The Persevering Curse of the İblisli Ahmet Pasha Boys School
Part II Awakening the Sleeping Dogs
After its closure in 1632 by Murat IV in 1632, the historic building of the Ahmet Pasha Boys School lay idle for over 200 years. In spite of its highly visible location on the shores of the Bosphorus, the building was almost entirely forgotten and rapidly fell into disrepair. In the early 1820s’ two enthusiastic Italian artists developed an interest in the building. The artists were part of a newly emergent art movement called La Belle Ruine (The Beautiful Ruin), which was becoming all the rage in Europe. As implied in the name, their manifesto was a eulogy to the beauty of collapsing buildings and the sense of mystery encapsulated within. Vincenzo Preciosa and Guiseppe Bandrolli soon claimed that they have “Discovered a hidden jewel in the heart of Constantinople” and began producing highly detailed illustrations of the buildings to be published in the Italian magazine Il Risveglio. The illustrations were often accompanied by badly translated interviews with the locals who warned Preciosa and Bandrolli to steer clear from the building. The articles in Il Risveglio are full of contempt against the locals who tried to warn the artists. Sentences like “The Oriental mind is too preoccupied with petty prejudices to appreciate the glory of its own history” pepper the pages of their accounts.
As the instalments progress the texts start to acquire a worrying quality. In the final update for the magazine, Preciosa declares excitedly that his friend Bandrolli has learned about the existence of a cavernous passageway into the secret mazes below the building that can only be accessed by diving from the shore. There are obscure references to an ancient Mesopotamian underwater deity known as Kulullû who supposedly grants his acolytes the ability to breathe underwater in return for a human sacrifice. After their final update for Il Risveglio, the artists vanished without a trace. No clue has emerged of their fate until a skeleton that shares Bandrolli’s features was discovered inside an iron cage without any traces of diving equipment, by an amateur diver collecting mussels near the site in 1967. It is highly likely that Preciosa whose body has never been found, served as the human sacrifice required by Kulullû. Judging from the texts detailing the ancient god’s specifications for human sacrifice rituals, we can surmise that Preciosa’s demise has been even more gruesome than that of his friend and murderer.
The series of lithographs by the Italian artists brought the school to the attention of Mahmut II (1808-1839) whose abolition of the Janissary order in 1826 led to new searches for a new direction for the Ottoman military. It was at this stage that the wealthy Mahmut Efendi proposed to the sultan to open the school once more as a modern institution to teach young cadets the arts of demonology so that the declining Ottoman army can gain an edge over its European rivals. Although there were no useful military breakthroughs, the first decades of the school seemed to be at least free of catastrophe. Newspapers were running full-page illustrated advertisements depicting young scholars in both Western attire studying next to their colleagues in traditional clothes. The advertisements underlined that the methods applied in the school combined scientific and religious knowledge to achieve a complete understanding of demonology. It seemed even though no great weapons emerged from the school it provided a place for different elements of the empire to come together and work toward achieving the same goal.
But problems soon started to appear. By the late 1870s, Numerous nocturnal sightings of Acaibü’l Mahlukât (Strange Creatures) were reported in various locations across the city. We can get a glimpse of these sightings from the two famous paintings of Osman Hamdi Devil in the Coffeehouse and Devil in the Bath House. Osman Hamdi Bey who is well-known for his innovative approach to the clichés of Orientalist painting also has a refreshing approach to depicting demons. In both of the paintings we see the demons as frightening but not posing an immediate danger. The first picture shows a red-faced demon wearing golden jewellery enjoying some tea in a very relatable manner. In the latter, we see an extremely muscled blue demon with worryingly sharp teeth and a beautiful golden belt engaging in a deep conversation with a man who is fearlessly extending his hand. Of course, there is no way of knowing if these pictures depict real events or whether they are purely the products of the artists’ famously vivid imagination.
The School’s new demise came on the morning of October 29th 1914, the day the Ottoman Empire entered the first world war. Ominous emerald-green clouds appeared in the skies above the school that engulfed the city for an entire week. The Committee of Union and Progress who led the Empire into war, promptly decided to shut the school down on the grounds that it was discouraging the country from taking part in the war. But of course, this is not be the end of İblisli Ahmet Pasha’s curse. Stay tuned to find out about how after sitting dormant for almost an entire century the school will be revived again in the 1980s’ under even more inauspicious circumstances.