Topkapı Palace

ארמון הטופקאפי

In 2004, at the initiative of Vista Historica Ltd., I began working on the project. The question that occupied me was not how to tell the history of Istanbul, but how to enable the visitor to experience it.

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Istanbul is an almost perfect setting for such a story. A city spanning two continents, it served as the capital of two great empires and, for centuries, was a meeting point between East and West, Islam and Christianity, commerce, art, war, religion, and courtly life. In the original project document, we described Istanbul as a city in which past and present, reality and myth, coexist side by side. It was from this complexity that the idea for the museum emerged.

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I did not want to create yet another historical museum in which visitors move from display case to display case, reading texts and observing objects. Instead, I proposed the creation of an Experience Museum, a theatrical journey through time in which space, lighting, sound, music, scenography, and technology would all become instruments for telling history.

Visitors were intended to move from one period to another and from scene to scene, encountering the figures who shaped the city and, for a moment, feeling as though they were present within the events themselves. Particular emphasis was placed on the Ottoman period, from the conquest of Constantinople by Mehmed II to the golden age of Suleiman the Magnificent, a period during which the city became the heart of a vast empire and a major center of architecture, art, and culture.

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The choice of Topkapı Palace was also an integral part of the concept. For me, the historic building was not merely the place in which the exhibition would be presented. It was one of the exhibition’s central exhibits. The visitor was meant to experience the story in the very place where part of that story had actually unfolded.

Looking back, the project’s distinctive quality lay in its early attempt to move from the idea of Museum as a Collection to Museum as an Experience, from a museum that presents the past to one that seeks to bring it to life.

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The visitor was no longer to remain an observer looking at the story from the outside, but to become, for the duration of the visit, part of the story itself.

For me, this was the essence of the concept: not to tell the visitor about Istanbul, but to allow them to enter into it.