“Geography determines history and provokes it,” wrote the poet Joseph Brodsky. The confluence of the Bosphorus with the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn is one of the most amazing views a big city can offer. It is here that Sultan Mehmet II decided to make his home. The Topkapi Palace is a huge palace surrounded by gardens that descended to the sea. With a strategic location, it was the nerve center of Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire: the sultan had just conquered it in 1453, giving it the name Istanbul.
Today, the hill that occupied the home of Mehmed the Conqueror is occupied by two magnificent museums: Topkapi itself with its pavilions, kiosks, courtyards and buildings that house endless functions; and the Istanbul Archaeological Museum that was developed, in the second part of the 19th century, on one of the terraces of the initial palace complex. Essentially it is a neoclassical construction, with generous outdoor spaces surrounding the venerable Azulejos kiosk – built in 1472 – among the first works carried out here. The two institutions are being renewed at a sustained pace.
In Topkapi, after a major restoration, the extensive harem complex, the building and exhibition dedicated to the treasure, the pavilion housing the sacred relics and the Seferli wing with its famous caftan exhibition have just been inaugurated.
After the Archaeological Museum, after the inauguration of the remodeled sarcophagi room (the Lycian and Alexander ones are the most famous) and twenty other rooms, the ambitious renovation of the Azulejos kiosk and the pavilion dedicated to antiquities began. oriental.
Mehmed II's personality has greatly influenced the palace's subsequent reputation. Visionary, polyglot, with great intellectual energy, the fearsome conqueror rushed to secure the different communities of Constantinople - Genoese, Greeks, Venetians - on whom he counted to develop a prosperous and open city, in which each could continue with their own religion and their own customs. Art was one of his greatest interests, for his own pleasure, but also as a symbol of strength, to reflect the power of his nascent empire.
Many artists and craftsmen moved to live in the palace grounds, then called Il Nuovo Serraglio, where large workshops were built for their use. In addition, he invited several prominent artists from the West, including Gentile Bellini of Venice, who painted the famous portrait of the sultan. And at his court there was also a prominent circle of astronomers, poets, scholars and scientists.
Mehmed II began acquiring and displaying manuscripts of great aesthetic value from all over the Islamic world: maps, weapons, armor and refined ceramics. As silk also generated a lot of enthusiasm in those times, an entire textile industry flourished in the Serraglio, but the most appreciated models were still those from Venice on the always open “liquid border” with Europe. Upon his death, the gala caftans were kept closed in bags, and the custom continued for centuries: those of the sultan, those of his children, those of his wives and those of official concubines.
As time went by, the construction of several pavilions was completed, including the Library of Ahmed III. At the end of the 18th century, Western culture began to have a greater influence on the taste of the sultans: thus arose, in 1853, the idea of moving to Dolmabahçe, a new, more modern palace on the banks of the Bosphorus.
The Topkapi remained closed for several decades, but in 1880, near the Azulejos kiosk, the Museum of Archeology was located, where you can see objects from Egypt, ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. The garden that surrounds the three pavilions of the museum invites you to a beautiful archaeological walk. The palace opened its doors to the public in 1924, a year after Atatürk declared the creation of the Republic of Turkey.
The two institutions are complementary and together give an idea of the phenomenal artistic wealth of past empires that is concentrated on this bank of the Bosphorus. The stored vitality of these sites may be the antidote that Orhan Pamuk (Nobel Prize winner in Literature) sought in his memoirs, asking himself what to do to “escape the melancholy of a dying culture, the bitter memory of a fallen empire.”
