Photographs Of Istanbul From The Archives Of Sultan Abdülhamid II

This album has been prepared and published by the Municipality of Greater İstanbul, through its cultural institution “Kültür AŞ”, and IRCICA. It contains 576 photographs of İstanbul taken at the end of the 19th-beginning of the 20th century and showing districts, buildings, scenes of social life and economic activity. These photographs were selected from the Yıldız Photograph Albums, which comprise a total of around 35000 photographs taken all over the Ottoman empire at the time. Their reproductions were made, classified and annotated by IRCICA. The album is supplemented with   an introduction on the history of photography, information on the photographers having worked in various parts of  the Ottoman empire and photograph studios,
and an index arranged according to the photographers. The book has forewords by: Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Prime Minister of Turkey, the Secretary General of the OIC Prof. Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, the Mayor of İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality Arch. Dr. Kadir Topbaş, and IRCICA Director General Halit Eren. The photographs are grouped by their subject, under  the following headings: landscapes, palaces (mansions, waterside residences, residences, pavilions), mosques, tombs, fountains (public fountains, cisterns, aqueducts), monuments, barracks (police stations), hospitals, schools, public buildings, museums, ceremonies and processions, foreign officials, factories, social life, city walls, sports, the 1894 earthquake.