Strolling Through Istanbul: The Classic Guide to the City (73 page)

Between Kanlica and Anadolu Hisar
ı
are the remains of the oldest yal
ı
on the Bosphorus, that of the Grand Vezir Köprülü Amcazade Hüseyin Pa
ş
a, built about 1698. All that exists of the original house is the wreck of a once very beautiful room built out on piles over the sea. The central area has a wooden dome with spacious bays on three sides of it; a continuous row of low windows in these bays lets in the cool breezes and gives views of the Bosphorus in all directions. But the astonishing thing about it was the exquisite and elaborate moulding and painting of ceiling and walls with arabesques, geometrical designs, floral garlands, in enchanting colours and in gold; especially lovely was a long series of panels above the windows each with a vase of different flowers. Towards the beginning of the twentieth century an attempt to rescue this unique room from ruin was made by the Society of the Friends of Istanbul, who published a sumptuous album of hand-gilded and coloured plates with a preface by Pierre Loti and descriptive text by H. Saladin. Since then, however, the room has been totally neglected and is now in the last stages of decay. It is said that a restoration is planned in the near future; one hopes that it is not already too late to save what is left of this once beautiful and historic yal
ı
.

ANADOLU H
İ
SARI

We come now to the Anatolian Castle opposite the Rumelian one. The castle was built by Beyazit I Y
ı
ld
ı
r
ı
m, the Thunderbolt, probably in 1390 or a few years later. This is the Beyazit whom Marlowe makes introduce himself as the Turkish Emperor:

But a few scenes later we find Tamburlaine entering in triumph and “two Moores drawing Baiazeth in his cage, and his wife following him.” Beyazit appears to have committed suicide soon after; and the legend has it that in order to avoid the ignominy of seeing his wife perform menial services for a possible conqueror, as Beyazit had had to do, no subsequent Ottoman sultan ever contracted a legal marriage. This tale is singularly unfounded since several later sultans were in fact legally married, including Fatih Mehmet and Süleyman the Magnificent.

The castle is a small one consisting of a keep and its surrounding wall, together with an outer wall or barbican guarded by three towers; parts of the barbican have been demolished. Gabriel suggests, on the basis both of historical sources and methods of construction, that only the keep and its wall were built by Beyazit, the barbican and towers being added later by Fatih Mehmet at the same time that he was building the fortress opposite. It is a pretty little castle and well deserves the name of Güzelce, the Handsome or Charming One, by which it was originally known. And the village which surrounds it is very attractive; from the quiet and picturesque street that borders the castle along the sea, there is one of the best views of the superb fortifications of Rumeli Hisar
ı
. In this street also is one of the very few surviving namazgahs, or open air mosques; it consists simply of a stone mihrab and a stone mimber standing at one end of a grassy plot of ground surrounded by low walls. Since the namazgah is mentioned in the
Hadika
but not by Evliya, one may take it that it was established some time between 1660 and 1780. Unfortunately it is in a rather dilapidated condition.

THE SWEET WATERS OF ASIA

The village is bathed on the south by one of the two rivers known to Europeans as the Sweet Waters of Asia. This one is called in Turkish Göksu, or Sky Stream; the other, a few hundred metres to the south, is Küçüksu, or Little Stream. Between them, in what was once a lovely meadow, there are a small palace and an elaborate çe
ş
me, the favourite resort on holidays in Ottoman times of the
beau monde
: it is still a resort, though the
monde
is not so
beau
(at least not socially), and beside Küçüksu is a swimming place with an artificially sandy beach.

The Küçüksu Çe
ş
me, one of the most beautiful baroque fountains in Istanbul and a favourite subject for artists in the nineteenth century, was founded by Selim III in 1806. The Sultan’s name and the date of foundation of the fountain are given in a long calligraphic chronogram of 32 lines inscribed across all four faces of the çe
ş
me, ending with these lines:

The palace of Küçüksu, a pretty little edifice on the lip of the sea, was erected for Sultan Abdül Mecit in 1856–7 by Niko
ğ
os Balyan on the site of several earlier imperial residences, the first of them apparently dating from 1752. Abdül Mecit at first used Küçüksu only as a pied-à-terre on day-trips from Dolmabahçe, and so the palace did not include bedrooms in its original design. But several chambers were converted into bedrooms later in the nineteenth century, when Küçüksu was used to house visiting dignitaries, a role it continued to serve in the first half-century of the Republic. In recent years the palace has been restored and it is now open as a museum.

Just next to the beach at Küçüksu stands the largest and grandest yali of them all, that of K
ı
br
ı
sl
ı
Mustafa Emin Pa
ş
a. Built originally about 1760 but added to and redecorated later, its façade on the Bosphorus is over 60 metres long, mostly of one storey only but with a central part of two. The rooms are arranged with great symmetry around three, rather than the usual two, great halls: of these the eastern one is perhaps the most beautiful, paved in marble with a marble fountain in the centre under a vaulted ceiling decorated with exquisite mouldings and painted panels of bowls of flowers; to north and south slender wooden columns with Corinthian columns divide the central space from two bays, one giving directly onto the sea, the other providing the entrance from the garden. Four superbly proportioned rooms open from this hall, two overlooking the Bosphorus, two the garden Still farther to the east is an enormous ballroom and a charming greenhouse with a pebble-mosaic pavement and a great marble pool with a curious fountain. The harem occupied the western wing of the house and was the oldest part of it: unfortunately it was demolished in the early 1970s.

KAND
İ
LL
İ
TO ÇENGELKÖY

We are now in the village of Kandilli, where there are several charming yal
ı
s, of which perhaps the handsomest as well as the best preserved is that of the Counts Ostrorog, built about 1790, distinguished by its rust-red colour. It is named after the Ostrorogs, a noble French-Polish family who moved to Turkey in the late eighteenth century. The last of the line, Count Jean Ostrorog, died in 1975. On the hill above is the palace of Adile Sultan, sister of Sultan Abdül Aziz. The palace was built in 1856 and restored after a fire in the 1980s; it is now a secondary school for girls.

The next ferry stop is the adjacent village of Vaniköy. Above Vaniköy we can see the tower of the Istanbul Rasathane, an astronomical observatory and seismological research centre. The Rasathane has a small but interesting astronomy museum, with a collection of the instruments and manuscripts of the sixteenth-century Turkish astronomer Takiuddin.

The large and imposing building on the shore south of Vaniköy is the Kuleli Officers Training College. The original building here was a barracks erected in 1828 by Mahmut II; Sultan Abdül Aziz replaced this in 1863 with the present
Empire-
style building, whose flanking conical-capped towers are landmarks on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus.

It was more or less on this site, probably, that the Empress Theodora, Justinian’s wife, established her famous hospice for fallen women, called Metanoia, or Repentance, of which Procopius writes with such bitter irony: “Theodora also devoted considerable attention to the punishment of women caught in carnal sin. She picked up some five hundred harlots in the forum, who earned a miserable living by selling themselves there for three obols, and sent them to the opposite mainland, where they were locked up in the monastery called Repentance to force them to reform their way of life. Some of them, however, threw themselves from the parapets at night and thus freed themselves from an undesired salvation.” The irony consists in the fact that, according to Procopius, Theodora was herself a harlot, and utterly un repentent.

Çengelköy, the Village of the Hooks, so-called according to Evliya because after the Conquest a store of Byzantine anchor hooks was found here, is an exceptionally pretty village with at least one extremely handsome yal
ı
, that of Sadullah Pa
ş
a, dating from the late eighteenth century. The seaside village square is very picturesque, shaded by venerable plane trees and graced by a lovely baroque fountain. There are good restaurants on the square where one can dine while gazing down the Bosphorus towards the skyline of Stamboul.

BEYLERBEY

We now approach the Bosphorus Bridge once again as we come to the village of Beylerbey, known anciently as Stavros, or the Cross. Next to the iskele there is an imperial mosque known popularly as Beylerbey Camii. According to its dedicatory inscription, this was built in 1778 by Abdül Hamit I as part of a very extensive pious foundation, the other buildings of which, however, are not grouped round the mosque, as is the usual practice, but are near Yeni Cami in the old city. The mosque, a work of the architect Mehmet Tahir, is an attractive example of the baroque style, its dome arches arranged in an octagon, vigorously emphasized within and without, its mihrab in a projecting apse, richly decorated with an assortment of tiles of different periods from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The mimber and kürsü are unusually elegant and beautiful works, both of them of wood inlaid with ivory. It has two minarets, the second one added later by Mahmut II.

Beyond the village, and almost directly under the Bosphorus Bridge, we now come to the Palace of Beylerbey. The palace and the village were named after a Beylerbey, an Ottoman title that literally means Lord of Lords; this was Mehmet Pa
ş
a, Governor of Rumeli in the reign of Murat III (r. 1574–95). Mehmet Pa
ş
a built a mansion on this site at that time, and though it eventually vanished, the name Beylerbey lived on. The present Palace of Beylerbey was built for Abdül Aziz in 1861–5 by Sarkis Balyan, brother of Niko
ğ
os Balyan, architect of Dolmabahçe Saray
ı
. Beylerbey was used mainly as a summer lodge and as a residence for visiting dignitaries, one of the first being the Empress Eugénie of France, later visitors including the Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, the Shah Nasireddin of Persia, and King Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson of England. Abdül Hamit II lived here after his return from exile in Salonica, dying in Beylerbey in 1918. In recent years the palace has been splendidly restored and is now open as a museum.

The palace is divided into the usual selaml
ı
k and harem. The ground floor of this three-storey building houses the kitchens, with the state rooms and the imperial apartments on the two upper floors, a total of 26 elegantly furnished rooms, with six grand salons. The grandest of these salons are the Yellow Pavilion and the Marble Pavilion, the latter focused on a large pool with an elaborate cascade fountain. Beylerbey is as elaborately furnished and decorated as Dolmabahçe, including Hereke carpets; chandeliers of Bohemian crystal; French clocks; vases from China, Japan, France, and the imperial Ottoman workshops at Y
ı
ld
ı
z; and some superb murals by painters such as Aivazovski. The Royal Stables have also been restored; these occupy the building to the right of the palace as one looks at it from the sea. From the sea the palace is extremely attractive, with its two little marble pavilions at either end of the marble quay and bordered by lovely gardens.

Beyond Beylerbey we come to Kuzguncuk, another pretty village adorned by a very handsome yal
ı
with a rounded façade on the Bosphorus. After this we come to Üsküdar, the last (or the first) town on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus. From here our ferry sails back to the Galata Bridge, where we complete our journey up and down this most beautiful and historic strait.