The story
An old man in old-fashioned religious dress stands in a tiled interior, carrying a reed flute and a small drum, and looks down at five tortoises busy eating green leaves. Osman Hamdi Bey, a painter, archaeologist and founder of Istanbul's archaeology museum, painted The Tortoise Trainer in 1906 and showed it at the Paris Salon. It is often read as a wry comment on the slow pace of reform in the late Ottoman Empire. In 2004 it sold for 3.5 million dollars, reported at the time as a record for a Turkish painting, to the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation, and it became the centrepiece of the museum the foundation opened the following year.
That museum is the Pera Museum, in the old European quarter of Beyoğlu, a few steps from İstiklal Avenue. It occupies the former Bristol Hotel, designed by the architect Achille Manoussos and built in 1893. Between 2003 and 2005 the architect Sinan Genim kept the hotel's facade and rebuilt the inside as galleries.
Its Orientalist collection hangs European painters who travelled to the Ottoman lands beside Ottoman artists, so visitors can compare how outsiders and insiders pictured the same world. Two quieter collections fill other floors. One holds more than 10,000 Anatolian weights and measures, from prehistoric scale weights to modern instruments, and the other over 800 Kütahya tiles and ceramics, mostly from the 18th to the 20th century.
