Altın varak, the Turkish expression for gold leaf, is what happens when human vanity finds its most delicate expression. The Ottomans used it with flair: laid onto Qur’an illuminations, painted into miniatures, burnished across mosque panels and palace ceilings. It was a craft in which theology, politics, and decoration were rolled into one, performed with fine brushes.
The craft never died. Conservators still apply gold leaf to fading manuscripts and mosque domes; luxury publishers tuck it into leather-bound spines; and trendy Istanbul chefs cap their baklava or cappuccino with edible slivers of eternity. Europe has its own gilded fetishes: Byzantine mosaics that made heaven visible, Renaissance frames that turned saints into stock portfolios, Versailles mirrors that reflected the Sun King in endless radiance.
NEO-OTTOMANS’ GILDED CAGE
The Ottomans gilded as if the empire depended on it. Tombs, thrones, and palace halls gleamed not just to dazzle visitors but to assert divine sanction. To gild was to govern.
Then came the Republic, with its rejection of imperial excess. Ankara’s boulevards and ministries wore their austerity like a uniform. The stripped-down, modernist aesthetic became an ideological statement: out with gilt, in with concrete.
But history, like fashion, has a way of circling back. Under the AKP, altın varak has returned with a vengeance - along with rose-scented water. Having already turned Dolmabahçe Palace into a showroom of golden excess, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan went in search of a palace to gild in his own name. Beştepe, the presidential palace, is a showroom of neo-Ottoman splendor dripping with leafed arabesques that continues to amaze foreign visitors. (Can’t wait for Trump to see and compare it with his glitter-and-gold Manhattan mansion when he comes to us for the NATO Summit 2026.)
The world remembers the golden chair offered to Angela Merkel, then Germany’s long-serving chancellor, in 2015; more throne than armchair, the sort of seat that sends protocol officers scrambling and cartoonists into ecstasy. Merkel later defended herself in her memoirs, noting she had no choice but to sit. Diplomatic seats, like thrones, are hard to refuse.
Altın varak is a visual shorthand shared by strongmen everywhere: Trump’s Tower, Putin’s Black Sea palace, Gulf monarchies where even the tissue boxes glisten.
Here in Turkey, it is a glimmering but painfully thin layer over deeper fissures: a faltering economy, censorship, and fear. At times, it becomes cruel irony, like First Lady Emine Erdoğan extolling thrift from a ‘zero-waste’ kitchen where the faucets themselves are gold.
GILDED FIG LEAF
Which brings us to the lawyer with a taste for shimmer. Cem Duman, an Istanbul attorney later detained in a criminal investigation into an organized crime network, posed in a room lavishly coated in gold leaf, a setting so theatrical it looked like a Beştepe knock-off. He also had the temerity to hang a portrait of Erdoğan in the background, duplicating the palace aesthetic to a tee. Soon after, he was arrested, not for the décor, but for his alleged links to organized crime.
AKP figures themselves pounced on Duman’s altın varaklı oda (room with gold leaf), condemning the ostentation. They did so, of course, while delicately sidestepping the altın varak that coats their own leader’s palace. Gilding is tolerable when it frames power; scandalous when it frames its fringes.
