Download PDF | Douglas Scott Brookes - Death and Life in the Ottoman Palace_ Revelations of the Sultan Abdülhamid I Tomb-Edinburgh University Press (2023).
337 Pages
Introduction: Mansion of the Heavens
One would hardly notice it today, when navigating the dense streets of Istanbul between Galata Bridge and Topkapı Palace, so unassuming it is, marooned at the end of a row of garish shops, and overshadowed by the magnificent Ottoman Revivalist office building across the street. Nothing about the architecture alerts the passer-by that this small, stone building with grilled windows is in fact a royal mausoleum, as well as an exquisite gem of the Ottoman Baroque, as well as repository of one of the holiest relics of Islam. We have come to the Sultan Abdülhamid I Tomb. Abdülhamid built his final resting place long before he needed it for himself.
Having come to the throne in 1774, by 1778 he had begun construction on his tomb, which reached completion in, almost certainly, 1780. Was his rush to build his final resting place because he had passed the age of fifty, when thoughts of mortality begin to linger not far from one’s mind? Possibly; and as further impetus, he would have known that his brother and predecessor, Mustafa III, had built his own tomb when he was about the same age. Yet for Abdülhamid surely the major impetus lay elsewhere. In line with court custom, he had officially begun fathering children only after he had become monarch. But his young offspring kept dying, one after another. He needed a place to bury his children. With that, the Sultan Abdülhamid I Tomb – or to use the more common Turkish term derived from his name, the Hamidiye Tomb – was born. A ‘Mansion of the Heavens’ it is indeed, in the pleasing Ottoman phrase Kasr-ı Cinan that graces poetic inscriptions at mausolea and on headstones in graveyards, including the graveyard around this royal mausoleum, in double reference to both the tomb and to Paradise.
In this graveyard we see it first in 1797, on the headstone of Abdülhamid’s consort Nevres: Eylesün Nevres Kadın Kasr-ı Cinanda cilvegâh, ‘May the lady Nevres fashion a chamber of splendour in the Mansion of the Heavens’. It appears again in 1812, on the pall over the cenotaph of the infant prince Bayezid: Ol gül-i nevresteye me’va ola Kasr-ı Cinan, ‘May the Mansion of the Heavens be home for that newly sprouted rose’. As built, the Hamidiye Tomb formed but one component of the multifaceted Hamidiye Charitable Complex. The tomb itself forms a minicomplex of two components: the mausoleum and the garden graveyard surrounding it. Turkish has a special word to denote an enclosed graveyard in the grounds of a tomb or mosque: hazire, whose original Arabic meaning was, rather amusingly, ‘cattle pen’.
In this book, ‘the Hamidiye Tomb’ refers to the mausoleum (türbe) and the garden graveyard (hazire) together. ‘Now, a man may learn a deal of the general from studying the specific, whereas it is impossible to know the specific by studying the general’, runs a 1942 version of the aphorism.1 Along these lines, cemeteries can serve as troves of information about a culture, and the goal in investigating the Hamidiye Tomb is to see what insights it reveals about Ottoman culture of the period during which this mausoleum and graveyard received burials: the 1780s to the 1860s, but most actively between 1800 and 1840. Given that almost everyone buried here, male and female, worked (and, for most of them, lived) at Topkapı Palace – males (including eunuchs) in the monarch’s Privy Household or the Imperial Harem, females in the Imperial Harem as managers, higherranking staff, or concubines – we look for what it will teach us of life at the Ottoman court of this era.
The workings of the Ottoman palace in the last two centuries up to the end of the monarchy in 1924 have not been deeply studied and remain something of an enigma, so we are turning to this royal cemetery to help us better understand the Ottoman court during this period. We will look for clues as to the place this tomb held in Ottoman society. Was it known among the elites of the empire as a prestigious site for burial? Or was it introspective: a final resting place for palace folk themselves, not for men of state, and not seeking to strike a certain public pose and make a statement on an empire-wide scale?
The next imperial mausoleum constructed in Istanbul, the grand edifice built in 1840 to house Mahmud II’s remains, evolved (in the graveyard surrounding it) into a national pantheon; can the same moniker apply to the Hamidiye Tomb, for the preceding era? Because the era of this tomb witnessed the most wrenching changes of modern Ottoman history until then – the reforms forcibly introduced by Abdülhamid’s son Mahmud II after 1826 – we shall also look for manifestations of these changes in this graveyard, if indeed Mahmud’s sweeping reforms filtered down as far as cemeteries. Our exploration touches on an aspect of spatial history: the concept of representational space, meaning space that is experienced through the symbols that have been gathered together in it, or through symbolic associations that it makes. What was the impact this royal mausoleum sought to make on visitors, and even on passers-by? Did that impact tie into the iconographic programme of the Imperial House? Was the impact different on foreigners versus on Ottomans? On literate versus illiterate Ottomans? Responses to these questions might fill a book of their own, but here we shall consider them as we navigate this particular space.
As the above paragraphs imply, in terms of methodology this book approaches history by beginning with the physical evidence, the artefacts on hand, as the starting point for exploration, as one would in curating a museum exhibit or designing an educational tour. In this book the physical evidence is, of course, the Hamidiye Tomb. The paths of exploration leading out from this starting point are many: architecture, art and design, calligraphy, dress, death and funeral customs, literature, calendars, time calculation, disease, hierarchy, gender roles, eunuchs, concubinage, harem structure, and language use, to name but the more prominent. The goal is to see whether we can identify, from this disparate evidence, what the reigning House sought to accomplish through this tomb, quite apart from the practical purpose of burying its dead.
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