Yıldız Palace, Revisited

Öz

I visited the renovated Yıldız Palace on July 24, 2025, a little over a year after its grand opening to the public. My experience that day was diametrically opposed to my first visit in 2009 with Yavuz Sezer, one of the best architectural historians of his generation, whom we lost to Covid in 2021. The site, which had been used by multiple institutions since the early years of the Turkish Republic, has since 2018 been (more or less) unified under the ongoing preservation and conservation efforts of the Directorate of National Palaces (Milli Saraylar İdaresi Başkanlığı). When Yavuz and I sauntered in through what was once the gate reserved for the sultan’s mother (valide kapısı), we encountered many wonders in ruin inside the palace’s inner harem garden (today, labeled the has bahçe). Especially striking were the rusticated concrete landscape features—an artificial lake, nymphaeum, grottoes, bridges, cascades, and gazebos. These late-nineteenth-century Victorian inventions, where artifice and nature produced their steampunk quirks, were what propelled me to work on the sprawling, magnificent palace complex.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Yıldız Palace
• Palace gardens
• Beşiktaş
• Harem gardens
• Abdülhamid II
• Mabeyn Kiosk
• Çit Kiosk
• Small Mabeyn
• Yıldız Palace Furniture Museum
• Photograph albums

Kaynakça

1. 1 Deniz Türker, The Accidental Palace: The Making of Yıldız in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul (Penn State Press, 2023). The Turkish translation is forthcoming with Koç University Press in early 2026.