City of Countless Names- Pera p2

We move deeper into Pera, the most aristocratic quarter of Constantinople, with a look at an institute of higher learning. 

Galata Serai

In the heart of the quarter, the great avenue called the “the Grand Rue De Pera” bends southward towards Galata. Just beneath the bend, young Turkish scholars study at the greatest medical college in the Ottoman Empire, behind the high stone walls of Galata Serai. A fire in 1849 devastated the school, but the Galata Serai’s importance and influence forced its immediate rebuilding with a stately modern edifice. Despite the school’s location in Pera, Galata Serai means “Palace of Galata”, a holdover from the old Turkish habit of referring to the whole center of the northern shore as Galata.

In the late 1470s, the Sultan Bayezid II often wandered Constantinople in disguise meeting his subjects with humility.  While wandering in Pera-Galata, he found a beautiful rose garden carefully tended by a wise man named Gul Baba. The Sultan asked him how he would improve a city with such a diverse population as Constantinople. Gul Baba humbly counseled the city needed a school to teach young men the wisdom and knowledge needed to govern the Empire. Sultan Bayezid II returned the next day and built a school next to the rose garden. Gul Baba was the school’s first headmaster. This story may only be a symbolic legend obscuring the schools founding by the Beshiktash Dervishes. Gul Baba means Father Rose, and roses are a common symbol of that Dervish order.

Whatever its exact origin, the Galata Serai converted its unlearned charges into polished examples of Ottoman youth prepared to serve in the Empire’s governance for more than 360 years. In 1834 the Sultan’s father, Mahmud II, dissolved the school as a part of his educational reform. He gave a few of the buildings to his army to be used as barracks, but the majority of Galata Serai became the Ottoman Medical School.

The school now strives to produce the next generation of Ottoman naval and military surgeons by offering courses on medicine, pathology, anatomy, natural history, chemistry, languages, drawing, history, and mathematics. Its student body is made up of 350 boys and men ranging in age from 12- 25. French professors and instructors make up a large percentage of the faculty, and most lessons are taught in French. The school’s library has two librarians: one for the books in French, and one for the rest. The school’s professors may borrow books for their own studies; everyone else is obliged to carry their books no further than the libraries’ reading room.

The school also operates a charity clinic. The clinic only has room for 60 patients but sets aside two days for anyone to consult with its staff. In a remarkable stroke of modern medicine, the clinic added a pregnancy ward, led by a female professor from Vienna with the aim of teaching Turkish midwives modern techniques. She has considerable experience and connections with the harems of imperial households. As another example of modern reform, the Ottoman jails send the bodies of their dead convicts to the anatomical class for teaching purposes without regard to their religion or creed, although many consider this sacrilegious. The professor of anatomy, Dr. Spitzer, is fascinated by local remedies and is currently studying bezoars.