1924

An old postcard of Constantinople featuring Dolmabahce Palace

Portrait of Sultan Abdulmecid I, ordered construction of Dolmabahce Palace.

In the years following the Dolmabahce Palace’s construction, the site would become the seat of the Ottoman authority. The Ottoman government used the Palace as the administrative center of the Empire for almost every year from 1956 to 1922 (with about a decade in the Yidiz Palace in the interim). Six Ottoman sultans would live in the Palace during this time. [1]

Around the end of the 1910s and the beginning of the 20s, the Ottoman Empire began to see its rapid decline. Following defeat in WWI, the Empire was partitioned and lost many of its Eastern territories, which became occupied by allied proxy forces. The already weakened Ottoman Empire was then engaged in war by Turkish national groups, seeking to abolish the Ottoman Caliphate and establish their own Turkish state in Anatolia. After several years of battle with Ottoman and allied proxy forces, the Turkish nationalists won out and, on October 1923, the Republic of Turkey was founded. The Turks instated secular reforms that would exile the last Caliph in March 1924.[2]

1924 was a point of major flux in the memorial significance of the Dolmabahce Palace. With the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire, the ousting of the last Caliph, and the establishment of a secular Turkish state, the Palace took its first shift from its original intentional commemorative value, to the unintentional, potentially ironic monumentality. With the omnipresent crumbling of the Ottoman Empire, the audacious monuments to Ottoman power, like Dolmabahce, could only be interpreted as a relic of time past. Dolmabahce’s initial gesture to the power of the Ottoman’s had now become exactly the opposite: a gesture to the decline of a once great state, a shadow of a previous era that allowed the Turks to remember just how far the Caliph had fallen.