As the century-old lift opened, Serdar Gulgun hovered in his doorway like the ghost of another era.
Hands clasped, he hesitated before reaching out to take a visitor’s hand. In the Ottoman period, Turkish etiquette was highly refined and stylized. Each encounter, casual or otherwise, was choreographed and the resulting ceremony reflected the romance of the East.
Although today’s Western-looking Turks have adapted to the 21st Century, courtly vestiges remain in the flowery formulas used to meet and greet, creating a feeling that perhaps, as the lift designed like a bird cage rose upward from the building’s dim marble foyer, it also moved backward in time.
It’s this imperial past that’s so important to Gulgun.
“This flat is my refuge because I am just two steps from the street and city life. Yet, when I close my door, I can be completely alone,” he said. “This idea of being hidden from the street life is very Turkish.”
Like a gentle sultan, the tall, slight Gulgun, garbed in black, stood in stark contrast with his colorful flat, beneath a mischievous chandelier whose glass globes hung like jewel-colored birds.
As Gulgun’s greetings unfolded in a dance of words and gestures, rooms beckoned from beyond arched doorways. There were quick glimpses of low divans, tall calligraphy genealogies, a Sufi turban, hand-painted boxes, playful lamps, waist-high brass candlesticks, stacks of books and scores of rich textiles in vivid colors.
Gulgun’s world is an Ottoman one. An Ottoman art expert and an occasional lecturer at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in London, he also organizes private exhibitions and sales of Ottoman antiques and artwork at Topkapi Palace, home to Ottoman sultans until the reign of Abdul Mecit in the 1800s.
“Even if I were not a Turk, I would love Ottoman art,” Gulgun, 34, said. “But I do not like theatrical decor. My flat and the things in it are cut from the street, our history and culture. I cannot see a Minimalist house, in which you would eat nothing but tiny, fancy foods, here in Istanbul. Here, you need a home in which you can eat lamb, kofte [fried minced meatballs] and borek [thin sheets of pastry].”
Gulgun lives in Tesvikiye, a fairly new neighborhood by Istanbul standards. Tesvikiye scratched its place onto the map when Abdul Mecit moved from Topkapi to the neighborhood in 1856 with the completion of the Dolmabahce Palace on the shores of the Bosporous.
With the sultan and the imperial family came the imperial hangers-on. Of course, they, too, needed places to stay. And because the Dolmabahce Palace was, in poet Theophile Gautier’s words, “an Orientalized Louis XIV style, where one senses an intention to imitate the splendors of Versailles,” it makes sense that the whole neighborhood followed suit with a decidedly European feel.
The importance of quiet
Gulgun’s address is a stalwart stone building, overlooking a street crowded with tiny shops, where girls in tight jeans and high heels stroll hand in hand, while women in traditional baggy trousers called shalvar lug overflowing baskets home from the market.
Despite the ubiquitous mobile phones, MTV and modern buildings, Istanbul remains a great city of the Orient, set in a land of ancient empires–Hittites, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Turks and Mongols–each leaving its own imprint in the wake of efforts to absorb or annihilate previous cultures.
In the midst of the urban monster that Istanbul has become are the vestiges of some of the most luminous civilizations on Earth. And in the constant hurly-burly, Turks have discovered the importance of a quiet place.
“The constant comings and goings of people have, over the centuries, shaped Istanbul’s social structure and meeting places,” wrote Tim Hindle in “Living in Istanbul” (Flammarion, $75). “The residents of Istanbul, who spend their lives in this constant bustle, naturally devote a lot of time and energy to creating havens of peace.”
Regardless of the age of the home, its size, grandeur or even the occasional heavy European influence, Turkish culture–with its sense of propriety and family–makes an imprint on the physical layout of the varied building styles. For example, windows on the konaks, the picturesque 19th Century wooden houses in Bursa and Edirne, are fitted with moucharabies or kafes, elegant wooden trellises that cover windows to allow the ladies inside to observe the street without being seen.
Many Anatolian houses have courtyards, rather than front doors, allowing both an additional layer of privacy and a central place to assemble.
Although reflecting a distinctive European influence, Gulgun’s flat has a central room or a bas oda, a nerve center, from which the other rooms radiate.
From his foyer, visitors are drawn immediately into a large salon, where a nesting feeling is created by low-lying furniture and warm colors. The Ottoman palette is filled with plums and reds, blues and forest greens. And they all appear in these rooms; against walls Gulgun has painted the color of sunshine.
“I like strong, audacious colors,” he said. “Partly it is that I collect old things. And color brings life into them. Ottoman colors are, today, very contemporary, very modern. I may be an art historian, but I hate to hear those words: ‘Those were the days.’ “
In Ottoman times, said the art historian, “what made an Ottoman home was first the architecture and then came the art objects. With the exception of the divan, they did not have much furniture.”
Laughing and glancing around his own cluttered rooms, Gulgun said: “Perhaps I am not a good example,” he said, glancing at the treasures he has culled from private homes, back-alley junk shops and the famous Covered Bazaar.
Please touch
But Gulgun’s house is no museum setting. All manner of intriguing objects are within easy reach. “I don’t have much patience with breakable things, and I do not like display cases,” he said. “When you can’t use something, when you can’t touch it, it loses its appeal for me.”
Gulgun’s passion is entertaining, whether impromptu coffees or more formal dinners. “A house lives when it is full of guests,” he said. “Without people, a house dies.”
A dozen or more people can gather easily in Gulgun’s main salon around the mother-of-pearl, 19th Century Ottoman table flanked by two sunflower-yellow, turn-of-the-century sofas, whose curved lines accommodate sitters of any ilk–long- or short-legged. It would, however, require some confidence to take up residence on what he impishly refers to as “the throne,” an 18th Century walnut bench, covered in hand-woven, hand-cut antique velvet and covered in the obligatory nest of pillows.
For himself, Gulgun has a low-slung, French armchair, close to the kitchen and the coffeepot. It is an advantageous position from which to replenish platters of tiny pastries.
But this is not a flat designed only for large groups. Small collections entice visitors away from the crowded main room to one of the smaller salons. There are bronze dogs, tortoise shell carved spoons, domestic brass candlesticks the size of small children and several astonishing collections of calligraphies.
Because Islam frowned upon visual representation of the human form in painting, creativity turned to one of the oldest forms of expression–writing. There is an adage: “The Koran was revealed in Mecca, recited in Egypt, and written in the land of the Ottomans.”
But calligraphy was not restricted to the writing of holy scripture, it became an aesthetic medium in its own right, as executed by the Ottomans.
“I consider calligraphy the great-grandparent of the abstract non-figurative paintings,” Gulgun said. “It proves my theory that the beauty of Ottoman art is the combination of simplicity and splendor. The material used in calligraphy is quite limited. Just letters. Just two dimensions. But they used these simple things to create the most sumptuous panels.”
Tucked into a corner by the front door is a 16th Century silk-on-silk calligraphy tapestry. And in the main salon is a collection of Sulus-style classic calligraphies. Some are proverbs, some are verses from the Koran and some are the sultan’s imperial seals.
One of the smaller salons has tall, narrow calligraphies, which are genealogies of Ottoman sects, actually designating the next in line to inherit the throne. The dining room has a whimsical array of calligraphy practice sheets, in which a single letter is repeated over and over again.
It would take just a subtle nod of a head to encourage a small group of two or three to retire to either of the two salons opening off the main room. There, they could settle in on a low divan beneath one of the few paintings in the flat. A gold-plated tombak tray table, used traditionally for breaking the fast, literally glows.
Off the wide hallway, actually more of a gallery leading to the rear of the flat, are the small private rooms, the kitchen, with a shining array of tea and coffeepots, an office, a guest room, and the master bedroom and balcony.
Here the collections continue, but on a smaller scale, and the colors are cooler. The bedrooms display Gulgun’s own textile designs, executed for the textile department of the exclusive department store, Vakko, Turkey’s answer to Harrods.
The Ottoman Empire also left its mark on Turkish cuisine. Turkish meals are also carefully choreographed, like a three-act play with plenty of individual scenes. “Mezes,” small appetizer plates provide the prologue. Soups, salad and main courses follow at a measured pace. Dessert is an act unto itself, with separate courses for sweets, fruit and finally, thick Turkish coffee.
And with coffee, there is the ageless expression: “Bir kahvenin, kirk yil hatiri vardir” or “One cup of coffee has 40 years of pleasant memories.”
Turkish hospitality, and coffee or tea, are a gesture of good will and impossible for a guest to refuse because, as it says in the Koran, “the stranger is an envoy of God.” And for this reason, you always will be welcome in any Turkish home.
Who is Serdar Gulgun?
Size of household: 1
Size of dwelling: Seven rooms
Profession: Ottoman art expert
Work and free time: “All my time is free. I do everything for pleasure, including my work.”
Number of televisions: One small television, hidden
Most-valued possession: A throne of carved walnut covered in hand-woven, hand-cut velvet
Favorite ritual: Entertaining friends at home, whether for an afternoon coffee or an evening’s soiree
Favorite decade: Now–a time that is the culmination of many beautiful periods of history
Most-admired designer: The great 16th Century Ottoman architect Sinan
Object of desire: Mehmed II, the conqueror’s portrait by Bellini in the National Gallery of London
— Catherine Collins
BITS ABOUT TURKEY
Area: 314,516 square miles (slightly larger than Texas); 3 percent of the area in Thrace on the European continent, 97 percent in Anatolia on the Asian continent
Neighborhood: Shares borders with Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Iran to the north and east, Syria and Iraq to the south, and Bulgaria and Greece to the west
Lots of water: Surrounded on three sides by four seas–Black Sea to the north, Aegean to the west, Mediterranean to the south and Marmara in Turkey’s own interior
Government: Created in 1923 from the Turkish remnants of the Ottoman Empire as a secular, parliamentary-based republic
Population: 66.4 million (about five times the population of Illinois)
Birth rate: 18.31 births per 1,000 population
Death rate: 5.95 deaths per 1,000 population
Fertility rate: 2.12 children per woman
Infant mortality rate: 47.34 deaths per 1,000 live births
Life expectancy: 71.24 years; 68.89 years for men, 73.71 years for women
A youthful country: 67 percent 30 years old or younger, making it one of the youngest countries in the world
Religion: Muslim 99.8 percent (mostly Sunni), other 0.2 percent mostly Christian and Jewish
Average annual income: $3,000 per family, although that changes constantly with fluctuating exchange rates and rising inflation
Labor force: 23 million, of which 38 percent work in the agriculture sector, 38 percent work in services and 24 percent work in industry (2000 estimate)
Currency: Turkish lira (exchange rate fluctuates daily; it was 1.5 million TL per U.S. dollar in November 2001
Child labor: Turkey is fourth in the world in the use of child labor; children make up 24 percent of the labor force.
Telephone services: 19.5 million land lines; 12.1 million mobile phones (2000 estimate)
Internet users: 2 million
Literacy rate: Officially it is 94 percent for men, 77 percent for women. Unofficially, the rate could be as low as 50 percent for women.
Education: Public education is required through the 8th grade
Military: Military service is compulsory for all males.
— Catherine Collins
