Gülhane Park: The Rose Garden and the Edict of 1839
Why is it significant?
Walk down the broad avenue under the plane trees, between lawns and flower beds, with the palace walls rising on your right. Families picnic, cats patrol the benches, and in spring the beds fill with tulips. For most of its history, though, almost nobody was allowed in here at all.
Key Facts
| Place | Gülhane Park: The Rose Garden and the Edict of 1839 |
|---|---|
| Address | Cankurtaran, Gülhane Parkı, Alemdar Caddesi, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.01300, 28.98090 |
| Part of Walk | Sultans' Gates: Topkapı, Gülhane & the Sublime Porte in Istanbul |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk down the broad avenue under the plane trees, between lawns and flower beds, with the palace walls rising on your right. Families picnic, cats patrol the benches, and in spring the beds fill with tulips. For most of its history, though, almost nobody was allowed in here at all.
Gülhane means the house of roses. These were the outer gardens of Topkapı Palace, sloping down towards the meeting of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, with orchards, pavilions and the palace's own rose garden. Ordinary people of the city mostly glimpsed them from boats on the water, and the palace gardeners, the bostancı, who also served as the sultan's guards and boatmen, kept everyone else out.
On the 3rd of November 1839, a crowd of ministers, religious scholars, foreign ambassadors and representatives of the empire's communities gathered in these gardens. The foreign minister Mustafa Reşid Paşa read out a decree in the name of the young Sultan Abdülmecid. It promised every subject security of life, honour and property, fair taxation and an orderly system of military service, regardless of religion. It is called the Edict of Gülhane, and it opened the reform era known as the Tanzimat.
Promises on paper were one thing, and the reforms met resistance and moved slowly. But the edict reshaped the empire's laws, schools and army over the following decades, and it is remembered as the first great charter of modern Turkish history.
In 1912 the gardens were opened to the public as a park, and in August 1928 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk presented the new Turkish alphabet in Latin letters at an evening gathering in Gülhane... a reform as sweeping as anything this garden had heard before. Keep walking to the far end of the park, where the land drops towards the water, and look for a lonely column among the trees.