his already very beautiful suite. This great room is certainly worthy of Sinan and if not built by him cannot at all events be very much later.

We pass through a small but lavishly tiled antechamber into the Salon of Murat III, often but erroneously called his bedroom. This is undoubtedly the most beautiful room in the Saray, retaining the whole of its original decoration. The walls are sheathed in Iznik tiles at the apogee of their greatest period; the panel of plum blossoms surrounding the elegant bronze ocak is especially noteworthy, as is the calligraphic frieze that runs around the room. Opposite the ocak is an elaborate three-tiered fountain of carved polychrome marble set in a marble embrasure. But it is the perfect and harmonious proportions of the room as much as its superb decoration that lend it distinction and charm. As we have said, it was created by Sinan in 1578. Early in the next century (1608–9) Ahmet I added a pendant to it on the west, a much smaller room but domed and tiled almost as beautifully as Murat’s. It looks out over the pool and garden and the much later marble terrace of Osman III, and the light reflected from the predominately blue-green tiles gives it a cool and aqueous atmosphere. A century later still (1705–6) Ahmet III added or redecorated another tiny room to the south, called Yem
ı
ş
Odas
ı
, or the Fruit Room, because of the painted panels of fruit with which the walls are decorated. This belongs to the high Tulip period and shows the first beginnings of European rococo influence; but of all the rococo rooms in the Palace this is surely the most bewitching.