Emirgan Park
The Emirgan Park (Turkish: Emirgan Korusu or rarely Emirgan Parkı) is a historical urban park located at the Emirgan neighbourhood in the Sarıyer district of Istanbul, Turkey, on the European coast of the Bosphorus. It is one of the largest public parks in Istanbul
History
In the Byzantine era, the entire area where today the park stretches was covered with cypress trees and known as “Kyparades” or “Cypress Forest”. It became known as “Feridun Bey Park”, when the uninhabited land was granted in the mid-16th century to Nişancı Feridun Bey, a Lord Chancellor in rank in the Ottoman Empire.
In the 17th century, Ottoman Sultan Murad IV (reigned 1623-1640) presented the estate to Emir Gûne Han, a Safavid Persian commander, who surrendered his sieged castle without any resistance, and followed him back to Constantinople (now Istanbul). The name “Feridun Bey Park” was changed to “Emirgûne”, which in time became corrupted to “Emirgan”.
During the centuries, the estate’s owner changed several times. By the end of the 1860s, Emigran Park was owned by Isma’il Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt and Sudan (reigned 1863-1879). Although Egypt had been virtually independent since 1805, it legally remained a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, and the Egyptian Khedival family had married into the Ottoman Sultanic family. After he was deposed as Khedive, with the throne of Egypt and Sudan passings to his son, Tewfik Pasha, Isma’il initially took up residence in exile in Naples, before relocating permanently to Emigran Park, where he lived in exile until his death. The area was used as the backyard of a large wooden yalı that Isma’il ordered built on the shore of the Bosphorus. He also built within the park area three wooden pavilions, which still exist.
The heirs of the deposed Khedive sold the estate in the 1930s to Satvet Lütfi Tozan, a wealthy Turkish arms dealer. In the 1940s, he granted the park grounds, including the three pavilions, to the City of Istanbul during the office of Governor and Mayor Lütfi Kırdar (1938-1949).