The city that has long been at the centre of HALI’s world is now the centrepiece of the V&A for six months. For sixteen centuries one city served as capital to two great empires. Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires opened at the V&A South Kensington on 7 November. It follows the city’s story from the founding of Constantine’s capital in AD 330 to the end of the Ottoman sultanate in 1922. The exhibition is sponsored by Koç Holding, the company of the Koç family, the well-known industrialists and art collectors, with further support from the Huo Family Foundation. The curators, Tim Stanley and Bella Radenovic, have brought together more than 200 objects from the V&A’s own collection and from lenders across Europe and Türkiye. It is a real treat, packed with pieces that have rarely been shown or even seen.
View from Constantinople to Istanbul showing 17th Century velvet and metal and thread cushion cover and a women's dress from Thasos
Replica of the 6th-century Byzantine mosaic depicting Empress Theodora and her court, originally located in the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy
Textiles are central to the story, and the show rewards the specialist eye. Among the highlights is a spectacular late sixteenth-century Bursa velvet horse covering from the Benaki Museum, Athens, once part of the trappings for a parade mount. There is also a group of high-status silk üçetek entari, the traditional three-skirted women’s robes, from the Koç family’s own Sadberk Hanım Museum, Istanbul. A sixteenth-century silk kemha kaftan woven with gold, on loan from the Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul, has drawn particular praise from the critics. Around them are Ottoman tiles, metalwork and a jewelled ivory belt from the tomb of Selim II, lent by the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts.
Ottoman silk velvet (çatma) saddle cover with tulips, carnations and pomegranates, Bursa, early 17th century. Benaki Museum, Athens.
Sultan’s kaftan, silk woven with gold, Istanbul, 16th century. Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul
The Byzantine material is just as strong. A sixth-century fragment of the Great Palace mosaic opens the show. The fourteenth-century Lincoln Typikon is on public display for the first time in sixty years, and Gentile Bellini’s portrait of Mehmed II, lent by the National Gallery, is the hinge between the two empires. A seventeenth-century Ottoman procession scroll from the John Rylands Library, made for a foreign diplomat, shows the imperial city in remarkable detail.
