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By Root 1017 0

ıs had reached its peak, a highlight of the summer social season was the mehtâb, one of the most extraordinary spectacles of an affluent and esthetically refined era. On summer evenings when the moon was bright and the Bosporus calm, rich and poor alike would throng the shore to watch and listen as a flotilla of private boats—sometimes numbering in the hundreds—would weave its way north in a snakelike procession, often calling at prominent yalıs on both shores along the way. In the lead was a special concert boat fitted with a raised platform on which an orchestra performed, or vocalists accompanied by the flutelike ney, the stringed dulcimer, and the saz.

With such prominent owners, yalıs invariably also played host to history. In the central sofas, viziers received visiting ministers and heads of state, treating them first to banquets and later to negotiations that, in several instances, altered the shape of the empire. The far-reaching Karlowitz Treaty—which ceded to Austria territories in the Balkans, including Hungary and Transylvania—was ratified in the Köprülü Yalı in 1699. The Küçük Kaynarca Treaty recognizing Crimean independence was also signed there in 1774. Early in this century, negotiations with German officials in the Sait Halim Pasha Yalı led to Turkish involvement in World War I.

Architecturally, yalıs were bellwethers of style. From the earliest, entirely Ottoman yalı, they gradually adopted features that reflected Istanbul’s rising fascination with European designs. From the 1730s to the early 1800s, a style now called “Turkish baroque” brought elaborate decorative schemes to the Bosporus and encouraged the replacement of traditional built-in cupboards and divans with European-style, freestanding furniture.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, this gave way to a neo-Western classicism, the “empire” style—a term the Ottomans borrowed from the French—that produced several of the largest yalıs. Toward the close of the nineteenth century, this was overshadowed by an eclectic “cosmopolitan” style wherein several yalıs became ensembles of European towers and Ottoman onion domes, each ornamented with Islamic motifs. Finally, during the decade prior to World War I, a Turkish expression of Art Nouveau influenced some of the last of the Ottoman yalıs to be built.

Yalİs were rarely built for longevity. In Ottoman Turkey there was no hereditary aristocracy that bequeathed property from one generation to another, as was the custom in Europe. A pasha’s position depended on his relations with the sultan: Should the pasha fall from grace or the sultan fall from power, the family’s fortunes fell as well, and the yalı often became impossible to maintain.

Indeed, temporality is intrinsic to timber buildings. Winter rains and the moist sea air both encouraged rot. On an unseasonably chilly July day in 1910, the romantic French novelist Pierre Loti, staying at the yalı of his friend Count Ostrorog, noted that “a balmy dampness fills my bedroom overlooking the sea, like an old ship whose hull is no longer watertight.”

Simple forms of heating, such as the common open brazier, or mangal, caused several devastating fires. Later, in the 1940s and 1950s, rising land prices took a further toll. Thus only a handful of eighteenth-century yalıs have survived, and a number more from the nineteenth century. During the 1980s, some of these received new leases on life as a new class of monied Turkish entrepreneurs revived the prestige of a historic Bosporus summer home.

Today, the remaining yalıs are protected buildings, divided into several categories according to their architectural importance. One, the eighteenth-century Bostancibaşi Abdullah Ağa Yalı at Çengelköy has been acquired by the Ministry of Tourism, and it is being remodeled to accommodate a restaurant and a souvenir shop.

The future of the best eighteenth-century yalıs now seems brighter than at any time this century. Several have actually remained in the same family for generations, and the current owners are committed to their upkeep. The Çürüksulu Yalı at