With a former-Istanbul-resident friend in town, the normal tourist things are off the activities list, because we've both been there, done that. So yesterday, Em's first full day back in the 'Bul, we headed out to the edge of the city for some sightseeing and antics – to Gebze, a feature of very few guidebooks.
In about two years, Gebze will be a summer weekend jaunt of choice for Istanbullus. I have no idea why it isn't already. Gebze is awesome. So awesome.
Em and I ambled our way out the door and down to Karakoy about midmorning, where we caught the ferry to Haydarpasha to meet up with Matt, a Fulbright teaching assistant from Kayseri, and grab the banliyo train out to Gebze. The banliyo is the suburban train, and Gebze is the last stop. It is not technically in Istanbul, it's actually in Kocaeli province and much closer to the city of Kocaeli itself, but it is reachable on Istanbul public transit, which is always a plus when you're carless. But I digress.
After a nice hourish train ride, past the Marmara coastline and some light industrial zones, we ended up in Gebze, where it had clearly just stopped raining. We found a road sign for Eskihisar, the bit of town where the waterfront and the Osman Hamdi Bey museum are located, and set off, winding through some gorgeous summer homes in the back streets.
At this point, I should point out that Em's a grad student, and Islamic/Ottoman art is kind of her thing, and Osman Hamdi Bey is most definitely her thing. Osman Hamdi Bey is a bit of a rock star – he's perhaps the best-known Ottoman painter, and also the first Turkish head of the Imperial Museum. In his spare time, he founded the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul (now Mimar Sinan University), built the Istanbul Archaeology Museum and directed the first Turkish-helmed archaeological dig. So he's kind of a big deal.
By the time we got to the waterfront and found OHB's stately house, it was closed for the lunch hour. We decided to take our lunch hour as well, and headed next door to a decent place for some tavuk in various forms and some catch-up gossip. We then headed back to the museum/house, and found it still locked, so we headed across the courtyard to the two-storey administrative complex adjacent to try and find someone with a key.
Well, we did find someone with a key, but much more awesomely we found the museum's Saturday painting circle! We walked in to this room to find a dozen women painting and chatting away over tea, supervised by an instructor who'd occasionally lean over someone's shoulder to suggest some technique or another. They were really excited to see us, and we were really excited to chat with them, but first we had to see the museum itself, so one of the painting women detached herself from her canvas and brought us over to the house to check out Osman Hamdi Bey's abode.
The museum itself was excellent. Everything was preserved just as it was when OHB lived there, and they had a lot of original artifacts, furnishings and furniture. Em about died when we opened a door dividing the study and a gallery, and the guard casually remarked, "oh, Osman Hamdi Bey painted that door, that's his original painted flowers you're touching."
The house had a lot of reproductions of OHB paintings (many are in the Pera or the Sabanci museums), and Em gave an impromptu lecture on his painting hallmarks (He painted himself into a lot of his paintings, or his wife, and he used a lot of locations in Bursa. Also, because he was in charge of the imperial archeological collection, he painted a lot of pieces from the collection into his artwork, many of which are pretty identifiable.).
The second floor of the house had a few rooms of OHB's painting supplies, including one with wax figures recreating the setting for one of his paintings. The house itself was gorgeous, with some beautiful late-19th-century Ottoman fixtures. The security guard showing us and the painter (a German woman, Marita, who moved to Turkey some 30 years ago) around the house was really impressed by our enthusiasm about the house, and gave us DVDs with the story of Osman Hamdi Bey produced by the municipality.
After the tour, we headed back through a light rain to the painting studio, where we had tea with a whole group of painters and chatted about their art, OHB, Eskihisar, and pretty much everything else. They were all pretty talented, and were painting in pretty varied styles. I may have finagled an invite to join their Saturday classes.
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