The Ottoman Renaissance in the Balyan Final Project of the Çırağan Palace Waterfront Façade
Theo Faugeres - January 11, 2023
The Gurekian family archive features documents that belonged to Sarkis Balyan (1831-1899), a member of the Balyan family, the most prominent architectural dynasty of 19th-century Istanbul. The final elevation drawing for the waterfront façade of Çırağan Palace, finished in 1871, appears in this collection (Figure 1). The Çırağan (Figure 4) was an imperial palace designed to be the residence of the Ottoman Sultan and a yalı, or a mansion laid out along the shore of the Bosphorus. The final Çırağan project caves into many of the architectural tendencies spurred by a Romantic awareness of change and a break with the past, culminating in the style called the “Ottoman Renaissance.”1 In trying to expand and solidify the Ottoman imperial claim, the style drew from far-flung and diverse sources, geographically and temporally, including the Andalusian Islamic (particularly the Alhambra), Gothic, and 15th-century Ottoman architecture.2 Only the Alhambresque (derived from the Alhambra) and Gothic, however, figure prominently in the Çırağan drawing; 15th-century Ottoman architectural details and the characteristically complex and detailed decorative program are absent.3 A tension arises between opposing perceptions of this building: as a medley of near-exclusively Gothic and Alhambresque details, the imperial palace design retains a certain Ottoman-ness. The key to this dilemma is considering the mode of the building as a waterfront mansion, a yalı, and the precedents of imperial palaces of this type. By adhering to the same two-story, waterfront frame as the Dolmabahçe and Beylerbeyi yalı palaces (Figures 2 and 3), the Çırağan figures as yet another in a line of Bosphorian imperial Ottoman palaces. By incorporating Alhambresque and Gothic decorative callbacks, the Çırağan exemplifies the Ottoman Renaissance goal of expanding the imperial claim and alleged cultural patrimony of the empire; following on yalı precedents, the elevation drawing still presents itself as an intrinsically Ottoman palace.
In looking at the drawing, the palace appears sectioned horizontally rather than vertically. Raising the viewer’s gaze from the reflection on the Bosphorus, the building appears as a solid rectangle, and with a small amount of scrutiny, the shading indicates the slight dynamism of the façade. Four bands run parallel to the water, splitting the building into its two stories and two outer cushioning layers. Progressing upwards, the bands wax and wane: the lowest is a multilayered, jutting cornice, the following two pair cornice with a string of brackets, and the highest leaves only the brackets, the protuberance almost entirely flattened onto the façade. The ubiquitous pillars demarcate the secondary vertical divisions of the building. Each adheres to the same pattern: the square-carved pedestal, then the shaft, then an Alhambresque flower capital, then a square (with a square carved into it) on the level of the brackets, all comfortably fitted between the horizontal bands. Mounted on this orthogonal frame are vignettes, three openings apiece, arranged as back-to-back equals or hierarchized in a Serlio window scheme. Crowning the darkened orifices is varied Gothic detail, arches cascading in geometric and intersecting tracery and forming into circles, cusped hexafoils, and bulbous stalactites; notably, an odd sequence of hanging bars occasionally replaces this — might they be dentils? In the top and bottom outer layers, octagrams are carved into rectangles.
As the Ottoman Empire churned under reform, sentiment was rallied around preserving those images of a past faced with imminent destruction.4 What constituted that past, however, opened questions on the Ottoman identity and the historical heritage to which the Empire could lay claim. The Ottoman Renaissance was born as a response, made up primarily of three styles, as mentioned above: the Alhambresque, the Gothic, and 15th-century (with a bit of 16th-century) Ottoman. The Usul-i Mi’mari Osmani (Principles of Ottoman Architecture) was a government-commissioned publication that professed the principles of the Ottoman Renaissance style and was meant for foreign consumption at the 1873 Vienna International Exposition. In including the Alhambresque, Gothic, and Ottoman styles as components of the Ottoman Renaissance, it also embarked on a legitimating analysis of the value in all three to validate the Renaissance style as a whole.
The interplay of octagrams and hexafoils, flower column capitals, and arch tracery in the elevation drawing replicate the betweenness of Gothic and the Alhambresque in the Ottoman Renaissance. While the octagram and hexafoil are different, and even opposite along the lines of the sharpness of the octagram points versus the round hexagram petals, they are tied by their geometric simplicity. The Islamic and Gothic were both valued in the late 19th-century Ottoman conception of architecture because of their geometric soundness.5 Additionally, European ideas about the consanguinity of the Gothic and Islamic had floated on to the Ottoman Empire; while these ideas had yet to settle fully, notions that Gothic and Islamic architecture were linked already existed.6 That link made the former’s admission into the Ottoman Renaissance alongside the Islamic permissible. Its capacity for complementing the geometric forms of the Islamic, through similarity and contrast, went beyond and made it desirable.
In the Ottoman Renaissance and the microcosm of the Çırağan drawing, the Gothic and Islamic lay claim to overlapping, though distinct, cultural patrimonies. The crucial motivation for the inclusion of the Islamic was the unstable position of the Ottoman Empire, the most prominent Islamic power, in international politics. To reinforce their position as apt representatives and rightful heirs of Islam, the Ottoman Renaissance embraced the “golden age” Islamic architecture of Andalusia and the Alhambra. The privileged place of Andalusia, and in particular the Alhambra, in the minds of the Ottoman elite, arises from their observance of both eclectic European Orientalism and a conservative Islamic-Ottoman historicism.7 Andalusian forms were recognizable as “Eastern” while also being familiar to and adopted by Europeans. They were thus subjected to less of the othering inherent to “Oriental” subjects.8 Take examples of building and decorating in the Alhambresque style, the Wilhelmspalais, built for the King of Württenburg (by Ludwig Zanth, 1846), “the Palacio Real de Aranjuez near Madrid (by Rafael Contreras, 1848) and in Alexandra Fyodorovna’s bathroom at the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg (by Alexander Pavlovich Brjullov, 1839).”9 The Alhambresque was the form that least flared up the tension between eclecticism and conservatism.
Just as the Alhambra was adapted and simplified in Europe, so it was in the Çırağan design. Since the endlessly complex surfaces of the Alhambra do not figure in the elevation drawing, the flower of the Çırağan column capitals seems to have been surgically disentangled from its original floral milieu (Figure 5). One can clearly see a closer match of the flower motif in Zanth’s Wilhemspalais (Figure 6). What is being done in the Çırağan mirrors is what took place in the Wilhelmspalais: the Alhambra is distorted and once more takes the mantle of the Alhambresque. Despite the availability of European Orientalist works, Sarkis and Hagop Balyan, who designed the Çırağan elevation drawing, sent their own research team to Spain to produce drawings of the Alhambra.10 This is not to say that those Orientalist works did not have their share of influence, but rather that an alternative was sought after. Not venturing deeper into the research team’s drawings, their production proportioned to the Alhambresque features of the Çırağan a more Ottoman genealogy. Over two iterations, the Alhambra was filtered through Ottoman eyes: once by the research team on-site and a second time by the Balyan brothers fitting the research team’s product onto the Çırağan.11
The Gothic, on the other hand, legitimized the Ottomans in their reality as a Mediterranean empire. If the Alhambresque brought Iberia into the fold, then the Gothic brought Dalmatia and Italy. Every acquisition brought the Ottomans closer to an imperial antecedent for Mediterranean hegemony: the Roman empire. That same antecedent is what the Ottoman sultans sought to reach by collecting paintings of ancient Mediterranean scenes such as Boulanger’s Le Gynécée and Coomans’ Récompenses.12 The Gothic of the Çırağan drawing coexists with Venetian forms.
These still fulfill the political function of laying claim to Mediterranean heritage and, through nested associations, become tightly knit not only to the Gothic but also to the Alhambresque. The clearest arrangement in which to study the conjoining of styles is, fortunately, one of its most repeated: the Serlio window, also known as a Venetian window. Lining the tops of the sidelights and the arch are Gothic motifs. Though the detail is limited in the sidelights, the arch dons a single intersection in its tracery, with a spike at the tip; three circles appear, one above the intersection and two on each side, formed by the cusps. Atop the pillars which divide the sidelights from the central window and aligned with the tops of the sidelights is, once more, the Alhambresque flower capital.
The Ottoman Renaissance was, just as much as for religious and imperial legitimation, a part of the larger project of creating a national cultural patrimony.13 Buildings belonging to the style thus had to be intrinsically Ottoman despite extraneous, far-reaching influences. The frame of the Çırağan Palace drawing, as an imperial yalı palace, is related in form and dynamism to its predecessors, the Dolmabahçe (1843-56) and Beylerbeyi (1861-1865). In the Dolmabahçe’s Avant-corps, the “stacking” of layers, as with the Çırağan, is already in place: two rows of windows, floors separated by a cornice and dentils, the predominant horizontal arrangement overlaid with the vertical grid of cube-topped pillars. The Beylerbeyi has the same silhouette as the Çırağan, almost wholly contained in a single rectangle. The two-layer, cornice-separated layout is there; brackets have now replaced the dentils; cube-topped pillars sustain the verticality. The window arrangement is stunningly similar to the Çırağan, especially in the repeated Serlio windows.
Between the waterfront façades of these two earlier palaces is the gradual compacting that leads to the Çırağan: first, the reduction of the silhouette to a single rectangular shape, and then a flattening of the façade. Were it not for the side wings, the flat frame of the Dolmabahçe Avant-corps might be comparable to a vertically stretched Çırağan. As for the Beylerbeyi, were it not for its four staggered pavilions, two advanced in the middle, and two retreated on each end, then its rectangular façade might match the more monolithic Çırağan. Between these two earlier yalı palaces is where the slab of the Çırağan lies. At the time the Çırağan was finished, Dolmabahçe Palace was the primary residence of the sultan, and the Beylerbeyi was a summer residence used to entertain visiting dignitaries. With the Çırağan built on the western shore of the Bosphorus, directly north of the Dolmabahçe and across the strait from the Beylerbeyi, the geographical proximity of the three would undoubtedly have imbued the newest addition with the imperial associations of the two earlier palaces.
The threat of cohesion weaving the Gothic-Alhambresque filling and the Ottoman imperial frame is geometric soundness. The simplification of the Alhambresque flower motif is in this spirit, and so are the divergences of Çırağan from the two earlier palaces; the relatively simple carved decorations, the lack of decorative protrusions, the concise silhouette, and the flatness of the façade pack the figure into a rectangular prism frame. Geometry is essential to the desirability of the Gothic-Alhambresque filling and gives the frame its Ottoman identity. In the watercolor façade, geometric rationality sees the establishment cast lassoes across time and distance, roping in legitimation of empire and religion.
1 Ersoy, Ahmet. “Ottoman Gothic: Evocations of the Medieval Past in Late Ottoman Architecture.” In Manufacturing Middle Ages: Entangled History of Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe, 217-238. Edited by Patrick J. Geary and Gábor Klaniczay. Boston: Brill, 2013. p. 219.
2 Ersoy, Ahmet. Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary: Reconfiguring the Architectural Past in a Modernizing Empire. Farnham Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015. p. 214.
3 Ibid, 146.
4 Ersoy. “Ottoman Gothic.” p. 219.
5 Ibid, 233.
6 Ibid, 229.
7 Ersoy. Architecture and the late Ottoman historical imaginary. p. 213. & McSweeney, Anna. “Versions and Visions of the Alhambra in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman World.” In West 86th, Volume 22,
8 Ersoy. Architecture and the late Ottoman historical imaginary. p. 217.
9 Uras, Büke. The Balyans: Ottoman architecture and Balyan archive. İstanbul: Korpus Kültür ve Sanat Yayıncılık, 2021. p. 121. & McSweeney. “Versions and Visions of the Alhambra.” p. 61-2.
10 Uras. The Balyans. p. 123.
11 Both Balyan brothers and Sopon Bezirdjian, one of the most prominent figures on the Alhambra research trip, were Ottoman Armenians. By only calling them Ottoman, I don’t mean to discredit that their identities as Armenians influenced the way images of the Alhambra filtered through them, but, rather, I mean to emphasize how these figures, who produced what is today recognized as Ottoman architecture (for example, the Çırağan Palace), were the same ones producing the source material of these final Ottoman designs.
12 Mary Roberts, “Gérôme in Istanbul,” in Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists, and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015): 75-110. p. 97.
13 Ersoy. Architecture and the late Ottoman historical imaginary. p. 135.
