Gülhane Parkı

This guide to Gulhane Parki in Istanbul centers on a November morning in 1839, when the private garden of the Ottoman sultans was opened for a reading that no ordinary subject had ever witnessed. It follows sixteen-year-old Sultan Abdulmecid, newly on the throne after military defeat, and his grand vizier Mustafa Resid Pasha, and the sweeping promises about equality and justice they chose to announce inside these walls rather than anywhere else in the empire. The guide also traces how the garden's role changed over the following decades, right up to the day the public was finally let in.