Having built private chalets for his personal use, Abdülhamid now began to build bijou, one-room pavilions to house intimate diplomatic encounters. A skilled carpenter – some of his intricate furniture, adorned with tiers of crenellations, niches, pilasters, reliefs and columns, can still be seen today at Yıldız – Abdülhamid would surely have recognised the chalets as buildings that he himself could easily construct and decorate.Īnd perhaps he had another purpose in mind as he commissioned chalets for Yıldız. But for the Sultan, these temporary garden buildings also had a personal resonance.
To some visitors of the palace, Abdülhamid’s architectural choices appeared frivolous, insubstantial or even downright ugly (the Italian journalist Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, would later describe the chalets as “shacks”). Indeed, when the archivist of the Yıldız library lists the names of the catalogues, rather than making direct translation, he picks out the terms he knows will most appeal to his patron: ‘rustic’, ‘country cottage’, ‘orangerie’ and, of course, ‘chalet’. An early member of Abdülhamid’s translation office described one of the first chalets as ‘rustic’ ( rustaî) and likened it to a gossamer birdcage among lofty trees and delightful meadows.
Spurred by a Romantic desire to express truth, transparency and virtue in one’s dwellings, the chalet craze was rooted in a pan-European idealisation of rural life, stoic peasants and philosophical theories that foregrounded hilltop and mountain settings. In fact, Sultan Abdülhamid II was at the forefront of what was, in fact, a global fad, sparked by the showing of a huge number of prefabricated timber buildings – most often manufactured in Norway – at the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris. The chalets of Yıldız.Īrriving in iron-reinforced crates from northern Europe, and then often customised by local craftsmen, these chalets – or Şale – would go on to become so popular that, by the turn of the century, publishers would be producing Mrs Beeton-style guides to the commissioning, design and building of timber prefab buildings for Istanbul’s middle class. What I eventually found was a collection of mail-order catalogues, from manufacturers as far afield as Sweden, Norway and Odessa, selling prefabricated timber chalets. The collection is not fully digitised and I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. My next port of call was the Rare Books Collection – which includes Yıldız’s library of books and manuscripts – held at Istanbul University. Sultan Abdülhamid II was at the forefront of a global fad sparked by prefabricated timber buildings – most often manufactured in Norway – at the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris
However, bafflingly, I could find nothing about the garden pavilions. The archives are vast, covering every aspect of Ottoman life in great detail, including a huge amount of information about the architecture and construction of 19th-century imperial palaces and gardens. Like many Ottomanists before me, I made my way to the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi – the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Minister’s Office – now kept at a mammoth repository in Istanbul’s Kağıthane neighbourhood. How had they come to be built here, on the hilltop? What were they for? And why did they look like Swiss chalets? I had to find out. But what I wasn’t expecting was the quirky beauty of the decaying timber garden pavilions studding the landscape. I knew, too, that the property was a vast complex of pavilions and gardens, designed in different styles and located within a woodland overlooking the Bosphorus. I knew, of course, that it had been the seat of Ottoman government and the residence of Sultan Abdülhamid II from 1876 to 1909. I had not visited Yıldız – the Palace of the Northern Wind – before. And it all started with a climb up a steep hill to the Yıldız Palace Park in the summer of 2009. This is a story about 19th-century globalisation: of flat-pack homes sold by catalogue, of the introduction of new ideas about domesticity and home-making, and of how the suburbs of Istanbul came to be dotted with Swiss-chalet-style timber buildings.
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