Survivors of the old Ottoman Empire, my paternal grandmother included, were accustomed to beginning bedtime stories with a rather puzzling stock opening: “Once upon a time, there was and there was not . . .” Contradictory on its face, it actually made a lot of sense, especially when prefacing a folk tale grounded in truths but formulated as fable. It could also apply to historical fiction.
Although the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak doesn’t begin her sprawling, moving—and only occasionally exasperating—tapestry of a novel with these words, she well might have, and she does allude to them later in her text. The Architect’s Apprentice is both a richly evocative historical narrative and an exercise in sheer fantasy, a work equal parts Arabian Nights, magical realism, formulaic whodunit, and chronicle of a lost empire at its zenith—an intriguing mixture of things that did, and did not, happen.
The architect of the title, though little known to most American readers, is one of history’s greatest master builders, Sinan, chief architect to three Ottoman sultans beginning with Suleiman the Magnificent. The latter expanded Ottoman influence to its height during a reign of nearly half-a-century (1520-66) and was arguably the most talented and powerful monarch in an era of compelling rulers. At the time, the Ottoman Army was the most efficient and best disciplined in the world, and it was from within its ranks, where he served as a military engineer, that Sinan, son of a humble Christian stone mason in Anatolia, and of Greek or Armenian descent, first rose to prominence.
He was a product of the devshirme, the Ottoman levy of the strongest, most promising boys and young men from among the empire’s Christian subjects. Young recruits like Sinan, whose Christian name was Joseph, were renamed and became mandatory converts to Islam, nominally “slaves” of the sultan. The brightest among them, trained in the army or rigorous palace schools, would end up as senior military commanders and government officials, sometimes rising to the highest rank of all, grand vizier. Thus, with each passing generation until the end of the devshirme in the mid-17th century, the leadership of the nominally Turkish Ottoman Empire became less and less Turkish by blood, just as Ottoman sultans—usually mothered by Circassian, Slavic, Greek, Armenian, or European concubines—became less and less Turkish themselves. The there-was-and-there-was-not formula applies to the very nature of the empire itself.
Probably the greatest of all the sons of the devshirme, Sinan was responsible for the building of 79 mosques, 34 palaces, 33 public baths, 19 tombs, 55 schools, 16 poorhouses, 7 Muslim seminaries, 12 caravansaries, and numerous granaries, fountains, bridges, aqueducts, and hospitals. He also supervised a major restoration of Santa Sophia. Dying in his hundredth year, Sinan’s legacy set the standard for Ottoman public architecture until Western styles, usually adapted by Western-oriented Armenian palace architects, came into fashion after the 1800s.
Around this very real historical figure, Elif Shafak arranges a fictitious quartet of apprentices vying for the master’s favor, including the human protagonist Jahan, who is both an architect-in-training and mahout for Chota, a white elephant from India, gift of the Great Mogul to Suleiman, and the novel’s four-footed co-protagonist. (While the elephant is genuine, Jahan falls into the was-and-wasn’t category, a Turkish cabin boy on the ship delivering the elephant who, when the real mahout dies at sea, passes himself off as Chota’s Indian attendant.)
Which leads us to the palace, to a fictional, unconsummated love affair between Jahan and Princess Mirimah, the real-life daughter of Sultan Suleiman, a beautiful and (according to one historian) “laughter-loving” princess for whom Sinan built one of his finest Istanbul mosques. With a colorful supporting cast of good and evil courtiers, scheming eunuchs, wicked harem beauties, a rollicking band of gypsies, and side trips to Rome and India, the reader soon learns to overlook the author’s many historical liberties and occasional anachronisms. At one point, she has the Kapi Aga, the Sultan’s chief white eunuch, tap the roof of his carriage with a walking stick in the manner of a Victorian gentleman in a hansom cab, while her dialogue for Istanbul’s lower social orders resembles 19th-century cockney parlance more than anything one would have heard on the shores of the 16th-century Bosporus. Nonetheless, it is a most enjoyable literary ride.
Things are seldom what they seem, and some of the twists and turns of the plot stretch credibility, but the historical atmosphere Shafak evokes—the sights, sounds, smells, and emotions of the greatest city of its day with layers of history ranging through ancient Greece, the Age of Alexander, and the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires—conveys a lot of truth even when it strays from the strictly factual.
Aram Bakshian Jr., who served as an aide to presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, is a writer in Washington.
