On Boxing Day 1893, 32,251 travellers descended on Constantinople, not Istanbul’s historical peninsula, but rather a colossal replica of the city, constructed under the vast glass-and-iron canopy of Olympia in West London. For a multitude unlikely to make the journey across Europe, Constantinople in London represented the real thing. Passengers alighting at Addison Road station were invited to board a caique to ferry them down an imitation Bosphorus, through a torch-lit Byzantine cistern, into an ersatz Golden Horn. Twice daily for nearly a year, a cast of 2,000 performed Constantinople or The Revels of the East – A Grand Terpsichorean, Romantic and Lyric Spectacle, and Aquatic Pageant, in Two Acts and Six Tableaux. Orientalist for sure, the extravaganza helped reshape the popular image of the Ottoman empire at a time when the reputation of Abdülhamid II was at a low and Great Game machinations at their height. It also gave birth to other ‘Constantinoples’, from Buffalo to Budapest, and while few traces of these simulacra remain, they arguably created an exotic, indelible, fairy-tale image of the city in the Western imagination. Shaped by commerce and love of spectacle, the performances at Olympia also blazed an all too curious trail to today’s mass tourism.
Issue 67, December 2024
Beauty in the Wilderness
