Çırağan Palace on the European shore of the Bosphorus

Description

Featured in the 1836 collaborative work of Thomas Allom and Robert Walsh, this steel engraving depicts the wooden Çırağan Palace (which would later be rebuilt in stone during the reign of Sultan Abdülaziz) constructed on the European shore of the Bosphorus during the reign of Sultan Mahmud II. The artwork reveals the radical modernization in Ottoman palace architecture with its massive Neoclassical columns, pediment, and symmetrical Western facade. By illustrating a large sailing galleon anchored in the Bosphorus and magnificent imperial caiques rowed by oarsmen in the foreground, the artwork objectively documents how the state's new aesthetic vision and diplomatic protocol integrated with the sea in the 19th-century Ottoman capital.