Entrance to the Gallery of Caiques

Turkey's Naval Museum opened in 1897, and changed homes four times before finally settling in the present building in 1961. The museum has constantly grown, developed and renewed itself, reflecting corresponding changes in the Turkish Navy.

The main building has 17 rooms and galleries on three storeys. The large annex behind it consisting of a single hall housing royal barges and caiques is a favourite of many visitors. Field guns and other large exhibits fill the grounds. In addition the museum has an archive and library building and an art gallery. The nearby 16th century tomb of Barbaros Hayrettin Pasa is also under the auspices of the museum. The library contains a collection of 23,000 books on all aspects of the sea and ships, 25 million archive documents, 10,000 films and photographs, and 900 atlases and charts.

Each of the Ottoman imperial caiques is a work of art

Let us first take a look at the main building. If time is not short I like to go twice around a museum, the first to see what is where, so that I do not miss anything of importance on the second round, which I take slowly, spending as much time as I like on those exhibits which most interest me. On this occasion I examined the clock of the warship Yavuz to see if it was working accurately and the instruments on its main battery, and tried to guess the useful load of galleys, and so on. The Yavuz has a separate room all to itself, containing a model and fittings removed from this famous ship. Despite being nearly a century old the clock from the captain's bridge revealed itself to be more accurate than my own watch. I itched to move the levers of the trajectory alignment instrument, a mechanical computer which is still in working order, but had to refrain as touching is not allowed.

At one point I found myself in front of Halim Sitki's "Sehzade Suleyman Crossing to Rumelia on Rafts", reproductions of which used to hang in school corridors and illustrate history textbooks. It gave rise to one of the great fallacies of Turkish history, since in fact of course the army crossed in boats not rafts. Who knows what mood of newly awakening nationalist feeling had fired the artist's imagination. In the 11th century Caka Bey had led a fleet into the Aegean, and Umur Bey had established a large naval fleet just a few years prior to Suleyman Sah's crossing of the Dardanelles.

The Ottomans on the other hand used to sometimes rent ships from the Genoese.

The model of the frigate Ertugrul

The Memorial Room is dedicated to the memory of Turkish seamen who lost their lives at sea, some of whose names go back as far as 1319 and many more who are nameless.

Leaving the innumerable and wonderful models, standards, medals, war mementos, lamps, and rooms dedicated to heroic sailors such as Barbaros Hayreddin Pasa to Rauf Orbay, and corners devoted to the Savarona and Ataturk, for those visiting the museum for the first time, I went out of the main building and headed for the gallery of royal barges and caiques.

The caique must be the most graceful form of rowing vessel ever created anywhere in the world. Once the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus were filled with these colourfully decorated, long narrow boats, which skimmed across the water. Today they are a thing of the past, and even the Bosphorus fishermen's rowing boats are not what they were. I saw the last alamana, or fishing smack, rotting on the shore at Beykoz fifteen years ago. If this museum had not been established nothing would have been saved. What if the carved figurehead of the Aziziye frigate had been allowed to disappear like so much else?

The disadvantage of the emphasis on rowing power was that it delayed the use of sail. In other words the caiques and galleys represent a long period of inertia in Turkish nautical history. Galleys had the advantage of manoeuvering ability in the Aegean and Adriatic, but prevented Turkish ships venturing into the oceans. The 16th century Ottoman admiral and celebrated map maker Piri Reis was able to resist the Portuguese in the Red Sea, but his ships were too low to perform well in the rough seas of the Indian Ocean.

The royal galley belonging to Mehmed IV (1648-1687) is perhaps the star of the museum. It is 40 feet long and 5.7 metres wide, and weighs just 140 tons. The area of the single deck is approximately 200 square metres. It was propelled by 24 pairs of oars, each with 3 rowers, making a total of 144 rowers in that narrow space. If you think of the amount of water and food needed for so many people, it is obvious how small its useful load was when faced with a three masted galleon, and why Ottoman supremacy at sea lasted only just over half a century. When the Genoese were forced out of the Eastern Mediterranean they entered the service of the Spanish and Portuguese kings and began to explore the oceans. Their discoveries made those countries so rich that it was two hundred and fifty years before Turkey could find her way into the race for naval power again. Today if Turkey is among the first forty countries in many areas, while in the first twenty in terms of her naval and merchant fleets, she owes it to all the thousands of sailors whose names do not appear on the museum plaques.

The carved figureheads of lions, tigers, eagles or horses which once decorated the prows of Turkish ships are now represented by one example each in the museum. These delightful pieces undoubtedly have their roots in ancient pagan symbols and were believed to instill the ships with the spirit of these creatures. They can no longer fly over the foamy waves today, but if their spirits are still awaiting our sailors, probably their most joyful day is the Naval Festival celebrated on the quay in front of the museum on 1 July every year. This cheerful event attracts large crowds on this part of the Bosphorus, down which ships from a myriad countries still sail, as they have done for centuries.

* Mehmet Tanju Akad is a writer and researcher.