The Ottoman Bank

The Ottoman Bank

North façade plan for the imperial Ottoman Bank in Constantinople, drawn by Alexandre Vallaury, 1890. Ottoman Bank Museum, Istanbul.

The headquarters of the Ottoman Bank, known as the Bank-ı Osmanî-i Şahane in Ottoman Turkish and Banque Impériale Ottomane in French, was built in the European-populated Galata district (now Karaköy) of Istanbul in the late 19th century, during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II. The bank was founded by the Ottoman government in 1856, with the support of French and English backers, which made the business district of Galata a logical choice for its location. The new building was commissioned of the French-Levantine architect, Alexandre Vallaury, who was educated at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris: the completion of this project in 1892 gave his career a significant boost. As we can see in Vallaury’s architectural drawing, his design for the north-east façade on Bankalar Caddesi street expressed a pronounced neoclassical Beaux-Arts influence and fit in perfectly with the highly Westernized aesthetic of Galata, which had been developed to the point of looking very much like a European city by this time. Being a native of Istanbul, Vallaury also decided to create a different, neo-Ottoman façade for the opposite side, which constituted the larger view from the Golden Horn, thus embodying a kind of East-West dichotomy in literal facets of the building itself—each side facing its appropriately designated audience. Vallaury’s Ottoman Bank became the depository of a rich document archive, and later was transformed into a museum, which now serves as the Galata branch for the Turkish art institution, SALT.

Alexandre Vallaury

Ottoman Bank Museum, Istanbul.

SALT

Drawing on paper.