İncili Köşk August 2020
Built into the old Roman walls of Byzantium in the late 16th century was a pleasure palace on the Bosphorus for one of the Ottoman sultans.
The Pearl Kiosk was a mansion directly located at the banks of the Bosphorus and served as a pleasure building for the Ottoman sultan. It was built in 1590 by the grand vizier Koca Sinan Pasha.
(Wikipedia)
On one of my walks in Istanbul while waiting to get back to the USA during the COVID pandemic, I went down the steep hill from the hotel which was just outside the ancient Topkapı Palace walls. I exited the densely packed neighborhood onto the Bosphorus shoreline, took a left, and started to walk back toward the "Golden Horn". I was following the old Roman walls of Byzantium which were still in place over 1,500 years after their construction. Of course they had been significantly altered and were not very well preserved, but I was amazed they existed at all. Even in Rome the old city walls exist only in bits and pieces. This was a huge stretch along the water interrupted by one or two old gates (boarded up).
The Sinan Paşa Köşkü, also known as the İncili Köşk (Pearl Kiosk) or the Çayır Köşkü (Meadow Kiosk), was integrated into the Marmara Sea Walls and is located south of the Christos Soter Church. According to Tarih-i Selȃnikȋ, Sultan Murat III (r. 1574–1595) wished for a belvedere "close to the Ahır Kapı area of the imperial palace, on the walls of the fortification of Istanbul", from which one could enjoy both the sea view and the land view, especially of the so-called Kabak Square (an area for special shows with weapons).
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From the edifice, which was destroyed in 1871/72 during the construction of the railway, only the projecting substructure/basement facing the sea has survived.
What an irony that part of the ancient walls were incorporated into a pleasure palace 1000 years later only to be torn down after a paltry few hundred years to make way for the modern railway connection that would link Istanbul and Europe (the Orient Express). When I viewed the remains of the palace, I was certain I was looking at an old Roman gate, but in fact, I was looking at the foundation for a palace that overlooked both the Topkapı enclosure and the Bosphorus. Such a shame that it didn't survive the railway construction which itself only lasted about a century.
I had viewed something ancient, very old, and slightly old all in one spot - Roman, Ottoman, and early Modern. In a way that summed up Istanbul itself - old atop older atop the ancient.