The Art of Infrastructure: Hamidiye Fountains in Late Ottoman Istanbul

On September 1, 1902, as part of the twenty-sixth anniversary of Sultan Abdülhamid II's accession to the Ottoman throne, a series of opening ceremonies were held to inaugurate a set of new public fountains for the recentlycompleted Hamidiye waterline in Istanbul. The day began with the most monumental of the series, built in the Tophane neighbourhood not far from a larger, eighteenth-century public fountain that had long shaped the district's social life. As the Ottoman Turkish and French-language press reported, the ceremony was attended by a crowd of municipal and palace officials, chemists, ulema, representatives from European industries, and students from a nearby school (Fig. 1). ¹ Abdurrahman Nurettin Pasha, the overseer of the project, spoke on the hygienic benefits of the fountain's scientifically-tested water, and after prayers and the ceremonial sacrifice of a sheep, he collected some of the fountain's water in a specially-made crystal carafe, before travelling to five other new Hamidiye fountains around the city and presenting each of their waters to the Sultan himself. ²

While this new Tophane fountain was designed by the Italian architect Raimondo d'Aronco, using a mixture of marble and metal work in an art nouveau and rococo style, a complementary array of smaller mass-produced fountains, drafted by the military engineer André Berthier and produced by the Val d'Osne foundry in Paris, were also placed throughout the city (Fig. 2 and 3). ³

Figure 1.

The opening ceremony of the Hamidiye Tophane fountain and Kağıthane waterline; September 1, 1902. Sourced from Servet-i Fünûn, no. 595 (5 Eylül 1318/18 September 1902).

In total, an estimated 126 fountains were constructed from 1898 to 1902 as part of the Hamidiye waterline project, which collected drinking water from the Kağıthane valley and, using imported steam pumps, distributed it throughout the European side of Istanbul (Fig. 4 ). ⁴ The scale of this project and the symbolic and ideological investment in it raises a number of questions, especially when taking into account increasing competition from another mode of water distribution: domestic tap water. ⁵

Figure 2.

Opening ceremonies for a marble Hamidiye fountain; Photograph by Ali Sami, September 1, 1902. Image courtesy of Istanbul University Rare Works Library.

Figure 3.

Opening ceremonies for a cast iron Hamidiye fountain; Photograph by Ali Sami, September 1, 1902. Image courtesy of Istanbul University Rare Works Library.

Figure 4.

Map showing the locations of the Hamidiye fountains, 1902. Image courtesy of the Presidency Ottoman Archives, Y.MTV.00234.00083.

As a map from 1888 shows (Fig. 5), the Hamidiye water project directly overlapped with the waterlines operated by a foreign concessionary company, the Compagnie des Eaux de Constantinople (Dersaâdet Su Şirketi), which sourced water from the brackish Terkos Lake and provided tap water to the homes of Beyoğlu residents. ⁶ While this mode of water consumption was not widely adopted among the broader population of the city, it nevertheless offered and displayed a particular culture of water usage in which water was necessarily conceived as a monetized commodity, to be consumed by individuals in private. Yet the Hamidian state, in their 1882 contract with the French company, insisted on the continued development of the public fountain form, to the point of making their construction the second condition of the concessions. ⁷

Figure 5.

Map showing the locations of Compagnie des Eaux de Constantinople water-lines and fire hydrants, 1888. Image courtesy of the Presidency Ottoman Archives, DVN.MKL.00029.00011.

Some historians have interpreted the slow and inconsistent adoption of private piped water among the population of the city and the continued usage of the public fountain network as a process of "reluctant modernization." ⁸ This approach entails a certain...