top of page
Istanbul. Between Cross and Crescent Moon
Sezione 1
Sezione 2
Beylerbeyi Palace
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. 1938
PLAY ME
Another infinitely beautiful palace
in Istanbul, surviving from the late Ottoman Empire,
is the Beylerbeyi Palace, named after a suburb of the capital on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. This was the summer residence of the Ottoman sultans, built in the 1860s. Empress Eugenie of France also visited Beylerbeyi on her way to the inauguration of the Suez Canal. On that occasion,
she was slapped by the mother of Sultan Abdul Aziz for daring to enter the palace on his arm. Eugenie of France was so impressed by the elegance of this palace that she placed a copy in her bedroom at the Tuileries Palace in Paris. During my rule, I had the constitution approved, codes rewritten,
the Gregorian calendar introduced, and my country intensively industrialised. I reformed men's and women's clothing and behaviour, westernising them, even banning the veil for women and the fez for men. I abolished polygamy and granted equal rights to women. What I always intended to do was to transform, in an extremely radical way,
Turkish culture and identity once and for all, cutting all bridges with the past! Istanbul became the nerve centre of this radical change; a city thousands of years old, always a crossroads of multiple histories and cultures, interpolated between one world and another.
Sezione 3
bottom of page