A Palace Called Kiosk

We found ourselves, as one does, at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. Or rather museums: the official name, İstanbul Arkeoloji Müzeleri, is plural, because there are three of them, sharing a garden like well-behaved neighbours.

A Sultan Abroad

Guns and Antiquities

From this collection grew the first museum in what is now Türkiye, named in 1869 the “Imperial Museum,” Müze-i Hümayun. The word hümayun came from Persian, where it means “blessed, royal,” and goes back to the huma, a mythical bird of fortune: whoever its shadow fell upon was destined to be king. The same word gave its name to the Mughal emperor Humayun, whose luck, it must be said, was rather more intermittent than the bird’s reputation would suggest.

Nothing to Declare

The Ottoman Empire meanwhile turned its attention to the legal side of digging. The regulation of 1869 introduced excavation permits and recognised the landowner as owner of whatever turned up. Finds could be sold within the empire, the state kept first refusal, and export was forbidden—unless the sultan was pleased to allow it.

The regulation of 1874 proved altogether more generous: finds were divided in three equal parts between the state, the landowner and the director of the excavation. Since the directors of excavations were, at the time, invariably European, their third travelled perfectly legally to Europe, and more than one great European museum owes a good part of its collection to this admirable spirit of sharing.

Things changed shortly after 1881, when the painter and archaeologist Osman Hamdi Bey became director of the museum. The law of 1884 once again banned the export of antiquities, save by the sultan’s special leave, and provincial governors were instructed to send their finds to the capital.

Not That Sort of Kiosk

The museum had outgrown the church even earlier, and in 1875 it moved to the nearby Tiled Kiosk, where the exhibition opened in 1880. In Turkish the building is called Çinili Köşk.

It was built in 1472 under Mehmed II, who was busy converting a freshly conquered Constantinople into an Ottoman capital. It stands within the outer walls of Topkapı, its windows looking out over Gülhane Park, and its main façade recalls the architecture of Central Asia, Samarkand in particular.

English speakers need no help with the first word. Çini is the Persian chīnī, “Chinese,” and glazed ceramics were named after their country of origin much as they were in English—except that English reserved china for fine porcelain, while Persian and Turkish apply the word to the whole family, earthenware and tiles included.

The second word is more of a surprise. Köşk, a villa, summer palace or garden pavilion, comes from the Persian kōšk (کوشک), “pavilion, palace, mansion.” The Italians borrowed it from the Ottomans as chiosco, and the rest of Europe from the Italians; the English kiosk is the same word. Somewhere along the way the pavilion shrank into a booth selling newspapers and cigarettes—a sense it never had in Persian, which is why Iranians, needing a word for the humbler object, had to borrow kiosk back from French as کیوسک (kiyosk). A palace, it seems, can come down in the world as thoroughly as any aristocrat.

A Temple for the Dead

The museum soon outgrew the kiosk as well, and sensational finds settled the matter. In 1887 Osman Hamdi Bey excavated the royal necropolis at Sidon and brought a whole company of sarcophagi back to Istanbul. Opposite the kiosk rose a purpose-built museum designed by the Levantine architect Alexandre Vallaury, who took his inspiration from two of the finds: the Alexander Sarcophagus and the Sarcophagus of the Mourning Women, which is shaped like a small Ionic temple. It is, one imagines, the only museum in the world designed by its own

Above the entrance of the museum, opened in 1891, the tughra of Abdul Hamid II presides over the inscription Asâr-ı Atîka Müzesi, “Museum of Antiquities.” South and north wings followed in 1903 and 1907, giving the building its present form.

Vallaury built a good deal of Istanbul. His works include the celebrated Pera Palace Hotel, where Ernest Hemingway stayed and where, the hotel will tell you, Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express—a claim her biographers regard with the same scepticism Poirot reserved for alibis. He also put up an enormous wooden building on Büyükada, the largest of the Princes’ Islands, which was meant to be a hotel and casino and became instead a Greek orphanage.

The School Next Door

The third museum of the complex, the Museum of the Ancient Orient, occupies a building Vallaury completed in 1883 for the School of Fine Arts (Sanayi-i Nefise Mekteb-i Âlisi). The school was founded by the same indefatigable Osman Hamdi Bey and survives today as Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University—the very institution now housed in the old cannon foundry at Tophane. The arrangement had an admirable logic: the director could run museum and school without crossing the road, and future painters and sculptors had something worth copying on the doorstep.

This museum, too, has only just reopened after four years behind closed doors. It displays pre-Islamic treasures from across the former Ottoman lands: Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Egypt and even Arabia.

But the collections deserve posts of their own. Stay tuned.