The Architects of Ottoman Constantinople

The Balyan Family and the History of Ottoman Architecture

Alyson Wharton-Durgaryan

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781780768526
• eBook ISBN: 9780857738134
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

The Balyan family were a dynasty of architects, builders and property owners who acted as the official architects to the Ottoman Sultans throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Originally Armenian, the family is responsible for some of the most famous Ottoman buildings in existence, many of which are regarded as masterpieces of their period – including the Dolmabahçe Palace (built between 1843 and 1856), parts of the Topkap? Palace, the Ç?ra?an Palace and the Ortaköy Mosque. Forging a unique style based around European contemporary architecture but with distinctive Ottoman flourishes, the family is an integral part of Ottoman history. As Alyson Wharton's beautifully illustrated book reveals, the Balyan's own history, of falling in and out of favour with increasingly autocratic Sultans, serves as a record of courtly power in the Ottoman era and is uniquely intertwined with the history of Istanbul itself.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The Balyan Family, Canon and Archive¹

The Balyan family were Armenian architects at the forefront of the building trade in nineteenth-century Ottoman Constantinople. Krikor Amira (1764–1831), his son, Karapet Amira (1800–66), and his sons, Nigoğos Bey (1826–58), Serkis Bey (1831–99) and Agop Bey (1837–75), were engaged in the construction of Ottoman architecture for three generations.

During the nineteenth century, imperial works encompassed a wide range of buildings, including not only the traditional types associated with Ottoman architecture of the past, such as mosques, palaces and pavilions, but also new structures that proliferated over the century, such as factories, government buildings (including ministries created mid-century) and schools for the Empire’s new civil elites. The earlier generations of the family to serve as architects – Krikor and Karapet – were powerful leaders of the Armenian community (amira). Karapet’s sons – Nigoğos, Serkis and Agop – were educated in Paris in the 1840s–60s.

During this time of transformation, within both the building trade and sociocultural life, the Balyan family retained a striking degree of control over the planning and the carrying out of a large number of imperial building works. Despite their temporal fame, the longevity of their careers and their potential importance in the history of Ottoman architecture, the lives and works of the Balyan family have not been well studied. The limited works about the Balyan family are often clouded by bias and fail to connect the family with other developments in Ottoman, Armenian and architectural historiography.

The Turkish perception of the Balyan family has changed little since the nineteenth century. This is the canon or ‘[T]he actively circulated memory … [that] keeps the past present.’² The degenerate influence of non-Muslim kalfas (builders and architects of non-Muslim identity) over the stately edifice of Ottoman architecture was remarked upon frequently in Ottoman chronicles and official documents, although the Balyan family were seldom referred to by name. The view was that their architectural works were of an inappropriate style that copied alafranga (Frankish or European style) fashions and were badly constructed. They were also accused of embezzlement and other personal and professional vices. The historiography since the Ottoman period, through the Republican period and into the twenty-first century, has repeated these assertions about the Armenian kalfas and their corruptive influence, thereby keeping this canon alive and well, guaranteeing that authors either repeat it or react against its tenets.

Yet, there is always a counterpoint. Here, it is the Armenian narrative of a talented family of builders who moved from Anatolia to the Ottoman capital Constantinople and became the sultan’s favoured subjects. Their ability at construction enabled them to excel, and they served consecutive sultans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Balyan family were among the earliest Ottomans to attend Parisian educational institutions and to take part in important Ottoman industrialization projects, such as the construction of mines and railways, which enabled them to play a crucial role in the modernization of the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, they were benevolent towards their own community and encouraged the expansion of Armenian religious life and cultural expression. Therefore, they became Armenian genius figures.

In Ancient Greece and Rome the genius figure was a god of human nature or messenger between god and man. This pagan god migrated into the literature of the Middle Ages, where it took on aspects of the modern meaning of genius: human creativity, inventive powers and mental ability. The genius had positive moral qualities such as he ‘abhors vice and artifice, but praises... virtuous behaviour’. He also had an association with reproduction and virility.³

Giorgio Vasari,⁴ in one of the first works of art history, describes the lives of the eminent artists and architects of the Renaissance such as Michelangelo and Leonardo. They were talented polymaths, responsible for not only the design and construction of their works of art and architecture but were humanists engaged in a manner of other intellectual pursuits.

Debating the nature of genius became prominent again in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Joshua Reynolds claimed that genius could be acquired through hard work, whereas the Romantic vision of genius stated that it was innate and waiting to be discovered. Views of genius became bound up with racial science. As a result, literature concerning art and architectural works, such as the Elgin Marbles, were used to prove the biological superiority of the Europeans, their ability to possess ideas ahead of their time and to enact progress.⁵ This was the intellectual background to colonialism as Edward Said points out.⁶

The emerging nation states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as the Republic of Turkey identified their own genius figures to reflect their national characteristics and ethnic superiority to other nations. The sixteenth-century Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan was promoted as a genius figure not only because of his architectural accomplishments but also due to the survival of biographical texts shedding light on his character (in a related manner to those of Vasari).⁷ As a result Sinan became ‘a sacrosanct yardstick to celebrate, criticise and comment on agency in modern Turkish architecture.’⁸

Due to the pressures of political and social circumstances that Armenians faced in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, an alternative genius figure was created out of the architectural legacy and biographical details of the Balyan family.⁹ This image has continued to be expressed in recent works.

Because of the continued dominance of different Armenian and Turkish narratives on the role of the Balyan family, there is no satisfactory account that investigates the assertions of both, or that gathers additional evidence to answer uncertainties and fill gaps. Also, the Balyan family has not been viewed within its proper contexts – not only in relation to the history of Armenians, or of architecture and its practice in the Ottoman Empire, but also on a global scale.

Some might argue that this separation into ‘Turkish’ and ‘Armenian’ narratives does not accurately reflect demonstrations of Armenian identity in Turkey that overwhelmingly focus on the belonging of Armenians not on their difference.¹⁰ Despite this tendency and despite recent advancements in the reconciliation of Turks and Armenians, both in popular and academic spheres,¹¹ the historiography of the Balyan family has long continued to be defined along bifurcated lines.¹²

It might also be argued that a focus on the Armenian identity of the Balyan family is irrelevant when talking about the Ottoman Empire, a society in which individuals visualized themselves as Ottoman subjects and did not understand their existence in terms of anachronistic modern separations.¹³ However, as this book will show, although the Balyan family identified themselves on many levels as Ottomans, they also demonstrated their social, linguistic, cultural and religious difference as Armenians. Hence this distinction should be acknowledged, as well as the position of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire as a colonial power, and thus potentially as the ‘master’s culture’ for these non-Muslim subjects.¹⁴

This book aims to find a meeting place for extant cultural memories and discourses.¹⁵ A large body of Ottoman and French archival documents, periodical materials, Armenian histories and newspaper sources adds to these memories and discourses and will be considered. Buildings will be formally analysed, as well as comparative works both from Europe and Armenia. The use of literary sources is also included to give more flesh to the depiction of social types and transformations.

The book is an attempt at what Aleida Assmann calls archaeology: ‘Archaeology is an institution of cultural memory that retrieves lost objects and defunct information from a distant past, forging an important return path from cultural forgetting to cultural memory.’¹⁶ This act of remembering involves paying particular attention to information that has been archived (that is, material that is kept in archives and has not been used, or has been misused, by previous researchers) as well as, on the theoretical level, referring to ‘the passively stored memory that preserves the past as archive’.¹⁷

The position of the Balyan family as imperial architects is the centre of the book’s enquiry, an enquiry that builds specifically upon works on the subject by authors of Armenian ethnicity, Pars Tuğlacı and Yeprem Boğosyan, as well as on those of Turkish authors Selman Can and Oya Şenyurt. The Armenian scholars assert that the Balyan family, although called kalfa, were the imperial architects of the Ottoman sultans. However, because they did not back up this claim with convincing evidence, it was questioned by Selman Can and Oya Şenyurt, who focus more generally on the building trade, and who assert that the Balyan family were one of many contractors active at this time.

This book argues that there is substantial evidence that the Balyan family did indeed hold a special status, which was a continuation of the post of imperial architect (a position within Ottoman officialdom and with a specific training and entry system). The book also develops the narrative about how the building trade in the Ottoman Empire transformed over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the result of social change and bureaucratic reform, and how the Balyan family adapted to this new environment. They developed their own system of operations, which had some overlaps with the old procedures of the Imperial Architects Office and with the new bureaucratic bodies, but which in other ways resembled a private company. Therefore, their position, their methods of working, aspects of their identity and their architecture, were a mix of old and new.

Each chapter deals with one issue related to the status and operations of the family. First, this introduction addresses historical, artistic and social contexts, such as the influence of westernization on reforms and on Ottoman architecture, the image-making of the Tanzimat (reform-era) sultans, and the fate of the Armenians at the end of the nineteenth century. It also begins to discuss the identity of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. This is something that is continued in the account of the historiography of the Balyan family that concludes Chapter 1.

Following this introduction to the contexts and secondary literature concerning the Balyan family, the subsequent chapters move on to the findings from new documentation. Chapter 2 is a thorough assessment of the status of the Balyan family using European, Armenian and Ottoman primary sources. The overarching contention is that members of the family held very important positions that were in some ways equivalent to the earlier imperial architects. The following chapters develop how they managed to achieve (and then to defend) this status as imperial architects.

Chapter 3 argues that the Balyan family’s position within the Armenian community played an important role in their assumption of the position of imperial architects, and the maintenance of that position. Chapter 4 addresses the Parisian education of the younger members of the family (Nigoğos, Serkis and Agop), and asserts that they can be viewed as a kind of avant-garde¹⁸ who were socially engaged ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Colour Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Transliteration
• Abbreviations
• Archival Document Collection Codes from the Başbakanlık Arşivi (BBK)/Ottoman Prime Ministry Archives
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Position of Imperial Architect and the Balyan Family
• 3. Karapet Balyan as an Amira and his Role in the Mobilization of the Armenian Community of Constantinople
• 4. The Balyan Family, Paris and the Birth of the Armenian–Ottoman Romantic Era
• 5. Official Style and Architecture in the Tanzimat
• 6. The Networks Behind the Imperial Building Works of the Tanzimat
• 7. The Downfall of Serkis Balyan
• 8. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates section
• Back cover