A handful of obscure archival fragments from Sultan Abdülhamid II’s imperial library in Yıldız have revealed a curious architectural practice that took place in the urban gardens of members and officials of the Ottoman court: they had a penchant for imported chalets.
Deniz Türker discusses her research on how this relatively niche fad for importation quickly shifted to widespread local prefabrication in the last decades of the nineteenth century. With the entrepreneurial oversight of production facilities in Istanbul, a larger swath of the capital’s population began to find ways to express their domestic tastes in an extremely competitive spirit on Istanbul’s expanding suburbs.
In tracing these practices through state archives, newspapers, novel, and photographs, Türker also proposes some preliminary answers to the scarcity of original architectural drawings in the Ottoman archives.
A historian of Islamic art and architecture, Deniz Türker is a graduate of Harvard University’s dual degree program in the History of Art and Architecture and Middle Eastern Studies. She specializes in nineteenth-century Ottoman material culture with a particular focus on the art, architecture, and landscape of reform and respective transformations in patronage patterns. She has published on Ottoman collectors, antiquarians, and historians of Islamic art as well as Ottoman garden and landscape histories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Issue 66, December 2023
Turkey’s Centenary Issue
