Expertise and Architecture in the Modern Islamic World: A Critical Anthology

By Intellect Books

Expertise and Architecture in the Modern Islamic World explores how architectural traditions and practices were shared and exchanged across national borders throughout the world, departing from a narrative that casts European actors as the importers and exporters of Islamic designs and skills. Looking to cases that touch on empire building, modernization, statecraft, and diplomacy, this book examines how these processes have been contingent on a web of expertise informed by a rich and varied array of authors and contexts since the 1800s.

The chapters in this volume, organized around the leitmotif of expertise, demonstrate the thematic importance and specific utility of in-depth and broad-ranging knowledge in shaping the understanding of architecture in the Islamic world from the nineteenth century to the present. Specific case studies include European gardeners in Ottoman courts, Polish architects in Kuwait, Israeli expertise in Iran, monument archiving in India, religious spaces in Swedish suburbs, and more.

This is the latest title in Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East, a series devoted to the most recent scholarship concerning architecture, landscape, and urban design of the Middle East and of regions shaped by diasporic communities more globally. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: May 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783209293

Book preview

Chapter 1

‘I don’t want orange trees, I want something that others don’t have’: Ottoman Head-Gardeners after Mahmud II

Deniz Türker

The reform-minded sultans Mahmud II (r.1808–36) and his son Abdülmecid (r.1836–61) eagerly sought out advisors to help transform their environments to befit the enlightened, politically engaged, public role they cast for themselves. The sites they chose for their new residences on the shores of the Bosphorus would naturally become emblematic of this imperial refashioning. Çırağan Palace’s vast and hilly backdrop, which would later become Yıldız Palace’s ten-hectare park, would constitute the principal experimental ground for this image quest. The site’s makers were the trained recruits of a Bavarian gardener called Christian Sester (1804–66). Leading labourers predominantly from Albania and the Black sea, Sester, his assistants, and his successors would institute a predominantly German gardening dynasty in the Ottoman court – a new kind of gardening corps crafted from a long-established imperial institution. The work of Sester’s team would only be disrupted at the turn of the century, when the court began to value different modes of horticultural expertise, and turned its attention to France. If, in very broad strokes, the nineteenth-century Ottoman garden history is characterized by grand landscaping projects modelled on Yıldız, the twentieth century marked an obsessive turn to cultivation and acclimation of plants inside the most technically advanced greenhouses and palm houses.¹ Ultimately, these changes of interest were not only related to matters of taste, but also tinged with the competitive spirit of shifting diplomatic alliances, as well as national and international political networks.

Until Mahmud’s overhaul of the Janissary corps in 1826, the Ottoman imperial gardens, from aspects of their design to the agricultural production derived from them, were tied to one of its most prominent branches: the bostancı ocağı (gardeners’ corps).² Only a few months after the Janissaries were violently disbanded, the gardeners’ corps was completely and, much more peaceably, restructured under a military charter (nizamname) on August 5, 1826.³ The eldest members were forced to retire with lifetime pensions (kayd-ı hayat), while the able-bodied were redeployed to train with Mahmud’s new army, the asakir-i mansure-i Muhammediye, and serve as officers (zabit) in the gates, barracks, and police offices on the Dolmabahçe-Ortaköy shoreline, where the court now resided full-time.⁴ A decade later, Mahmud’s ambassador to Vienna came back with an idea that would fill the void for the upkeep of the many imperial gardens: a foreign garden-director – a professional with knowledge of the latest in landscape design, botany, and horticulture – would restore the vacant post of the palace’s bostancıbaşı (translatable to head-gardener) to its erstwhile garden-centred metier. This practice would continue until the First World War at Yıldız, the longest serving imperial palace of the nineteenth century, transformed in half a century into the corps’ operational headquarters.

In the gardeners’ corps’ earliest incarnation under Mehmed II (r.1444–46, 1451–81), its members attended to the palace gardens and royal retreats, while their superior bostancıbaşı, the only court official allowed to grow a beard, held the privileged position of helming the sultan’s boat during the latter’s seafaring trips along the Bosphorus [Figure 1.1].⁵ The structure of this corps would undergo drastic transformations, and shed the fifteenth-century horticultural requisites of the young Janissary conscripts that gave their group its name. Especially with the emergence of Janissary unrest in the seventeenth-century, the corps started to represent the personal security force of the imperial household.⁶ By the time Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier (d.1817), the French ambassador to the court of Abdülhamid I (r.1774–1889) and dilettante-antiquarian of ancient Greek artefacts, published his Voyage pittoresque en Grèce (1782), the head-gardener had become ‘la police intérieure du sérail’ (interior police of the palace), who presided over the Bosphorus in an austere waterfront building in Kuruçeşme, allocated to his office and in the immediate vicinity of the sultan’s summer retreat in Beşiktaş [Figure 1.2].⁷ Later, the first recruits of Selim III’s new model army, the ill-fated nizam-ı cedid, wore the red-felt barata headgear of the ruler’s bostancı-bodyguards as a symbolic gesture of the trust established between the ruler and his protectors.⁸

Figure 1.1: Le Bostandji-Bachi, J.M. Moreau (le jeune) in Marie-Gabriel-Auguste-Florent Choiseul-Gouffier, Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce (1782–[1824]). Harvard University Fine Arts Library Collection.

Figure 1.2: Vue du kiosque du Bostandji-Bachi á Kourou-Tchechmé, Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier, Voyage pittoresque en Grèce (1782–[1824]). Harvard University Fine Arts Library Collection.

Foreign Head-Gardeners in the Ottoman Court

In fact, it was during Selim III’s reign that the court first experimented with a foreign head-gardener to redesign its imperial gardens in the capital. Later on, Mahmud II’s restoration of a majority of the novel offices that Selim had instituted would also extend to the reactivation of this post. Baron von Herbert, the Austrian internuncio to Selim’s court, had imported a gardener from Rastatt by the name of Jacob Ensle (d.1832) in 1794, who was fortunate enough to be residing with his stepbrother, the distinguished naturalist Franz Boos (1753–1832), botanical gardener and menagerie director of the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, during von Herbert’s recruitment efforts. Ensle, who appears to have led many a late-eighteenth century European traveller through the doors of the Topkapı’s new sections, while maintaining relative anonymity as ‘M. Jacques from Rastadt’ in their accounts, himself left a narrative of his time in the Ottoman court.⁹ In it, he boasts that ‘through the skilful leveraging of a connection [he] managed to achieve an assignment as the chief-gardener of the Bostandji [der Obergärtners der Bostandgi’s] in the palace,’ and notes that Selim III’s mild regime allowed a Christian to fill this post.¹⁰ This work is also traceable in the detailed map that Antoine Ignace Melling (1763–1831) provides in his Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople et de rives du Bosphore (1819), and the eyewitness account that the Austrian Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856) provides in his Constantinopolis und der Bosporos (1822), but Ensle also contributed to the gardens in Selim’s Beşiktaş Palace and Eyüp.¹¹ At Topkapı, he worked on a set of terraced spaces reserved for Selim and for the women’s quarters, and as per the sultan’s request, instituted the ‘French and Dutch conventions [Sitte]’ rather than the picturesque landscapes that Europeans had begun to install in their own estates.¹² If Napoleon hadn’t conquered Egypt in 1798, Ensle’s work in the gardens of Topkapı and other summer dwellings of the court would have had a chance to flourish. Not wanting to remain in an environment suddenly hostile to foreigners and volatile due to ceaseless uprisings against Selim’s reforms, he left for his fatherland in 1802.

The subsequent decades pitted a young Mahmud II (r.1808–39) against influential viziers, powerful provincial rulers, Balkan insurgencies, Russian advances, and, most significantly, insubordinate janissaries. These disruptive events also made crossing through the Balkans, which Ensle undertook, geographically impossible for even the most adventurous Westerner. Besides a few European renegades, expatriates were hard to come by in an increasingly unstable Istanbul.¹³ After a beleaguered but resolute Mahmud restored a semblance of order in his empire through a complete overhaul of the military and political bodies, the multilingual Ottoman bureaucrats of his newfangled administration began the hunt for foreign experts to furnish the backdrops of their homes. The English travel writer Julia Pardoe (1806–62) identifies the beginnings of this practice by remarking on the foreign gardeners of varying European nationalities attending to each of the terraces of Mahmud II’s garden in the Beylerbeyi Palace in 1836 [Figure 1.3].¹⁴

Figure 1.3: The Summer Palace at Beglier-Bey, W. H. Bartlett in Julia Pardoe, The Beauties of the Bosphorus (1839). Harvard University Widener Library