The Accidental Palace: The Making of Yildiz in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul

This book tells the story of Yıldız Palace in Istanbul, the last and largest imperial residential complex of the Ottoman Empire. Today, the palace is physically fragmented and has been all but erased from Istanbul’s urban memory. At its peak, however, Yıldız was a global city in miniature and the center of the empire’s vast bureaucratic apparatus.

Following a chronological arc from 1795 to 1909, The Accidental Palace shows how the site developed from a rural estate of the queen mothers into ...