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Cypriot Mehmet
Emin Pasha Mansion (Istanbul)
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The Kibrisli Yali [literally
"The Cypriot Mansion"] is one of the largest summerhouses to survive on the
Bosphorus, in Istanbul, Turkey. Its rambling architecture mirrors the fluctuating fortunes
of the statesman who gave the house its name and his colourful heirs. The yali stands on massive stone foundations built
out into the Bosphorus. Architecturally it looks all of a piece, but it was actually built
over a hundred years and is now divided into three. The central two storeys are what is
left of the original house, though the balcony does not appear in early engravings. The
lower windowswere raised to avoid the wash from pass- ing ships.
The yali was for summer use, but in
the thrities and forties the family would stay until December, when the men rowed out to
catch lufer. If a `yali' can be seen as resembling a bird, the Kibrisli yali is like a
huge white bird of prey drying its wings on the shore below the fortress of Anadolu
Hisari. This long, low building is the largest eighteen-century yali to survive on the
Bosphorus. Its frontage streches for more than sixty metres along the Asian shore. From
its vantage point halfway up the Bosphorus, it looks out on every turn of the twisting
northern course of the channel almost up to the point where a sharp bar of indigo marks
the entrance to the Black Sea. Rumeli Hisari and Anadolu Hisari, the rival fortresses of
Europe and Asia, frame its spectacular view. The strait is at its narrowest here, no more
than half a mile wide, a crossing point that has been used since Darius threw down his
bridge of boats. Only on the Asian side, along the ancient coastal road from Uskudar, is
the house hidden by walls and trees, a greenness accentuated by wooded hills which until
recently were part of the house's parkland.
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The Orangery, a late 19th century addition with
a central fountain and a floor of pebble mosaics. The entire ground floor has walls of
tall windows. Here, dense gardens crowd in; on the other side of the house lies the open
Bosphorus. The rambling gardens of the yali still touch the meadows around the mouths of
the Kucuksu and Goksu streams, "the Sweet Waters of Asia". But modern urbanising
mess has taken a heavy toll. A hundred and fifty years ago, Miss Pardoe wrote, describing
the "Beauties of the Bosphorus", that it needed "little aid from the
imagination to remember them as one of the brightest gems in the diadem of nature".
Now the streams are sadly polluted. Bathers swim at their peril. No longer are there
flowers enough to conduct a romance in the language of their names. The meadows where the
Sultans' horses once grazed are fenced off in plots, with warnings to tresspassers to keep
away. But behind the yali's high walls, the magnificence of the selamlik's shady trees and
flowering shrubs remains. The harem's fabled peonies continue to flower their best in
June. In the
selamlik garden, peonies, cedars and palms frame the `Orangery' once in fact lined with
sweetly scented lemon trees. From the sea the house looks so much of a piece that one
might imagine a single man built it within the space of a few years. In fact it grew over
a period of a hundred, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.
Being "noble so long as the
person who elevated him exists", Kara Vezir Silahtar Mehmed Pasha, the Black Vizier,
who built the original yali, is now long forgotten. Briefly grand vizier in 1770, he must
have been a rich and cultured Ottoman living during an unexpectedly quiet interlude in
which the empire enjoyed twenty years of peace. These were the happy years before the need
arose to confront Catherine the Great's Russia, when pashas built wooden summerhouses
along the shores of the Bosphorus. It was the golden age of the "true" Ottoman
yali. No expense was spared with the building. Foundations were set on three plat- forms
of quarried stone -mussel beds now- which still reach out into the bay to hold the yali
safe during earth tremors and winter storms. Alder, pine and spruce from the Black Sea
were used for the outside timbers, Lycian cedar for the floors, Pamphylian silver fir for
the window frames and Anatolian oak for the doors, cupboards, niches, pillars and
balustrades. In the selamlik, ranges of tall sash windows with large panes of imported
Venetian glass were let into all four sides of both storeys. The downstairs corner rooms,
identical in size and shape, led into the central hall, which in turn led into the
southerly garden. Where the two arms of the ascending staircase meet, a wall of windows
streches half the length of the house to overlook the red tiles of the harem's roof and in
those days allowed the eye a sweep of the lower Bosphorus before one carried on up to the
landing off which all the upper rooms lead. As a summer retreat, the building was designed
to allow maximum ventilation and to be filled with the strange aqueous light reflected off
the waters, as well as to catch the sunlight over the gardens when the wind from the sea
was inclement.
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Eighty years after Kara Vezir built
the yali, his name had been erased from the history books. The house had passed through
several hands and was in need of restoration. It was then that the man who gave his name
to the yali acqui- red it. Kibrisli Mehmet Emin Pasha, to give him his full name, was one
of Turkey's most able nineteenth-century statesmen. Three-times grand vizier, twice first
lord of the Admiralty, governor of Edirne and Aleppo, ambassador to London and St
Petersburg, once proclaimed "the voice of Law from one end of the empire to the
other", he was nevertheless frequently plagued by debt. At his death in 1871 he left
a daughter by each of two marriages, an admiring public, few friends and just eighty-one
Turkish liras.
Kibrisli Mehmet Emin Pasha owed the
beginnings of his tumultuous and illustrious career to the most skilled of all
talent-spotters, Reshid Pasha, ins- tigator of the reforming Gülhane Decree, promoter of
the Westernising Tanzimat movement, and six times grand vizier. Kibrisli Mehmet Emin
Pasha's first wife was a protegee of Reshid Pasha's family; his second was picked out for
him by Reshid Pasha himself. The lives of both women were intertwined with the history of
the yali, and each left her indelible mark on it. Kibrisli Mehmet Emin Pasha's forebears
were from Anatolia, and resettled in Cyprus shortly after Selim II's conquest of the
island in 1571. Somehow they acquired farming land on its western shore, farmed for the
production of sugar cane and sweet wines. For the next three centuries the profit from
these farms was the source of their income; it only ceased when the farms were
requisitioned by the British governor in 1948. Born on the family estates near Paphos in
1810, Kibrisli Mehmet Emin Pasha arrived in the capital (Istanbul) at the age of seven to
enter the Palace School. By twenty-five fluent in English, French, Arabic, Persian, and
Greek, he was an attache in the Paris embassy, betrothed to a wild and beautiful but
well-connected twenty-two-year-old Roman Catholic who had separated from the English
husband she had married when he was practicing medicine in the Levant.
In 1840, when he was thrity and
married to the lady in question, who had become Moslem, and changed her name to
Melek,
Kibrisli Mehmet Emin Pasha and his wife bought the yali, reportedly with the money raised
from the sale of their furniture, at a time when he had temporarily fallen from grace and
was searching for a house "in somewhat remote quarter where creditors generally come
mounted on asses". Ten years later, the marriage to Melek Hanim was over and Kibrisli
Mehmet Emin Pasha was recalled from the London embassy, not on affairs of state but to
deal with the scandal attributed to the wife he had left behind in the yali. His chief
eunuch had been found strangled in the hammam of the harem and Melek Hanim was suspected.
Kibrisli Mehmet Emin Pasha ordered the hammam to be torn down before his return London; a
lily pond was built into its foundations, as if to absolve the guilt of those implicated
in the murder. Melek Hanim's memoirs tells her side of the story. But what really happened
in the hammam during the afternoon of their daughter's first reading of the Koran will
never be knnown. Some say that the crime was committed by a female member of the
household, jealous of a favourite eunuch's power over his mistress. But it was whispered
that the eunuch had discovered that Melek Hanim was feigning a pregnancy in order to
introduce into her household a child who was not her own, to replace the only son who had
died on the morrow of Kibrisli Mehmet Emin Pasha's departure for London. If her husband
was to save his career, he had no choice but to repudiate his wife. She was tried and
exiled to Konya. Reshid Pasha arranged forthwith the contract of Kibrisli Mehmet Emin
Pasha's second marriage, as he had the first. Two portraits of Kibrisli Mehmet Emin Pasha
hang in the yali today.In the first he is depicted as the precocious young governor of
Aleppo. The other portrait was painted by an English artist only weeks before he left
London. He is dressed in his black Stambouline frock coat, black trousers and fez. It is a
penetrating study of a man who enjoys high office but is inwardly ill at ease. The second
wife, Feride Hanim, was the last of Ayaz Pasha's line. If history and fable go hand in
hand, this illustrious Albanian forebear was Suleyman the Magnificent's swashbuckling
grand vizier, who, before he died in 1539, helped his master to double the size of the
Ottoman Empire, and has 140 child- ren and estates streching miles across Istanbul, from
Ayazpasha to Ayazaga. With the aid of Feride Hanim, the yali was renovated, enlarged and
modernised with a new east wing balancing the identical west wing. A balcony overlooking
the Bosphorus was added to the original facade. Every room was "gaily pain-
ted". Banisters carved to imitate fer forge were as fine as the additional classical
cornices were grand.
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The winter dining room, now painted vibrant pink instead
of earlier pastel yellow and with a delicate fountain instead of the original fireplace
considered too risky in a wooden house. These extensive building works were apparently
undertaken over the course of winter months between 1850 and 1870. An entirely new grand
hall, or central sofa, was built out into the garden, streching the depth of the house
from the Bosphorus to the land entrance facade. Its floor of cedar planks cut along the
grainand riveted by iron nails has only recently been replaced by marble. The atrium,
possibly inspired by the seventeenth-century wooden dome in the nearby Koprulu
Yali, must
have had scaffolding up for months as artists worked on the frecoes of peonies. Beneath
these, master plasterers would have worked on the delicate task of moulding the
neoclassical columns and friezes. It still has the highest, grandest hall of the yalis on
the Bosphorus. Kibrisli Mehmet Emin Pasha completed his house with a third large hall
front- ing into the sea, its doors and windows opening onto the terrace, where the boats
still moor. This acted and still does, as a sea entrance. Behind it on the southern side
is the winter dining room, still lined with cupboards for storing bedrools for guests
spending the night. Selim
Dirvana, the
patriarch of his generation, sits beneath a youthfulportrait of his great-grandfather
Kibrisli Mehmet Emin Pasha, painted whenhe was governor of Aleppo, which appears in the
background. The name Kibrisli (literally Cypriot) denotes the family's origins in Cyprus,
where they were granted lands in the 16th century that formed the basis of their fortunes
until the British requisitioned them in the 1940s. Perhaps the loveliest contrivance of
all in the rebuilding was the winter garden, or orangery. Its walls of huge windows face
south and east, and its divans are ranged along the walls; but the most strikingly
original feature is the fountain in its centre, surrounded by a pavement of finely worked
krokalia. The intricate technique, much used by the Byzantines, producing a carpet of
geometric and floral designs from a mosaic of black and white Malte- se marble pebbles,
was carried on into the garden leading up to the selamlik's front door. Sadly, time and
winter rains covered these exterior mosaics with layers of silt. In places they have been
covered with a tidier and more mo- dern form of pavement. On Kibrisli Mehmet Emin Pasha's
death in 1871, the yali passed to the only child of his second marriage, Atiye
Hanim, who
is the forebear of those who still live in the main section of the house. Deeply
traditional she maintain- ed a strict division between harem and selamlik until her death
in 1922. While her salon was said to be almost like a mosque, the selamlik of her husband,
the son of a pasha from the Peloponnese, who conveniently adopted the name of Kibrisli
Mustafa Pasha, was far from traditional. As Atiye Hanim conducted prayers on the other
side of the wall, he gave garden and cocktail parties to which Pierre Loti, with his
powdered cheeks and platform-soled shoes, never refused an invitation and which the more
emancipated ladies of the harem were free to attend. Whatever the divisions in the
household, the first Liberal Democratic part was founded at the yali by the husband of
Atiye Hanim's eldest daughter to- gether with her own three sons, Tevfik, the eldest,
Nazim and Shevket. Five years later, on the eve of the First World War, Tevfik was
assasinated during Enver Pasha's Union and Progress coup d'etat. When Atiye Hanim died,
the house was, on advice of the courts, divided up into five equal parts, for which the
surviving children drew lots. The west wing went to Shevket, Atiye Hanim's youngest son,
who was married twice, first to a granddaughter of Cemile Sultan, whom he divorced, and
later to Princess Atiye, daughter of Khedive Abbas Hilmi of Egypt. He had no children and
his heirs was his second wife's son by a former marriage, who commited the unforgivable
sin of selling his stepfather's inheritance over the heads of the rest of the family. An
unsightly wall now cuts the old harem garden in half. From the sea, the west wing still
looks as if it is part of the yali, and so it is architecturally, but it is a separate
property, divided firmly from the rest. When it was sold, Kibrisli Mehmet Emin Pasha's
great-grandson Selim Dirvana, took a train to Ankara to ensure that an order for its
protec- tion was issued.
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The Venetian lantern in the hall, which streches from the
sea entrance to the gardens behind the house and used to serve as a ballroom. Atiye
Hanim's eldest daughter, Aziz, inherited the two storeys of the old selamlik. Her
descendents still spend their summers there. Though they have introduced modern bathrooms
and brought the kitchens indoors, they have left the hundred year old paint undisturbed.
It has aged to resemble the trans- lucent waters outside. What is left of the old harem
garden, with its lily pond where the hammam once stood, runs up to the road, cruedly
hemmed in by the west wing's boundary wall. Although the selamlik gate serves as its
ent- rance, the selamlik's turnstile food hatch is only a folding memory; it was considered a
dangerous plaything for Aziz Hanim's sisters four boys and was bricked in. The rest of the
central part and the east wing of the house, together with the dependencies in the
gardens, were shared between the remaining Kibrisli children: Muzeyyen, youngest of the
three sisters, who married an Egyptian pasha and lived with her only son in Paris;
Nazim,
who was a cavalry officer and married a White Russian but never had children; and
Refika,
who married the handsome grandson of a sipahi officer, Edhem Dirvana, and had the four
boys who played with the food hatch. Muzeyyen sold her part to Refika. Anetodes are still
told of the fun and generosity, the true Ottoman hospita- lity, enjoyed by visitors in the
years between the foundation of the Republic and late 1950s.
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In this portrait, painted when he was ambassador to London, a mere decade after the first
portrait, Kibrisli Mehmet Emin Pasha is only about forty. The strain of his domestic problems is all
too clear. The photograph dates from the yali's
heyday at the turn of the century, when it was filled with
politicians, philosophers and writers. |
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The Dirvanas and
Kibrislis kept open house. Edhem Bey was overheard to remark his wife over lunch one day,
"I do not recognise that young man at the end of the table", to which she
replied, "Neither do I, but he has been with us for a fortnight." Shevket filled
the yali with a gilded circle of philosophers and writers. Yahya Kemal, Riza Tevfik and
Fazil Ahmet were among those who unrolled mattresses taken from the cupboards in the
winter dining room to sleep under the windows fronting the Bosphorus, guarded only by the
moon and the waters. Nazim, the cavalry officer, has a particular claim to family fame. He
crossed the Bosphorus through the fierce current from Rumeli Hisari to the yali steps on
his horse in full dress uniform, not for a wager but to prove to his com- manding officer
that horses were better and more reliable than rowing boats. The four Dirvana sons,
Mahit, Emin, Suleyman and Selim, grew up in the ferment of the new Republic's early years.
Mahit,
the eldest, and his wife, Nesterin Hanim, returned each summer to the yali. It was they
who restored the orangery and had the main hall paved with marble. It was she who
discovered the origi- nal ceiling in her salon overlooking the Bosphorus (the ceiling was
probably lowered for warmth during the First World War). A widow now, she still occupies
her apartment here in summer. Emin was a soldier, bluff and upright, whose toothbrush
moustache, no nonsense manner and faultless Oxford English astonished London when he was
Turkish military attache in the 1950s. He went on to be Turkey's first ambassador to the
new Republic of Cyprus in 1960. Suleyman is a doctor who has remained in Istanbul to
practise. Selim, the archeologist of the
family, married Mihrimah Hanim and became father of Refika Hanim's only grandchild, a
daughter. Born on the eve of the Second World War, Mihda was brought up in the yali during
the lean wartime years, huddling over stoves in winter, boating and swimming in summer,
and always surrounded by horses and dogs. Selim Dirvana's shell collection in the
orangery. Refika Hanim died in 1961. Money had been tight for some years. Then apparent-
ly quite unexpectedly, Selim Bey's wife inherited her American mother's for- tune. The
yali survives in the fine condition we see today largely thanks to this timely injection
of resources. Selim Dirvana, now a widower, looks back down the years to his great-grand-
father, Kibrisli Mehmet Emin Pasha, and forward to the future of the great- grandchildren
among whom he lives, in a modern house built over the founda- tions of a garden kiosk. His
daughter Mihda married the influential business- man Ilkay Bilgishin, and their children
and grandchildren, Komilis, Kaslowskys and Bilgishins, now spread through Kibrisli Mehmet
Emin Pasha's east wing and the garden buildings. The yali lives on, a unique monument to
the declining years of the Ottoman Empire and full of vitality for the twentyfirst
century. Its story will con- tinue to be the story of one family: living history which
story books could not better.
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Article by: Patricia Daunt
Photographs by: Jerome Darblay and Simon Upton
- This article is quoted
courtesy of the courterly magazine Cornucopia, Issue 8, Volume II, 1995.
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