Accidental Palace: The Making of Yildiz in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul

This book tells the story of Yildiz Palace in Istanbul, the last and largest imperial residential complex of the Ottoman Empire. Today, the palace is physically fragmented and has been all but erased from Istanbul's urban memory. At its peak, however, Yildiz was a global city in miniature and the center of the empire's vast bureaucratic apparatus.

Following a chronological arc from 1795 to 1909, The Accidental Palace shows how the site developed from a rural estate of the queen mothers into the heart of Ottoman government. Nominally, the palace may have belonged to the rarefied realm of the Ottoman elite, but as Deniz Turker reveals, the development of the site was profoundly connected to Istanbul's urban history and to changing conceptions of empire, absolutism, diplomacy, reform, and the public. Turker explores these connections, framing Yildiz Palace and its grounds not only as a hermetic expression of imperial identity but also as a product of an increasingly globalized consumer culture, defined by access to a vast number of goods and services across geographical boundaries.

Drawn from archival research conducted in Yildiz's imperial library, The Accidental Palace provides important insights into a decisive moment in the palace's architectural and landscape history and demonstrates how Yildiz was inextricably tied to ideas of sovereignty, visibility, taste, and self-fashioning. It will appeal to specialists in the art, architecture, politics, and culture of nineteenth-century Turkey and the Ottoman Empire.

Review:

"The Accidental Palace offers an erudite analysis of the nexus of artistic activity represented by Yildiz Palace. It is one of the first English-language works of art or architectural history of the late Ottoman world that does not frame its importance through the prism of orientalism. Deniz Turker engages in a stealthy refutation of Eurocentric frameworks for late Ottoman visual synthesis by doing the archival work that allows the myriad actors involved-patrons, gardeners, builders, diplomats, and more-to materialize their own artistic autonomy, resulting in a truly fresh look at artistic agency."

-Peter H. Christensen,author of Precious Metal: German Steel, Modernity, and Ecology

"Through the prism of architecture and landscape, The Accidental Palace offers a rich ethnography of power and culture in the age of Ottoman reform, as well as a unique window on the expansion of globalized consumerism."