One would hardly notice it today, when navigating the dense streets of Istanbul between Galata Bridge and Topkapı Palace, so unassuming it is, marooned at the end of a row of garish shops, and overshadowed by the magnificent Ottoman Revivalist office building across the street. Nothing about the architecture alerts the passer-by that this small, stone building with grilled windows is in fact a royal mausoleum, as well as an exquisite gem of the Ottoman Baroque, as well as repository of one of the holiest relics of Islam. We have come to the Sultan Abdülhamid I Tomb.

Abdülhamid built his final resting place long before he needed it for himself. Having come to the throne in 1774, by 1778 he had begun construction on his tomb, which reached completion in, almost certainly, 1780. Was his rush to build his final resting place because he had passed the age of fifty, when thoughts of mortality begin to linger not far from one's mind? Possibly; and as further impetus, he would have known that his brother and predecessor, Mustafa III, had built his own tomb when he was about the same age. Yet for Abdülhamid surely the major impetus lay elsewhere. In line with court custom, he had officially begun fathering children only after he had become monarch. But his young offspring kept dying, one after another. He needed a place to bury his children. With that, the Sultan Abdülhamid I Tomb – or to use the more common Turkish term derived from his name, the Hamidiye Tomb – was born.

A ‘Mansion of the Heavens’ it is indeed, in the pleasing Ottoman phrase Kasr-ı Cinan that graces poetic inscriptions at mausolea and on headstones in graveyards, including the graveyard around this royal mausoleum, in double reference to both the tomb and to Paradise. In this graveyard we see it first in 1797, on the headstone of Abdülhamid's consort Nevres: Eylesün Nevres Kadın Kasr-ı Cinanda cilvegâh, ‘May the lady Nevres fashion a chamber of splendour in the Mansion of the Heavens’. It appears again in 1812, on the pall over the cenotaph of the infant prince Bayezid: Ol gül-i nevresteye me’va ola Kasr-ı Cinan, ‘May the Mansion of the Heavens be home for that newly sprouted rose’.