The Accidental Palace

This book tells the story of Yldz 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 Istanbuls urban memory. At its peak, however, Yldz was a global city in miniature and the center of the empires 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 Trker reveals, the development of the site was profoundly connected to Istanbuls urban history and to changing conceptions of empire, absolutism, diplomacy, reform, and the public. Trker explores these connections, framing Yldz 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 Yldzs imperial library, The Accidental Palace provides important insights into a decisive moment in the palaces architectural and landscape history and demonstrates how Yldz 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.