Istanbul Archaeology Museums & Osman Hamdi Bey
Why is it significant?
Follow the path down to the courtyard where ancient columns, sarcophagi and broken statues lie scattered among the trees, and face the long neoclassical building with its temple-like front. You are in front of the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, and the man who made them was a painter.
Key Facts
| Place | Istanbul Archaeology Museums & Osman Hamdi Bey |
|---|---|
| Address | Cankurtaran, Osman Hamdi Bey Yokuşu Sokağı, 34122 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.01170, 28.98130 |
| Part of Walk | Sultans' Gates: Topkapı, Gülhane & the Sublime Porte in Istanbul |
| Generated | Generated |
Follow the path down to the courtyard where ancient columns, sarcophagi and broken statues lie scattered among the trees, and face the long neoclassical building with its temple-like front. You are in front of the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, and the man who made them was a painter.
Osman Hamdi Bey trained in Paris, painted scenes of Ottoman life that now sell for record sums, and in 1881 became director of the imperial museum, then still crowded into the old church of Hagia Irene. He set out to give the empire a museum worthy of the British Museum or the Louvre. His best-known canvas, The Tortoise Trainer, painted in 1906, shows an old man in a robe trying to teach tortoises... a gentle joke, many think, about how slowly reform moves. He also pushed through a law in 1884 that made it much harder for foreign archaeologists to carry finds out of Ottoman lands.
In 1887 he led an excavation himself at Sidon, in today's Lebanon, and opened a royal burial chamber full of marble sarcophagi. The most spectacular is called the Alexander Sarcophagus, because its reliefs show Alexander the Great on horseback in battle against the Persians, with traces of the original paint still visible. It was carved in the late fourth century before Christ, probably for a king of Sidon, and this museum building was opened in 1891 largely to give it a home.
Across the courtyard stands the Tiled Kiosk, built for Mehmed the Second in 1472, one of the oldest Ottoman buildings in the city, its entrance blazing with blue and turquoise tiles. Sultans once sat in it to watch games of polo-like sport in the palace grounds.
The collections run from early Mesopotamia to Byzantium. Among them is a clay tablet with a Hittite copy of the treaty of Kadesh, often called the oldest known peace treaty, and a fragment of one of the serpent heads from the Hippodrome. Now leave by the lower gate into the park. These lawns were once the sultan's own garden.