Armed with deep pockets for offering generous bribes and a network of European dignitaries that included German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to pull some strings, Heinrich Schliemann had little to fear from the disintegrating Ottoman Empire as he went about raiding the treasures of Homeric Troy. Throughout the 1870s, the German archaeologist smuggled tons of artifacts and gold from Hisarlik, a site near the Dardanelles Straits, including a headdress allegedly worn by Helen of Troy and a lot that he erroneously insisted was the treasure trove of King Priam. Some of these artifacts can currently be viewed at the British Museum in the exhibition “Troy: Myth and Reality.”

A few corridors from the Troy exhibit, a large oil painting shows a young woman kneeling before a lectern holding a Quran and a backdrop of elaborately painted turquoise tiles and latticework. “Young Woman Reading,” which recently sold for more than $7 million, was painted by Schliemann's nemesis, the artist-cum-bureaucrat Osman Hamdi, who prevented the daring German from smuggling even more antiquities from Ottoman territory.

Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910) is the most expensive Ottoman painter today.

Osman Hamdi, born into a family of high-ranking bureaucrats and landowners, was sent to Paris by his father in 1860 to study law, but while there abandoned his studies to work in the studios of the Orientalist painters Jean-Leon Gerome and Jerome Boulanger, first as a model and then as a painter himself. When Osman Hamdi returned to Istanbul in 1869, after his fancy-free years in Paris, he pursued a career in diplomacy, serving as a clerk in the Foreign Ministry. In 1881, Sultan Abdulhamid II appointed him director of the Imperial Museum. A soft-spoken but determined bureaucrat, Osman Hamdi got the tight-fisted sultan to pay for an extension and renovation of the museum, laying the groundwork for what is today the Istanbul Archaeological Museums. 

“The relationship between the modernist intellectual and the autocratic ruler was far from an easy one, but they needed each other," Emre Caner, who wrote "The Tortoise Trainer," the biography of Osman Hamdi, told Al-Monitor. "Osman Hamdi was probably one of the longest-serving bureaucrats under Abdulhamid.” Caner might as well have said that he was one of the few who was able to keep his head on his shoulders.