Owen Matthews Owen Matthews

Turkish delights | 30 November 2017

Patricia Daunt has produced a stunning record of Ottoman grandeur before it’s bulldozed for new development

Patricia Daunt’s collection of essays is a fascinating exploration of some of Turkey’s most beautiful and evocative places, from the crumbling grandeur of Count Ignatiev’s Russian embassy summer villa on the upper shores of the Bosphorus to the remote and fog-bound manor houses of the Black Sea. But the Palace Lady’s Summerhouse is much more than a beautifully illustrated book: it’s about the people who lived — and live — in these buildings, and a portrait of the vanishing worlds they represent.

We meet the gentlemanly descendants of a dynasty of grand viziers who quizzically watch the maritime traffic of the modern world passing by their ancestral waterside palace. There are cheerful black peasants whose great-grandparents came to Turkey as slaves and settled on the shores of Lake Köycegiz, a rarely visited gem in western Anatolia; and gentlemen tea-farmers who spend winter evenings sitting in the vast inglenooks of ancient farmhouses. It’s a whimsical and finely drawn account, a love letter to a country and to a world that has been almost completely swallowed up by tourism, new money and development.

Daunt, the wife of a former British ambassador to Turkey, has been able to visit and document houses, palaces and grand Bosphorus villas — known as yalis — rarely seen outside a tiny circle of diplomats and Istanbul grandees. The section on ‘palaces of diplomacy’ takes us inside some of the grandest mansions in Istanbul. Almost all of them were purpose-built by the great powers to show off their wealth and power to the Ottoman court. Hence Pera House, the current British consulate-general, is a vast pile designed by Charles Barry who also built the Palace of Westminster. The Netherlands have a perfect early 18th-century Dutch manor house; the Italians a Venetian palazzo; the French a baroque hotel particulier, furnished in Louis XVI style.

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