Bebek

Bebek

“View of Bebek near Constantinople,” oil on canvas, by Jan Matejko, 1872. Lviv National Gallery, Ukraine.

A historic neighborhood of Istanbul on the European shores of the Bosphorus, Bebek was a popular and prestigious closed community in which the Ottoman elites built their summer homes. In the 19th and 20th centuries, along with Beyoğlu, it became a popular residential area for educated exiles to congregate, build and settle—particularly Polish and Russian refugees from the Crimea Crisis and Russian Revolution, and then Germans and Austrians seeking to flee the Nazi regime. Unlike the lively and centrally located Beyoğlu, Bebek was more removed, calm, and isolated, allowing emigrants to lead more privately networked social and political lives, establishing intellectual circles, gatherings, and parties in the familiarized comfort of their own homes. In 1872, the Polish history painter Jan Matejko came to Istanbul with his wife to visit his cousin, Henry Groppler, a wealthy emigrant entrepreneur settled in Bebek, and stayed there for three months, during which time Matejko produced a number of sketches and paintings of the city (he would later use some of these landscapes as backdrops for dramatically staged history paintings). This Impressionist-style landscape by Matejko depicts an idyllic view of the Bosphorus shores of Bebek on a clear, sunny day, in which the most distinctively Ottoman structure is the single minaret of a discreet-looking mosque against a green hill.

Jan Matejko

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Matejko-Bebek.jpg

oil on canvas