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Extract

Velvet and Steel

Nazan Ölçer

The curator Nazan Ölçer transformed two very different Istanbul museums into world-class institutions. No one else could have done it. Andrew Finkel discovers why

  • Photographs: Ara Güler (left) and Monica Fritz

I had been talking to Nazan Ölçer for three hours when the timbre of our conversation suddenly changed. Up until then she had spoken with light-hearted enthusiasm about her long career as (hyperbole aside) Istanbul’s most prestigious curator since Osman Hamdi Bey took the reins of the Imperial Museum in 1881. She was recalling a meeting in the late 1990s, when she was still in full flight as director of the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, an institution she had transformed from a leaky depot housing some of the world’s greatest, if most neglected, handicrafts into an internationally recognised centre of excellence. Her voice slowed, grew sombre, almost sad, as she described a moment that, in retrospect, was a turning point in her own life, not to mention a watershed in the cultural life of Istanbul…

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Issue 70, Summer 2026 Outpost of Peace
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Other Highlights from Cornucopia 70
  • A Journey to Rough Cilicia

    Barnaby Rogerson and the photographer Don McCullin set out from Turkey’s capital, Ankara, for Rough Cilicia

  • The Flowering of Europe

    Martyn and Alison Rix chronicle an extraordinary legacy


  • Back from the Brink

    This grand mansion, an Ottoman outpost on the remote southern peninsula of Datça, was rotting away when it was rescued by an enterprising new owner. It has now regained every inch of its early-19th-century charm. By Rupert Scott. Photographs by Monica Fritz


  • Seeing the Light

    A new exhibition turns the limelight on Halil Pasha, pioneer of Turkish impressionism. By Ayla Jean Yackley


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Issue 70, Summer 2026 Outpost of Peace
£15.00 / $19.86 / 922.68 TL
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