İstanbul and the baroque -- the bountiful Balyans

The problem is that the style of architecture in vogue in their heyday -- a florid local form of baroque -- has since fallen from favor. Today there are probably more people who admire the cool, classic lines of a Sinan mosque than appreciate the extravagant stone swags and garlands adorning a Balyan palace. Nor does it help that the buildings created by the Balyans tend to be stuffed full of the sort of over-the-top furnishings -- outsize chandeliers, giant porcelain vases, endless inlaid furniture -- that even lovers of maximalism find hard to stomach. The final nail in the Balyan coffin is the fact that you can only visit their most prominent masterpieces -- Dolmabahçe Palace, Beylerbeyi Palace and Küçüksu Kasrı -- on rushed guided tours that make it virtually impossible to appreciate anything. But the fact remains that the city would not be what it is without the Balyans, who are long overdue for a bit of praise.

The founder of this extraordinary dynasty was a man named Meremmetçi Bali Kalfa (?-1725), who hailed from a village near Karaman in Central Anatolia. Having somehow heard about the success of a fellow Armenian architect at the court of Sultan Mehmed IV, he made his way to İstanbul and succeeded in securing a post for himself, which then passed to his son Magar. Magar fell foul of Sultan Mahmud I and was exiled to Bayburt, where he taught his sons Krikor and Senekerim architecture. It was with Krikor Amira Balyan (1764-1831) that the great days of the family firm began in earnest. Sadly, many of the buildings he bequeathed to the city have since been lost, although the Nusretiye (Victory) Cami, designed to celebrate Sultan Mahmud II’s suppression of the Janissaries in 1826, is still standing, as are the elegant Valide and Topuzlu dams (reservoirs) in the Belgrade Forest and the Feshane alongside the Golden Horn at Eyüp, which is where the city’s fezes were once manufactured. Krikor was also responsible for three wings of the giant Selimiye Barracks, visible as you sail to Kadıköy, after it had to be expanded to house Sultan Mahmud II’s new professional army.

Less well known, Krikor’s younger brother Senerkerim nevertheless left the city one of its most conspicuous landmarks, the Serasker Fire Tower that stands on the grounds of İstanbul University in Beyazıt. Ironically, it was a replacement for the first tower, built of wood by brother Krikor, that had burnt down.

But it was Magar’s youngest son Garabet Amira Balyan (1800-66) who really made the city his own. It was he who was responsible, with his son Nikoğos, for the Dolmabahçe Palace, built for Sultan Abdülmecid and such a mammoth undertaking that it took from 1843 to 1856 to complete. The palace contains a daunting 258 rooms, although the public only get to see a tiny fraction of them, most attention focusing on the stupendous 38-meter-high Ceremonial Hall with its concealed dome where the later sultans presided over festivities to celebrate the different bayrams (holidays), and on the considerably smaller room in which Mustafa Kemal Atatürk breathed his last on Nov. 10, 1938. It shows what a grip the Balyans had on court architecture at that time that the wooden Beşiktaş Palace that had stood on the site before the Dolmabahçe had itself been a work of Garabet’s older brother Krikor.

Many people find a visit to the Dolmabahçe overwhelming, which is a shame since, amongst other treasures, it contains a priceless collection of paintings that the hurried tours prevent visitors from enjoying. On the other side of the Bosporus, however, Beylerbeyi Palace, built in 1865 towards the end of his life by Garabet in collaboration with his even more prolific son Sarkis, is more manageable, its most beautiful feature being a lovely internal pool presided over by a marble fountain adorned with dolphins that was intended to cool and soothe palace occupants during the dead heat of summer.

Garabet’s other masterwork is the exquisite mosque that juts out from the waterside at Ortaköy, an unmissable landmark as people cruise up and down the Bosporus that has a virtual twin in the equally lovely, light-filled Dolmabahçe Cami designed by Nikoğos. People strolling along Divan Yolu in Sultanahmet will also pass the mausoleum housing the remains of Sultans Mahmud II, Abdülaziz and Abdülhamid II, another work of Garabet dating from 1840. Less obvious are the diminutive Nusretiye clock tower that he built in 1848, the first such tower in the city (you can see it from the windows of the İstanbul Modern art gallery), and the enormous Surp Asdvadzadzin Church in Beşiktaş that you will pass if you walk downhill to the ferries from Abbas Ağa Park. Garabet was also responsible for the attractive Gümüşsuyu Askeri Hastanesi (Military Hospital) on Gümüşsuyu Caddesi, the road running down to Dolmabahçe from Taksim Square. He even designed the Abud Efendi Yalısı at Kandilli, used as the setting for the recent smash-hit TV serial Gümüş (Silver).

Nikoğos Balyan (1826-58) had a tragically short life during which he nevertheless designed a couple of the city’s smaller treasures: the Küçüksu Kasrı at Kandilli and the Ihlamur Kasrı at Beşiktaş. Intended as pavilions in which a traveling sultan could rest rather than as permanent homes, both these buildings showcase the elaborate baroque features of Balyan architecture without leaving the visitor drowning in excess detail. It’s a shame, then, that they receive relatively few visitors. It was Nikoğos, too, who was responsible for the pretty Küçük Mecidiye Cami, built in 1848 across the road from the Çırağan Palace, itself designed by his brother Sarkis. He was also responsible for the Adile Sultan Palace, built in Kandilli in 1853, which now houses the excellent Kandilli Borsa restaurant.

The work of Sarkis Balyan (1835-1899) will be familiar to residents of two of the city’s top hotels: the Çırağan Palace Kempinski Hotel, which was rebuilt in 1990 as a copy of his original that had burnt down in 1910; and the W Hotel at Akaretler, which was created out of the row-houses built to accommodate workers at the Dolmabahçe Palace in the 1870s. The newly restored Valide Sultan Cami at Aksaray, built in 1871, is also sometimes attributed to Sarkis and his brother Agop. In 1889 Sarkis expanded the Şale (chalet) guesthouse in the grounds of the Yıldız Palace ready for the state visit of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the man who bequeathed the green-roofed fountain to the Hippodrome. He also added the delightful Malta Köşk to the grounds, equipping it in 1870 with an interior pool rather like the one inside Beylerbeyi Palace, but this time decorated with marble swans. The Sarı Köşk that he added to the Emirgan Grove in the 1870s was designed to imitate a Swiss chalet. It now houses a pleasant small café.