Dolmabahce Palace

The Dolmabahce Palace is a grand 19^th century neoclassical behemoth of a building that stands on the banks of the Bosporus in Istanbul. The Palace, which was constructed in the 1840s and 50s at the behest of Ottoman Sultan Abdulmecid, grandly displays a level of power and ornate luxury that make it difficult to ignore. As such, over the years it has become an integral fixture of Istanbul’s urban fabric and an important touchstone of cultural memory. Certainly it qualifies as what theorists Pierre Nora calls a “lieu de memoire,” or “any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community.” The signifiers expressed by the Dolmabahce Palace, both in its form and its history, have served and continue to serve as an anchor around which Turkish memory has crystalized.

In this exhibit, I hope to demonstrate how the Dolmabahce Palace has been a dynamic lieux de memoire – that in different moments of its history, the climate of the times has recontextualized the memorial significance of the palace. Through highlighting five discrete points in the Palace’s history, this exhibit will act as a sort of temporal tour of the Dolmabahce Palace, focusing on the flux of the Palace’s memorial import.