Do you recommend visiting Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul?

 It was all about the symbolism, though by that time Topkapi had long ceased to be the centre of Ottoman government, and Dolmabahce was never actually occupied; the air proving unsanitary, a smaller palace was built some distance thence.

In saying it was a symbolic, essentially aesthetic, choice, I do not mean to say it was necessarily a better one than simple self-indulgence. The pervasive aestheticism of the Tanzimat often succeeded in strangling reform in its crib; from A. Wheatcroft’s Ottomans; Dissolving Images—

The first tangible reform (of the mid-19th c. Tanzimat) concerned the enforcement of the law. (It is revealing of Ottoman priorities that the principal task for local officials was the enforcement of the strict dress laws, first those established by the Conqueror and then those ‘reformed’ codes ordered by his descendant Mahmud II.) (…)

Perhaps the most striking change concerned the packs of dogs which had since Byzantine times roamed the streets. (…) the dogs had ruled the city at night because no one had much interest in stopping them. They also performed a useful function by acting as a primitive system of waste disposal. Charles White observed that much of the city would ‘become intolerable from dead horses and agglomerations of filth, were it not for the multitude of dogs. At present nothing escapes their voracity. In less than twelve hours after a horse has fallen, not a vestige remains of its carcase.’

But wild dogs were not consistent with the image of a modern city, and the city council ordered that all the strays should be rounded up and shipped to an isolated, waterless island in the Sea of Marmara to die. A ‘picturesque’ old Oriental feature of the city was abolished at the stroke of a pen.

The ‘dog problem’ revealed both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Ottoman administration. Specific abuses could be righted, but the long, patient process of ‘improvement’ was against the social ethos. There was little enthusiasm for the creation of invisible infrastructure of a modern city—sewers, water, gas supply. Why, Ottoman critics of ‘progress’ argued, spend a decade and a fortune on maintainance… when a single earthquake or major fire would destroy all the work? The dogs could be disposed of by a single ruthless act, but the promised drains to remove the filth of the city involved long-term planning. Consequently they were not built for another thirty years, and Stamboul just got dirtier.

Many of these failings could legitimately be explained by financial stringency. The Ottoman state squandered its resources and, when revenues were insufficient, raised loans at high rates of interest. The inevitable consequence followed in 1875, when the empire was forced to admit bankruptcy, and the European governments imposed a settlement which guaranteed their own investments. Years of financial restraint followed, and the support for invisible and intangible benefits like drains wasted away. What money remained was used where it could be seen: the building boom continued.

Nineteenth-century sultans, like their ancestors, left mosques and palaces as their gift to posterity, but the buildings themselves embodied the principles of change and progress. Mahmud II built the Nusretiye (‘Divine Victory’) mosque to celebrate his triumph over the janissaries… it was quite unlike any other mosque in the city. Designed by (the Armenian) Kirkor Balian, it owed more to the European view of what ‘Oriental’ building should look like than to its Islamic antecedents. It was intended to mark a new direction for the Ottoman empire, away from its past… towards a new Ottomanism which would incorporate the best qualities of the West. It was designed as the landmark of a new age.

At the same time, the dynasty became engaged in an equestrian statue competition with the khedives of Egypt. The Egyptian ruler first built a giant statue of himself on his horse; the Ottoman sultan built a bigger one; and so on and so forth. The Egyptians, just like the Ottomans, were driven to bankruptcy by their reckless spending in the 1870s.

Vast sums were spent on new buildings. ‘Paper’ reforms covered every aspect of life. Some areas of the city were modernized; old wooden houses were rebuilt in more durable materials in accordance with the new regulations. Attempts were made to reorganize the warren of small streets which had grown up around the bedestens (markets) and along the shore of the Golden Horn. But there was no money for more radical alterations, and the impact of any change was localized to the immediate area around a new building…

And this golden, if sewer-stained, springtime of aesthetics was carried out over a boiling kettle, of which the stakes could not have been higher.

The closed ethnic neighbourhoods of The City remained impervious to change and continued to provide the human material for riot and violence, which was an ever-present danger in Stamboul. The British diplomat Sir Charles Eliot, writing under the pseudonym Odysseus, observed in 1900:

Every Turk is born a soldier, and adopts other pursuits chiefly because the times are bad. When there is a question of fighting, if only in a riot, the stolid peasant wakes up and shows a surprising power of organization and finding expedients, and, alas, a surprising ferocity. The ordinary Turk is an honest, good-humored soul, kind to children and animals, and very patient; but when the fighting spirit comes on him, he… slays, burns, and ravages without mercy or discrimination.

The back streets of Stamboul and the derelict hovels of the poor were filled with ‘ordinary Turks’, and the sultans had reason to be wary of their people… Mahmud and his successors had encircled the city with barracks as a precaution against the people; security from the menace of the Stamboul mob was a strong motive for the sultans to move out of the city.

The corps of Janissaries had once been the cutting edge of any popular revolt, leading the poor and the softas from the mosque schools. After the janissaries’ dispersal in 1826, the students became the disciplined and organized leaders of any uprising. Halil Halit, himself a student, described how ‘roused and egged on by politicians, they would assemble in the courtyards of the great mosques, bearing yataghans and heavy clubs under their long cloaks, and numberless common people would follow them.’ The medresses could marshal as many as 20–30,000 fit and fanatical young men who would respond instinctively to any threat to the purity of Islam.

The softas were unpredictable and, once roused, were difficult to control. They hated Christians, Jews, and Muslim heretics, but for a brief period during the 1870s they became ardent in support of social change. (Their riot forced) the resignation of the grand vizier and the introduction of a programme of change, and they ostentatiously measured the railings outside the buildings to see if they were high enough to hang the vizier from them. The government crumbled and the softas were heroes. Their zeal for reform was shortlived, however: by August they were writing to attack the whole concept of a progressive constitution and threatening the new grand vizier, Midhat Pasha, with assassination if he persisted in his reforms.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the softas of Stamboul came to see themselves as the spearhead of militant Islam. Their hatred of foreign innovations gave their narrow, fundamentalist protest a wide appeal. By 1900 fear of European domination had become universal among Ottoman Muslims. The students were bigoted but not stupid, and they sought to gain support from all levels of Muslim society. They supported political reform when it was for the benefit of Muslims, but when it included Christians and Jews they declared it was against Islam. They put forward economic and social reasons for their xenophobia, as in 1895 when the softas of Stamboul asked, “Why do hundreds of Europeans daily come here and enrich themselves at our expense? For public works construction they send us workers as if we don’t have any of our own.”

The students gained the tacit support of civilized and educated Muslims who deplored sectarian violence but saw Christians as dangerous enemies. Sir Charles Eliot described a common Ottoman attitude to the Christian world. His Turkish narrator was a man of great eminence: ‘all that a Turk should be. He had an ample beard, his figure was like a haystack and his nose like a potato. He was a Field Marshal… He had been successively Minister of War, Finance and Foreign Affairs and for a few months, Grand Vizier.’ This imposing figure told a story of how, once:

I was a very young man and went for a ride with my old father. I was very foolish then and my head was stuffed with silly notions and liberal ideas. I told my father we ought to reform our constitution, systematize our administration, purify our family life, educate our women, introduce liberal ideas and imitate Europeans. And my father answered not a word.

So we rode along the banks of the Bosphorus. At last we came to a Christian village and round the Christian village were many pigs. Then my father said to me, ‘My son, what seest thou?’

I replied, ‘Pigs, Father.’

‘My son’ he said, ‘are they all similar in size and colour, or do they differ?’

‘They differ, Father.’

‘But all of them are swine, my son?’

‘All, Father.’

‘My son’ he said, ‘it is with the Christians as with the pigs. There are big Christians and little Christians, Russian Christians, English Christians, French Christians and German Christians; but they are all of them swine, and he who wishes to imitate Christians, wishes to wallow with the swine in the mire.’

The equation between Christians and unclean beasts (pigs) would have surprised most foreign visitors, who remarked on the kindness and civility they always received from Muslim Turks. Yet even the most liberal Ottomans, ‘once roused’, would echo the attitudes of the fundamentalists. Halil Halit, an educated and liberal man, made the direct connection between the restiveness of non-Muslim minorities and European commercial domination of the empire:

Foreign Powers… take up, some of them, the cause of those eastern Christians who are under Ottoman rule, alleging they are acting in the name of ‘humanity’. Their real motive, however, is that they may use them as a point d’appui for their political schemes and designs… each native Christian community entertains, nowadays more or less without disguise, sentiments of animosity towards the Osmanlis, and even sympathizes with the enemies of the Turkish empire in times of international trouble or war.

He continued to suggest that the attacks on Christian minorities, “which would be represented in Europe as an outburst of Musselman fanaticism”, were an understandable response to provocation: “The Turk’s patience is almost inexhaustible, but when you attack his women and children, his anger is roused, and nothing on earth can control it.”

The Turks were portrayed as savages and barbarians in the West; they saw themselves as slow to anger but implacable when roused. Europeans looked down on the Turks with disdain, and the Turks returned the compliment. Educated Ottomans accused Westerners of ignorance and insensitivity. A leading reformer, Cevdet Pasha, told the French ambassador,

You have been living in Beyoglu [Pera]. You have not learned properly the spirit of the Ottoman state or even the circumstances of Istanbul. Beyoglu is an isthmus between Europe and the Islamic world. From there you see Istanbul through a telescope.

Westerners, as Halit suggested, always reacted with fury at the ill-treatment of Christians by Muslims. The Turks were condemned as the enemies of humanity for their treatment of the Greeks during the Greek War of Independence (1821–9). But the 15,000 Turkish men, women and children slaughtered in southern Greece in 1821 were ignored: the Greek slogan ‘Not a Turk shall remain in the Morea’ was a prescription for genocide. During the ‘Bulgarian atrocities’ of 1875, the atrocities committed against the Christians were widely publicized in Europe and the United States, but the equally atrocious murders of Muslims were ignored. In the 1890s, when Armenians used violence to secure an independent Armenia, the killings of Turks were ignored by the Western states, while the Ottoman response was condemned as mindless racial murder. Sir Charles Eliot wrote of the chain of massacre and reprisal during the Greek war ‘not from a desire to prove that Turks and Greeks are all much of a muchness (=equivalent), but that it is important to realize that the Turks really have cause to fear Christians. Otherwise such events as the recent Armenian massacres (1896) would be inexplicable.’

The occasions on which the streets of Stamboul actually did run red with Christian blood were few. The different ethnic communities coexisted, perhaps because no one group predominated. In (Anatolia and the Balkans), there was far more racial violence. For all the great Islamic monuments, and the fervour of the softas, Constantinople (including Stamboul, Pera, and the outlying suburbs) was not a Muslim city: it actually had fewer Muslims than Christians (384,836 Muslims to 444,294 Christians, plus 22,394 Jews).

But the statistics do not adequately measure the changing nature of The City’s population. Between 1876 and 1896, more than 1 million Muslim refugees fled to the Ottoman empire from the Balkan regions and from southern Russia. Many of them had a deep personal hatred of all Christians, and a large number of these Balkan Muslims made their homes in Stamboul and the shanty towns around the walls. Other poor migrants to the capital included many Kurds, whose hatred for the enterprising, energetic Armenians was notorious. Most of the 6,000 Armenians murdered in August 1896 were clubbed to death by Kurds with a score to settle. The Christian population was also in flux… their numbers equally swollen by many who had suffered at the hands of the Muslim majority in Anatolia and the eastern provinces… In the last years of the Ottoman empire… Constantinople became what it had never been before: a microcosm of the empire.

 Source: https://www.quora.com/