"The Last Ottoman Palace: Yıldız and Its Many Makers"
Deniz Türker, Rutgers University
Moderated by Reşat Kasaba

This talk presents the history of Yıldız Palace, the last and largest imperial residential complex of the Ottoman Empire. While the palace today exists in fragments, nearly erased from the city’s urban memory, it once stood as a global city in miniature—a vibrant hub at the center of the empire’s vast bureaucracy.

Türker traces the evolution of Yıldız Palace from its beginnings as a rural estate for Ottoman queen mothers to its transformation into the heart of imperial governance between 1795 and 1909. Though the palace belonged to the elite realm of the sultans, its development was deeply intertwined with Istanbul’s urban history and broader shifts in empire-building, diplomacy, reform, and public life.

Drawing on rich archival research from the palace’s imperial library, Türker explores how Yıldız was not only an expression of Ottoman imperial identity but also a product of a rapidly globalizing consumer culture. From its architectural splendor to the vast network of goods and services that shaped it, the palace was a reflection of changing tastes, sovereignty, and self-fashioning during a transformative period in Ottoman history.
 

SPEAKER BIO:
Deniz Türker is a historian of Islamic art and architecture, who specializes in late-Ottoman visual and material cultures. Türker's first book The Accidental Palace: Nineteenth-Century Sultans and the Making of Yıldız, 1795-1909 was published in 2023 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. A forthcoming monograph (co-authored with Hilal Uğurlu) expands on the cultural patronage and political networks of Ottoman dynastic women (The Ottoman Harems of the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, The History of Constantinople Series, 2025). Türker also publishes on the history of Islamic art collecting (especially in the nineteenth-century Ottoman and Egyptian contexts). In particular, her scholarship centers on the close early ties between collecting practices and history writing, book collecting, and global scholarly networks and museums