BU YADYOK P4
Spring 2022-2023
The Ottoman Stage 1876-1922
Beginnings
1 Long before the arrival of modern theatre in the nineteenth century, Ottoman subjects had
practised various performing arts. People enjoyed dancing, processions, war games, parades,
shadow plays (Karagöz), puppetry, street performances, mimes, mockery and the Turkish
commedia dell’arte1 known as ortaoyunu2. In addition, professional storytellers known as
meddahs found listeners when they praised the achievements of heroic figures. From the
fifteenth century onwards, entertainers and investors who engaged in such performances came to
form companies known as kol. By the sixteenth century, Europeans had already staged plays in
Istanbul, including two ballet-pantomimes and a Venetian opera, and by the late 1600s and early
1700s, visitors to certain embassies and consulates of Istanbul and Izmir could enjoy French
plays, such as those of Molière and Monfleury. But it was not until the nineteenth century that
the modern theatres arrived.
2 Companies and individual entertainers of the early modern period mostly performed at
imperial weddings, circumcision3 festivals or on religious holidays, especially Ramadan. For
these activities, players used private houses, public squares, inn yards, taverns and coffeehouses.
Introducing the Modern Ottoman Theatre
3 By the early 1800s, entertainments began to take place in buildings constructed especially
for the purpose. An Italian by the name of Guistiniani opened a playhouse in Istanbul in the late
1820s, and Bosco, an Italian magician, built a 500-seat theatre in 1839. Later, an Ottoman non-
Muslim, Tütüncüoğlu Mihail/Michel Naum, took over Bosco’s theatre and ran it until 1846,
when it was destroyed by fire. Two years later, Naum received state aid to construct the famous
Naum’s Theatre where Sultan Abdülmecid watched Verdi’s opera Macbeth. Naum developed
friendly relations with the palace and thus was able to obtain a monopoly to run theatres in
Istanbul.
4 Ottoman sultans of this period showed great interest in European-style modern theatre, and
Sultan Mahmud II even had numerous relevant publications bought for the palace library.
Activities in this field accelerated further in 1828, when Giuseppe Donizetti, brother of the
famous composer Gaetano Donizetti, came to Istanbul to start a military band and an imperial
1
Commedia dell’arte - A form of theater that began in Italy in the 16th century and is characterized by masked
characters and improvised performances.
2
Ortaoyunu - A genre of early Turkish theater that had no written text and was usually performed out in the open.
3
Circumcision - To remove the foreskin of a male as a religious rite, especially in Judaism and Islam, or as a medical
treatment.
BU YADYOK P4
Spring 2022-2023
orchestra. Donizetti taught Western notation, instruments and songs while training the young
men under his supervision for dramatic performances. As a mixture of both traditional and
modern theatres, ortaoyunu also developed in Sultan Mahmud’s reign, and his successors built
theatres at the Dolmabahçe, Çırağan and Yıldız Palaces. Following the imperial example, highly
placed public officials and notables welcomed such activities into their households. This is how
the elite set itself apart from the commoners.
Western Adaptations
5 Modern theatres initially developed in the two Ottoman port cities of Istanbul and Izmir,
where sizeable numbers of non-Muslim Ottomans came to be interested in Western culture.
Ottoman Greeks were a case in point, their theatres active mostly in Izmir. Like the members of
the state elite, the wealthy Greeks took to organizing performances of tragedies and comedies at
home. Hermes, a Greek society, held theatrical performances in Beyoğlu, and a journal of the
same name published plays. Alongside the Greeks, the Armenians and the Jews took to staging
plays in order to finance community hospitals and schools. But not for long; with the sharp rise
in public expenses, the state began to tax such community activities even if they were organized
for philanthropic purposes.
6 The Ottoman Armenians played the most active role in the theatrical world. In 1820, for
example, young Armenians performed amateur plays at an elite waterside villa. A group based in
the Bosphorus suburb of Ortaköy founded a theatre society in 1856 under the directorship of
Mıgırdıç Beşiktaşlıyan. Two years later, another society appeared at an Armenian school in
Hasköy. Given Naum’s monopoly on theatrical presentations, there was a time when these
societies had to obtain his permission to set up and then work under his supervision. The
Armenians also founded more professional acting companies, including ‘Şark’ and
‘Vaspuragan’, that organized bilingual productions of European plays.
7 An Ottoman Armenian – and a Muslim in later life – named Güllü Agop played a prominent
role in the theatre scene of nineteenth-century Istanbul. He first founded the Asya Tiyatrosu
(Asian Theatre) and then the Osmanlı Tiyatrosu (Ottoman Theatre). Later, he moved his business
to a site in downtown Istanbul, known as Gedikpaşa, where his theatre and circus were the
property of a shareholding company. It was mainly through his efforts that theatrical activities
became available outside the ‘modern’ quarter of Beyoğlu. Like Naum in the recent past, Agop
obtained official monopolies: one of them covered the staging of Turkish plays; and another, the
opening of theatres in intra muros4 Istanbul. Yet tuluat5 artists with their improvisations defied
his monopolies as did certain operetta companies, until Agop began to stage operettas himself,
even employing a French specialist for the purpose. However, when the newspapers harshly
criticized his reliance on adapted and translated material, he left Gedikpaşa to try his luck at
Şehzadebaşı, a more centrally located part of the old city. After failing there too, he entered the
service of the sultan and began to manage the theatre at Yıldız Palace.
Original Plays
8 Western style plays were also a nineteenth-century phenomenon. After a relatively long
period of translating and adapting material for the stage, the playwrights began to compose
original works in Turkish. Şair Evlenmesi (The Poet’s Marriage), the first Turkish play, was
4
Intra muros - Latin for “within the walls”.
5
Tuluat - A kind of improvisational theatre
BU YADYOK P4
Spring 2022-2023
published in 1860, the work of the poet, writer and translator İbrahim Şinasi Efendi. However,
the most famous playwright of the time was Namık Kemal, who wrote romantic, patriotic and
historical plays. Other playwrights included Şemsettin Sami, Ali Bey, Recaizade Ekrem,
Ebuziyya Tevfik, Muallim Naci, Abdülhak Hamid, Ahmed Midhat and Bursalı Feraizcizade
Mehmed Şakir, the last producing comedies inspired by Molière.
9 Most of these playwrights primarily wrote to enlighten the public, to introduce ‘progressive’
ideas and to criticize what they regarded as ‘backward’. Their plays often featured critiques of
social and political institutions, religious fanaticism, extreme conservatism and bureaucracy.
They also had the chance to experiment with multiple genres, including tragedies,
historical/documentary or romantic and heroic plays, operettas and melodramas. Melodrama
easily found a public; for it afforded an opportunity to punish the wicked and reward the good.
Nevertheless, until the Young Turk era, romantic plays were the most popular.
Censorship
10 With the rise in the political influence of theatres, censorship also increased. It began with
Kemal’s famous Vatan Yahut Silistre (Fatherland or Silistria), staged in 1873. The increasing
number of theatres meant larger audiences. And that meant more censorship and suppression
from the authorities. By the year 1882, when one of Ahmed Midhat’s plays dared to express
nationalist sentiments, the government considered it intolerable and demolished the theatre in
Gedikpaşa. With the Gedikpaşa monopoly finally broken, new acting companies got their chance
to flourish in Istanbul. Some of the famous actors who had worked in Gedikpaşa now moved to
the western Anatolian city of Bursa, whose governor was Ahmed Vefik Paşa, a well-known
translator and adapter of Molière’s works. During his three-year tenure, and until his deposition
in 1885, Vefik Paşa actively encouraged theatrical performances. Other provincial cities
equipped with theatres were Adana and Trabzon.
11 During the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909), his censors targeted not only the
open expression of revolutionary ideas and nationalism but also the slightest suggestion.
Playwrights were threatened with persecution even for the use of words such as ‘freedom’,
‘anarchy’, ‘dynamite’, ‘constitution’ and ‘equality’. Therefore, light comedies without literary
pretensions flourished, and Mardiros Mınakyan, actor, translator, producer and director of
Osmanlı Komedi ve Dram Kumpanyası (Ottoman Comedy and Drama Company), courted
popular taste with plays adapted from pulp fiction.
A New Era
12 With the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, the authoritarian practices of the Hamidian
regime came to a temporary end and the theatres and their audiences could enjoy more freedom.
The first few years of the revolutionary era encouraged new theatrical activities, almost a ‘theatre
epidemic’, and public optimism recorded a new high. With censorship temporarily lifted, the
playwrights were free to strongly denounce oppression and injustice. They now wrote about
liberty, innovation, national development and politicolegal reforms. Ideologies such as Turkism,
emphasizing the glorious past of the Turks, or Islamism, even socialism, appeared on stage.
Other playwrights wished to promote more rational thinking, and chose to criticize fatalism and
belief in supernatural powers. Many playwrights of the time also expressed an interest in village
life; they praised the sacredness of family bonds and spoke of love as love for all of humanity
rather than the romantic love they had been shown on stage for so long.
BU YADYOK P4
Spring 2022-2023
13 More and more Muslim Turkish actors took to the stage during this time, and Muslim
investors began to take an interest in the theatre as well. Until 1908, there had been only a
limited number of Muslim actors, like Ahmet Fehim, Ahmet Necip, Hamdi, İsmail, Mehmet
Vamık, Mehmet Edip and Selim, who brought theatres to Anatolia. Burhanettin Bey and Muhsin
Ertuğrul were two other actors of the Young Turk era who were prominent in the early
Republican era as well.
14 Political parties, especially the Committee of Union and Progress, which rose to power in
1913, began to pay great attention and to lend great support to the theatres as their leading
members saw them as effective vehicles of propaganda. Theatres now became platforms for
those who sought to ‘save the empire’ which was trying to recover from its war wounds and the
consequent political and economic problems. Most plays of this period highlight these concerns
to the extent that they tend to neglect most aesthetic considerations. Not only did theatres help
form public opinion but they also expanded the public sphere. Sectors of society that had until
then been silent and invisible, like the peasants, now had a voice and a face. Unfortunately, like
all good things that must come to an end, this wonderful time for the theatre, namely, the first
few years of the Young Turk era, also did not last long. Strict censorship was back with a
vengeance during the Balkan Wars and the First World War.
15 Despite the censorship and the bans after the attempted counter-revolution in 1909 (the 31
March Affair) which ended the reign of Abdülhamid II, the theatres did gain a degree of stability
after 1908. The governor of Istanbul, Cemil (later Topuzlu), initiated the conservatoire known as
the Darü’l Bedayi-i Osmani, with both drama and music departments and the well-known actor
and director Ahmet Fehim as one of its teachers. Cemil Bey had invited André Antoine, a
prominent French director, to head this new institution. Though Antoine had to leave Istanbul
after a very short stay due to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the conservatoire
continued to function and staged its first play in 1916 at the Tepebaşı Theatre. Soon, however,
the conservatoire faced financial problems and the music department ceased to exist. The drama
section survived the Ottoman Empire, remaining active until 1926, when the newly founded City
Theatre took over its stage. More theatres emerged during the Republican period, starting in
1923, and were usually subject to the ideological and administrative patronage of the newly
formed nation-state.
