Most residents of Istanbul, and most inquisitive visitors, know the museum of contemporary art Istanbul Modern at Galataport. Not everyone has been inside, but everyone has certainly walked past. Comparatively near at hand there is a smaller museum that hardly anybody knows about. And there is a great deal in it worth seeing.
From Arsenal to Vapur
On the Galata shore of the Golden Horn, beneath the slope of Pera, a shipyard was at work until comparatively recently, laid down by the Genoese in Byzantine Constantinople—or, more precisely, in its suburb of Galata. They called it tersana (lit. It. darsena, from the same Arabic dār al-ṣināʿa that gave us arsenal).
Reinterpreted as containing the familiar Persian root hane ‘house’ (compare çayhane, ‘tea house’), it became tershane under the Ottomans, and the word came to mean ‘shipyard’ in Turkish. (The Turks, having had no previous seafaring of their own, had until then called the lot of it—harbours, ports, and yards alike—simply liman.) The Tersâne-i Âmire, the Imperial Shipyards, were the most important centre of shipbuilding in the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth century until its end. Under the Turkish Republic, renamed Haliç Tersaneleri, the Golden Horn Shipyards, they turned civilian and built and repaired vessels chiefly for local passenger traffic. The vapur so familiar to every Istanbullu—the city’s waterborne public transport, from the Italian vapore, ‘steamer’—were every one of them built, and until recently repaired, in precisely this place.
A New Life for an Old Shipyard
The oldest building of the yard, thought to be the work of Sinan himself, has now been turned by the Istanbul municipality into an exhibition space called İstanbul Sanat, ‘Istanbul Art.’ It gathers the work of contemporary artists from the municipal collection. Naturally, no true Istanbullu can walk past the city’s rightful sovereigns, and so a selection of cats opens my account of the museum.
And now, not only cats.
Tayfun Serttaş (b. 1982). Akdenizli
This inhabitant of the Mediterranean—for so the work of the young Turkish sculptor Tayfun Serttaş is called, Akdenizli in Turkish—rather lodged itself in my affections…
Damla Özge Eflatun (b. 2000). Bozkırkurdu
This goat, whose horns are made of pale blue balloons, was painted in 2021 by Damla Özge Eflatun, who left the painting department of Ankara’s Hacettepe University the following year. She called it Bozkırkurdu—the same calque by which Hermann Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf is known in Turkish.
The book, one imagines, made a considerable impression on the young woman. And now, perhaps, someone will be sufficiently intrigued by the title of a picture bought by the Istanbul municipality and hung in İstanbul Sanat to go and read the novel. Who knows…
Abidin Dino (1913–1993). Deniz Küstü
Here is another work that took its inspiration from a book. Deniz Küstü means, roughly, ‘the sea has fallen out with us and stopped speaking’—the verb küsmek denoting that particular state of having quarrelled and lapsed into silence. The title refers to the novel of the same name by the Turkish writer of Kurdish origin Yaşar Kemal (1923–2015), which English readers can find, in Thilda Kemal’s translation, under the title The Sea-Crossed Fisherman.
The novel’s principal character is Istanbul itself, and the lives of its people are interwoven with what the author regarded as an ecological catastrophe of the later twentieth century: the mass destruction of dolphins off the Turkish coasts of the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, within the bounds of Istanbul included, for the sake of their oil. (This grim trade continued from the 1950s until 1983, when it was at last forbidden by law; in certain countries it continues to this day.)
In this lovely gouache the attentive eye will make out a great deal: the familiar silhouettes of Istanbul, the fishing boats, the sea. A sea cold and grey, because it no longer speaks to us. It has been deprived of its voice—of those cheerful dolphins.
Edip Hakkı Köseoğlu (1904–1990). Köprü-Mandalar
And since we have turned to architectural landscapes, here is one more: Bridge and Water Buffalo. Buffalo, admittedly, are in short supply nowadays, but bridges of this kind are scattered in great numbers across the territory of the former Ottoman Empire. They may be seen in the Balkans, in Türkiye, and in a good many other places besides. The bridge celebrated by Ivo Andrić in The Bridge on the Drina—the novel that won him the Nobel Prize—looks exactly the same.
They are attributed to the celebrated architect Sinan, though in all likelihood he did no more, as chief court architect, than sign off an “exemplary” design which then went into series production.
