Category Archives: Tophane

Victor Vasarely

March 26, 2017 – 5:48 pm

Tophane-i Amire
Tophane-i Amire, 2017.03.25

Last week I wrote about the Turkish Impressionist Feyhaman Duran, born in 1886. Now my subject is the Hungarian-French Op Artist born twenty years later as Győző Vásárhelyi. His “Rétrospective en Turquie” is at the Tophane-i Amire Culture and Art Center in an Ottoman cannon foundry.

Vasarely show Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Archimedes, Collingwood, Descartes, Education, Euclid, Istanbul, Mathematics, Midgley, Pirsig, Principles of Art, Visual Art | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Art on the Bosphorus

March 9, 2015 – 4:28 pm

Here are photos from a Saturday (March 7, 2015) on the European side of the lower Bosphorus. I often go there, without a particular plan. Saturday was another cloudy day; but in Istanbul, in winter, one might wait weeks for a sunny day. No rain was forecast: that was enough reason to go out.

I first got the camera out at the Bezm-i Âlem Valide Sultan Camii, a.k.a. Dolmabahçe Mosque. The date at the door is 1851. Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Bosphorus, History, Istanbul, Tourism, Visual Art | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)

The Istanbul Seaside

December 3, 2014 – 11:00 am

The original purpose of this article was to display and explain two photographs by me: one of a seaside park, the other of an abandoned car. I do this, and I talk about the stresses and compensations of the big city. I continue with the theme of Freedom from an earlier article of that name.

It is now early December in Istanbul, 2014. We have hardly seen the sun for weeks. Some rain falls almost every day. One has to learn to go out when one can. Last Saturday was cloudy, but dry, so we walked down to the Tophane-i Amire—the “Cannon Foundry Imperial.” The name is romantic, because it dates from Ottoman times, and because, like Koh-i-Noor, it is in a Persian grammatical form that is obsolete in Turkish. Today’s name of the cannon foundry would be Amire Tophane.
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By David Pierce | Also posted in Bosphorus, Causation, Collingwood, Gezi, History, Istanbul, Nature, Philosophy, Pirsig, Psychology, Tourism, Turkey | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (4)