ABSTRACT
Topkapı Palace, built by Mehmed the Conqueror in Istanbul during the mid fifteenth century, was the main seat of the Ottoman rulers for more than four centuries.1 This extraordinary royal complex positioned at the tip of the Historic Peninsula and surrounded with high walls was defined as a “city-within-thecity”. This imperial self-sufficient city with an area of 700,000 square meters and thousands of inhabitants, could be accepted as an Islamic city par excellence. However, rather than focusing on the “golden age” of the Topkapı Palace, namely fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this chapter includes numerous travel accounts depicting the royal complex after its gradual abandonment following the seventeenth century. As stated by Nebahat Avcıog˘lu, “most interpretations of Topkapı, identifying it as the ultimate icon of the empire, have aimed at, and to a certain extent achieved, a coherent historical narrative of its development, but have also paradoxically invalidated the study of the palace after the “classical” period (sixteenth century) when the presumed signs of decline and decentralization of the empire had begun to appear, particularly during the eighteenth century and afterwards.”2 This chapter will map the transformation of the Topkapı Palace during the period between the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, from a secluded and glorious seat of the Ottoman rulers to a tourist spectacle, and aims at questioning the role of travel accounts in this construction. The Seraglio, or ‘mysterious’ palace of the Islamic ruler, has always attracted
western visitors and the life behind its walls, and especially the harem, was a great mystery for the westerner desirous of grasping and representing the Serail. Each travel account was in fact an act of re-presenting and constructing the truth. Travel accounts, while depicting the Topkapı Palace, also took part in the process of meaning making and each piece of travel writing performs as a tool for understanding the episteme of both those being represented and those who were representing. Instead of focusing on a specific traveller from a specific era, this chapter suggests a comparative reading of numerous travellers’ accounts on a rather long time period. In other words, it aims to trace the on-going and never-ending process of how a space turns into a place, through narratives and by addressing the changing perception and representation of one particular monument through the eyes of travellers of different periods. French poststructuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari suggested that
the nomad himself does not change in the course of travelling, but instead transforms the space, or the meaning of space. The changing perception of social space, in Lefebvrian terms, with respect to the changing temporal context, may be readily observed using travel accounts produced at different periods. Thus not only the mobility of the individual within space but the versatility of meaning with respect to space-time could be analysed. Even though architectural transformations of the royal complex were not
deciphered in travellers’ accounts in detail, the palace was perceived and depicted entirely differently during different eras. During the period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, not only the act of travelling but also the nature of the visitors drastically changed. Once opening its doors solely to diplomatic envoys and royal visitors, le Palais du Grand Seigneur (the Palace of the Grand Signor) became a part of the grand tour conducted by western elites during the nineteenth century; and eventually, by the twentieth century, le Vieux Palais (the Old Palace) actually turned into a popular tourist destination, a must-see spot for the modern traveller. This transformation may be observed thanks to the royal decrees (firman) found in the Ottoman Archives of Prime Ministry, granting entrance permits to the palace grounds. Therefore, this chapter does not focus on the mobility of the nomadic individual but on the mobility of meaning attributed to place, which is constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed through various media, one of which being the travel literature.
