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By Root 970 0

refers to a period between 1839 and 1876 that was characterized by attempts to modernize. One of the most notable reforms was to integrate non-Muslims and non-Turks into society by granting them more rights. Some of the men who were responsible for this reorganization included Sultans Mahmud II and Abdülmecid, Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, Ali Pasha, and Midhat Pasha. Among the proposed reforms were to guarantee Ottoman subjects perfect security for their lives, honor, and property; introduce the first Ottoman paper banknotes; adopt an Ottoman national anthem and Ottoman national flag; reorganize the finance system according to the French model; establish the first modern university and academies; establish railroads; allow non-Muslims to become soldiers; and establish the first stock exchange.

Tulumba

Tulumba (866 885 8622 / tulumba.com) is the largest Turkish online megastore in the U.S., so if you arrive back home and can’t wait for a return visit to satisfy a yen for simit, black Turkish tea, Turkish music, or evil-eye jewelry, Tulumba is at your service.

Tuğra

A tuğra was the monogram of the sultan used to authenticate imperial documents. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has in its fine Islamic collection the famous tuğra of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, dating from the mid-sixteenth century and acquired in 1938. According to Annemarie Schimmel, writing in the museum’s journal on Islamic calligraphy (1992), the tuğra was originally used as a king’s emblem, as well as a specific design at the beginning of a document drawn up by a senior official, but in Ottoman Turkey, the tuğra became an elaborate, highly sophisticated motif. All tuğra, however, consisted of “three high shafts and two ovals protruding to the left, with the names of the ruler and his ancestors in the lower center. This arrangement has been explained as representing the three middle fingers and the thumb (the prints of which formerly may have been used for signatures). However, another interpretation is that the design derives from the three standards decorated with yak tails carried by central Asian Turkish rulers in battle or in processions. Whatever the true origin, drawing and embellishing a tuğra was an important duty in the imperial chancelleries.”

Tulips

Who knew tulips could be so fascinating? Tulips are not native to the Netherlands, as many people assume. According to historian Mike Dash, in his thoroughly engaging book Tulipomania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused (Crown, 1999), the tulip “is a flower of the East, a child of the unimaginable vastness of central Asia.” The tulip didn’t reach Holland until 1570, and taxonomists believe that the world’s first tulips were thriving in one of the world’s least hospitable environments on earth, at a point in the mountains where China and Tibet meet Russia and Afghanistan. Dash says nearly half of the 120 known species of tulips grow wild in this forbidding terrain. Nomadic Turks encountered tulips as they moved westward, across the central Asian plateau, and by about the year 1050, tulips were held in high regard in Persia. As the garden was and remains central to the Muslim vision of paradise, after the ban on images of living things was relaxed, late in the fifteenth century, tulips were depicted often in various art forms and even graced the sultans’ robes. “Of all the blooms in a Muslim garden,” Dash writes, “the tulip was regarded as the holiest, and the Turkish passion for this flower went far beyond mere appreciation of its beauty. For the Ottomans as for the Persians, it had a tremendous symbolic importance and was literally regarded as the flower of God because in Arabic script, the letters that make up lale, the Turkish word for ‘tulip,’ are the same as those that form Allah.”

Ottoman gardeners considered only the rose, narcissus, carnation, and hyacinth to be the equal of a tulip, and all other blooms were considered “wildflowers,” cultivated only occasionally. Eventually there were as many as fifteen hundred varieties of Istanbul tulips,