The Starling Talisman of the Late Fifteenth-Century Istanbul:
Ottoman Historians’ Engagement with the City’s Deep Past

Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar
Ioannou Centre – 66, St. Giles’, Oxford

BYOSE III: Imagining Cities in Transition 
Ottoman Istanbul’s Talismanic Antiquities

Asli Niyazioglu, Oxford University, Exeter College

For early modern Ottoman writers, Istanbul’s antiquities were not insignificant remains of a distant past, as often assumed, but had important uses and talismanic powers. Through the focus on the story about a starling talisman, I will discuss what we can learn from them about the Ottoman interest in Istanbul’s pre-Ottoman past and the place of the occult in it. My talk is about an object which probably never existed. According to an anonymous Ottoman Turkish chronicle from the late fifteenth century, a talisman-maker from Maghreb came to Istanbul in 1200 BC to construct a talisman in the image of a starling, inscribed by sacred letters and powered by a special spring from Isfahan. He placed it on the dome of a great temple at the site of Hagia Sophia. Every year during the olive season, the talisman attracted starlings from all around the Mediterranean and made them bring tons of olive to Istanbul.
Such a story about a mighty talisman is unique in Ottoman histories. It gathers diverse sources to tell how people, knowledge, and resources from different places and times were brought to Istanbul. This particular collection and its geographical extent is also very different from what we know about the reach of Mehmed II’s imperial project and offers an in-sight into the ways which Istanbul’s past was imagined in a post-conquest city. The object secured an important place in the Ottoman historical imagination and was circulated widely throughout the early modern period.