Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [25]
Peter Olson, former chairman and CEO of Random House, Inc., and Candice Olson, cofounder and former chief executive of iVillage.com, have a number of Istanbul memories that keep coming back to them. For Peter, these include “the call to prayer—it’s so hauntingly evocative. I always felt a tug when I heard it and I miss it. It didn’t make me feel like an alien; rather it felt like a welcome. Additionally, the image of the Galata Bridge always comes to mind, not just the physical bridge that’s there now but the replacement bridges that have been built over the years and the bridge’s part in the history of Istanbul. I will never forget my hamam experience, where, at the very end, the attendant literally cracked my back—it initially felt like he was going to break me in half—but immediately afterward I felt wonderful. Lastly, I have a two-part image of my sixteen-year-old son outside the Grand Bazaar, where he bought six pairs of socks for the equivalent of nine dollars. Then he tried to resell them, for eleven dollars, and he was offered a job by a nearby merchant!”
On Candice’s short list are: “riding the subway, which makes you feel a part of the life of the city. (It’s so easy to get around by subway!); eating dinner in Sultanahmet at a little sky-top restaurant with mediocre food but absolutely drop-dead views of the Blue Mosque minarets; taking the ferry from the coast back to the city—this wasn’t a tourist ferry, but the one residents take to commute; the call to prayer. And the bookstores are spectacular!”
The Golden Age of Ottoman Art
ESIN ATIL
THE AGE of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent was an exhibit in every way equal to the magnificence of Süleyman himself. The show opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1987 and went on to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This excellent piece explores the prolific creativity of this time period and highlights the various types of artworks that were crafted.
ESIN ATIL is the former curator of the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and was guest curator responsible for assembling the 1987 exhibition The Age of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. She is also the author of more than a dozen books, including Art of the Arab World (Smithsonian, 1975), Turkish Art (Abrams, 1980), and Süleymanname: The Illustrated History of Süleyman the Magnificent (Abrams, 1986). This last was a stunning visual documentary record of the sultan’s life. As J. Carter Brown, then the director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., wrote in the foreword, “It is indeed fortunate that the illustrations in the Süleymanname are reproduced in facsimile, since the fragility and the uniqueness of the original manuscript have made it almost inaccessible for study.”
OTTOMAN ART flowered magnificently in the sixteenth century. With unprecedented prolificacy, court artists created splendid examples of illuminated and illustrated manuscripts; objects fashioned of gold, silver, jade, rock crystal, ivory, and inlaid wood; ceremonial and functional arms and armor; brocaded satin and velvet kaftans and furnishings; flatwoven and pile rugs; and a variety of ceramic vessels and tiles. They formulated unique and indigenous styles, themes, and techniques that not only came to characterize the artistic vocabulary of the period, but which also had a lasting impact on Turkish art. The vestiges of that impact are still visible today.
This extraordinary burst of artistic energy took place during the reign of Sultan Süleyman I (1520-1566), a remarkable half century when the political and economic power of the Ottoman Empire reached its zenith. Süleyman—a brilliant statesman, acclaimed legislator, and benevolent patron of the arts—more than doubled the territories of his domain, personally leading a dozen military campaigns that extended its frontiers from Iran to Austria. His state occupied the crucial link between three continents