The tomb of Nakşidil Valide Sultan stands on the qibla side of the Fatih mosque, opposite the Tabhane medrese, as part of a small complex she endowed that also holds a primary school, a sebil, a fountain and a few rooms. Most of those buildings are used today by a Qur'an course run by the directorate of religious affairs.
Fifteen cenotaphs stand inside the tomb. Besides the valide sultan herself they belong to members and servants of her line and immediate circle, among them two sons of Mahmud II who were both named Abdülhamid, and Cevrî Kalfa.
The woman buried here is surrounded by legend. Ottoman records usually call her Nakşidil, though some archive papers, her seal and her gravestone give the name as Nakşî or Nakşî Kadın. The TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam, on the strength of a newly found document, places her as a concubine in the household of Esma Sultan, the sister of Abdülhamid I, and calls false the popular story that she was Aimée du Buc de Rivery, a young Frenchwoman of royal connections. Like many women brought into the harem in the eighteenth century, she was probably of Caucasian origin.
She became the seventh consort of Abdülhamid I. Her first son, Murad Seyfullah, born in 1783, died of smallpox the following year; her second, Mahmud, was born on 20 July 1785; and a daughter, Saliha Sultan, lived only about seven months. When Mahmud II came to the throne in 1808 she became valide sultan and was brought from the Old Palace to Topkapı in what the encyclopaedia records as the last procession of its kind, with the new sultan kissing her hand outside the Middle Gate. She fell ill with tuberculosis and died at the Beşiktaş shore palace on 6 September 1817. Beyond this complex she paid for a mosque and school at Ayvansaray, and in 1814 she had a fountain of Nurbanu Valide Sultan rebuilt at Sarıgazi in Üsküdar.
When to go
- Climate
- Across İstanbul as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 6.8 °C in January to 24.7 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (99 mm) and lightest in July (22 mm). Long-term means for 1950-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
