Abstract

Three circular gardens in Venice and Constantinople/Istanbul in the context of early modern Mediterranean cross-cultural exchange b. deniz çaliş kural Take this book for study; medium — pose challenging comparisons at a time when gardens and it will transport you to the sweet home of the son of Leto garden forms symbolized philosophical quests, and garden space was and the groves of Pierides, full of nightingales. constructed through poetic and metaphorical means. Aldus Manutius, Venice, 1496 This paper examines three circular gardens of the early modern Med- Cross-cultural exchange across the early modern Eastern iterranean, a region that provides a heterogeneous context for cross- Mediterranean cultural interactions, both in the circular form of gardens and the transla- tions of the ideals expressed by that form. The three circular gardens in Early modern Eastern Mediterranean providesasuitable contextfor the comparison include the fictive Garden of Cythera narrated and illumi- comparison of the three gardens, bringing together the Venetian, the nated in the 1499 dated Venetian romance Hypnerotomachia Poliphili as Byzantine and the Ottoman paradigms within a geographical network. seen in figure 1; the sixteenth-century Garden of Karabali documented in Mediterranean had been a fertile medium for ‘mutual borrowing’, and it Ottoman