Festive palace ceremony: a tradition inherited by Istanbul from Constantinople. Part 2

During the Tanzimat era, the Turkish palace ceremony celebrating the end of Ramadan (Eid al-Fitr) was heavily modified. During this period, the Ottoman Empire, striving for large-scale reforms modeled after Europe, subjected many aspects of life to Europeanization, including the palace ceremonial. While in the later years of Byzantium’s existence, during palace ceremonies, courtiers had somehow tried to maintain an atmosphere of sacrality around the basileus, in the conditions of the Ottoman Empire’s decline, similar “theatrical” attempts by Ottoman dignitaries were described by Théophile Gautier with humor, irony and even sarcasm. In contrast to the monotonous descriptions of the ceremony under study in the Ottoman chronicles of the preimperial period, Gautier, as a talented writer, breathed life not only into the picture of what was happening, but also into the images of the actors and objects of the ceremony. His Abdul-Majid turned out to be even more vivid and memorable than in many official portraits. Twenty-two years later, the Italian writer Edmondo De Amicis also describes Sultan Abdul-Aziz's “Friday greeting” in his book “Constantinople”. However, in his description, the ceremony was already losing its former splendor. Both Gautier and De Amicis share a nostalgia for the pre-Tanzimat era, when the sultans appeared before their subjects and foreigners in all their oriental grandeur and fabulous wealth, when the fame of the Ottoman Empire thundered around the world. They felt that Istanbul's rejection of Ottoman traditions and its Westernization policies threatened to make the weakening empire totally dependent on the West.