Chapter 1 - The Makings of a Royal Graveyard: Abdülhamid I and the Iconography of Sultanic Tombs

Summary

I left the Mausoleum of Sultan Mourad more than ever convinced that no people on earth have succeeded better than the Turks in robbing death of all its terrors, and diffusing an atmosphere of cheerfulness and comfort about the last resting-places of the departed.

Miss Julia Pardoe, 1854

The Hamidiye Tomb is an outlier. Most tombs of the Ottoman Imperial Family lie along the ridge of the peninsula that forms the heart of Istanbul, clustering near the venerable mosque of Aya Sofya, adorning Divanyolu Boulevard as it wends its way westward toward the city walls, or perched atop hills highly visible from the sea. But the Hamidiye Tomb is down near the waters of the Golden Horn, and quite in the middle of a commercial neighbourhood, its only similar companion in this part of town being the nearby royal tombs at the New Mosque, by Galata Bridge. Out of the way it was and, unlike the royal tombs atop the ridge, not visited by new sultans during the procession after the sword-girding ceremony that marked the beginning of their reign. Instead, it languished in the metaphorical shadow of those more famous royal tombs on the ridge and, beginning in the twentieth century, found itself in the physical shadow of the commercial buildings that rose around it. In other words, this sepulchre has been rather overlooked, as Istanbul royal tombs go. But let us buck the trend and see what treasures of culture and history it offers those who pause to consider it.

The Story of the Hamidiye Charitable Complex

After the conquest of Constantinople by Mehmed II in 1453, every Ottoman monarch until 1622 was buried in the grounds around the imperial mosque he had built (or that his son built for him, in the case of Selim I), in a tomb erected for him by his son after the monarch's death; if he had not built his own mosque, he was buried in a royal tomb he had constructed somewhere in Stamboul (as foreigners called the old walled city between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara). The first of the latter – we might call them ‘free-standing’ royal tombs, since they were not part of a mosque complex – clustered near Aya Sofya.