Today the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul seems a haphazard aggregate of modest buildings no longer capable of conveying imperial power. Yet it is at once the most celebrated of all Islamic palaces and the least understood. Gülru Necipoglu brings together largely unpublished sources, both written and visual, along with information derived from the architectural remains to uncover the processes through which the meaning of the palace was once produced, before it came to represent a stereotyped microcosm of oriental despotism imbued with the exotic otherness of the East. She relocates the Topkapi in its historical context, a context that included not only the circumstances of its patronage, but the complex interaction of cultural practices, ideologies, and social codes of recognition.
Long out of print, this publication is now available from MIT Press Direct as a free e-book here
The MIT Press
Necipoglu, Gülru. Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 1992
