Guide
The Khedive's Villa stands in the Çubuklu quarter of the Beykoz district of İstanbul, between Piri Reis Avenue on the shore road and Hıdiv Kasrı Avenue, where the main gate is. It sits within a wooded park of 188,651 square metres on the Anatolian side of the Bosphorus, which begins about 1.5 kilometres north of Kanlıca, covers the steep slopes and much of the ridge above the diving school, the navigation and hydrography office and the fire station, and ends near the Çubuklu ferry pier.
Khedive was the title the Ottoman empire gave its governors of Egypt. Late in the nineteenth century the young Khedive Abbas Hilmi Pasha needed to stay in İstanbul for long stretches in order to break English influence in Egypt and secure Ottoman support. In 1903 he bought two wooden waterside houses on the spot where the villa stands, and some time later he also bought the garden behind them, some 270 dönüm of wooded slope and the level ground above.
He had the wooden houses pulled down and in 1907 commissioned the Italian architect Delfo Seminati to build, on a thousand square metres, an imposing villa in the Art Nouveau manner then in fashion, with a tower above it looking out over the Bosphorus.
The English, who occupied Egypt, brought in a system of monarchy and took the title of khedive from Abbas Hilmi Pasha. Deposed, he went to live in Switzerland, whether by his own choice or sent into exile. His family stayed on at the villa until 1937, when it was sold to the İstanbul municipality.
Architecturally the building stands outside the Ottoman tradition and belongs to the Western Art Nouveau. At the centre of the main entrance is a grand marble fountain; the ceiling above rises to the roof and is covered in stained glass. Elegant fountains and pools stand in various parts of the house. In plan the rooms draw a circle around the pool through the connections between them, a circle broken only by the entrance hall, where the historic lift is another thing worth noticing. The private rooms are on the upper floor.
After a long period of neglect the villa was restored in 1984 by Çelik Gülersoy on behalf of the Turkish Touring and Automobile Association and served for a time as a hotel. It was restored again between 1994 and 1996.
