Spurred by a Romantic desire to express truth, transparency and virtue in one’s dwellings, the chalet craze was rooted in a pan-European idealisation of rural life, stoic peasants and philosophical theories that foregrounded hilltop and mountain settings.
In fact, Sultan Abdülhamid II was at the forefront of what was, in fact, a global fad, sparked by the showing of a huge number of prefabricated timber buildings – most often manufactured in Norway – at the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris. The chalets of Yıldız.Īrriving in iron-reinforced crates from northern Europe, and then often customised by local craftsmen, these chalets – or Şale – would go on to become so popular that, by the turn of the century, publishers would be producing Mrs Beeton-style guides to the commissioning, design and building of timber prefab buildings for Istanbul’s middle class. What I eventually found was a collection of mail-order catalogues, from manufacturers as far afield as Sweden, Norway and Odessa, selling prefabricated timber chalets. The collection is not fully digitised and I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. My next port of call was the Rare Books Collection – which includes Yıldız’s library of books and manuscripts – held at Istanbul University. Sultan Abdülhamid II was at the forefront of a global fad sparked by prefabricated timber buildings – most often manufactured in Norway – at the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris However, bafflingly, I could find nothing about the garden pavilions. The archives are vast, covering every aspect of Ottoman life in great detail, including a huge amount of information about the architecture and construction of 19th-century imperial palaces and gardens. Like many Ottomanists before me, I made my way to the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi – the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Minister’s Office – now kept at a mammoth repository in Istanbul’s Kağıthane neighbourhood. How had they come to be built here, on the hilltop? What were they for? And why did they look like Swiss chalets? I had to find out.
But what I wasn’t expecting was the quirky beauty of the decaying timber garden pavilions studding the landscape. I knew, too, that the property was a vast complex of pavilions and gardens, designed in different styles and located within a woodland overlooking the Bosphorus. I knew, of course, that it had been the seat of Ottoman government and the residence of Sultan Abdülhamid II from 1876 to 1909. I had not visited Yıldız – the Palace of the Northern Wind – before.
And it all started with a climb up a steep hill to the Yıldız Palace Park in the summer of 2009. This is a story about 19th-century globalisation: of flat-pack homes sold by catalogue, of the introduction of new ideas about domesticity and home-making, and of how the suburbs of Istanbul came to be dotted with Swiss-chalet-style timber buildings.