It all began in Germany last year, when the auction house of Reiss & Sohn put on offer some 200 lots of memorabilia from Otto von Bismarck's estate. Among the items were photographic albums presented to the German chancellor “by admirers and devotees from all over the world,” including from Ottoman lands. Indeed, a set of three folio-size red velvet volumes, inscribed with Sultan Abdulhamid's calligraphic monogram, or tugra, were acquired for the extensive private collection of the Turkish business titan Omer Koc.

The three volumes are the centerpieces of “Ottoman Arcadia: The Hamidian Expedition to the Land of Tribal Roots (1886),” an exhibition at the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations at Koc University in Istanbul. They are displayed in a glass case like crown jewels, while the folios, which were not bound, have been removed for display. The exhibit features some 150 extremely well-preserved, cardboard-framed sepia portraits and landscapes with handwritten notes in French and Ottoman. 

“The Bismarck gift albums were the byproduct of a mission sent by the Ottoman sultan to survey and document the ancestral lands of the dynasty, searching for legitimacy through foundation myths,” Ahmet Ersoy, one of the curators, explained to Al-Monitor.

The landscapes include views from Marmara and central Anatolia: Sogut, the founding capital of the Ottoman Empire, and Bilecik; Eskisehir and Yenisehir; and Iznik and Bursa, the empire's first major capital. All are lands that the Ottoman Lords of the Horizon, an epithet of the sultans, conquered one after the other. In the albums, these places are conceived as units, arranged as a narrative sequence of territorial expansion and political consolidation from the tomb of Ertugrul, the father of the eponymous Osman, to the successive capitals of the empire.