The golden age of street fountains was in the first half of the eighteenth century, during the reigns of those notable builders Ahmed III and his nephew Mahmoud I. The change which they introduced into the architecture of their country was in many ways an unhappy one. It led the Turks out of their own order of tradition, which is rarely a safe or useful thing to do, into strange byways of bad taste where they lost themselves for two hundred years. Still, an architecture that tries experiments is an architecture that lives, and at its beginning the Turkish rococo has an inimitable grace and spirit. The fountains of the period are decorated, as no fountains had been decorated before, with floral reliefs a little like those of the Renaissance tombs and with fruits and flowers in various quaint receptacles. The earlier of the garden selsebils I have already mentioned is an example, and a more typical one is the wall fountain of the Valideh Jedid in Scutari. The sculptures also began to be touched up with colour and gilding, as in the larger of the two fountains of Ak Bîyîk. So must have been the charming fountain, now most lamentably neglected, on the street that drops from Galata Tower to Pershembeh Bazaar.
Street fountain at Et Yemez
Until this time the old pointed arch had been preferred, though, as we have seen, the rounded shell of the Renaissance had already made its appearance. But now round or broken arches began to be the order of the day; and so great richness of detail could only degenerate into the baroque. Yet I have bad taste enough to like, sometimes, even the out-and-out baroque. There is a little fountain, for instance, in the Asiatic suburb of Kanlîja, with a florid arch and rather heavy traceries and four very Dutch-looking tiles set into the wall above them, which I think is delightful. Long after photographing it I came across some more of those tiles in the imperial tribune of the mosque built in Scutari by Moustafa III, which gave me a clew to the date of the fountain. And after that I was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of the gentleman whose summer valî lies across the road from the fountain, and he told me that the fountain was built by the Sheï’h ül Islam of Moustafa III. There is, too, a fountain at Emirgyan, in front of the Khedival garden, which, for all its baroque lines, seems to me to terminate a vista very happily. But I do not hesitate to add that few wall fountains built since the middle of the eighteenth century are worth any attention.
We can hardly call it a discovery that the architects made when they first detached a street fountain from the wall and made something more monumental out of it. The thing had already been done indoors and in the courts of mosques. The earliest specimens, however, show their evolution very clearly. They are nothing but wall fountains applied to a cube of masonry. I suppose the religious associations of the shadrîvan kept its tradition from being followed, but with experience freedom was gained in the treatment of the detached fountain. Typical of its kind is a fountain in the waterside grove of plane-trees at Chibouklou, to which Ibrahim Pasha, the Grand Vizier of Ahmed III, gave the name of Feïzabad—Place of the Abundant Blessing of God. A great oblong pool reflects the trees, and nearer the Bosphorus is a raised space of the kind the Turks call a turf sofa. On one side of it a concave tablet, carved with a lamp swinging from a chain, indicates the direction of prayer. On the other stands a simple marble fountain, bearing three chronograms of 1133 or 1721. Twenty-eight Mehmed was then in Paris, and the new fashion was not yet launched in fountains. An early and a very happy experiment in that fashion adorns Ahmed’s park at Kiat Haneh. But the model and masterpiece of this little golden age is the great fountain at Top Haneh, beside the mosque of Don Quixote. It lacks, alas, the domed roof and broad eaves that Melling represents in one of his pictures. Moreover a trolley post has been planted squarely at its most conspicuous corner, while ugly iron fences attack two of its sides; and the War Department thinks nothing of making a dumping-ground of the enclosed angle. Yet none of these indignities affect the distinction of the floral reliefs that cover its white marble, or of its frieze of gold inscriptions spaced in a double row of blue cartouches.
Fountain of Ahmed III in the park at Kiat Haneh
Detail of the fountain of Mahmoud I at Top Haneh