Bulletin of Palestine Studies

Abstract

The construction of government houses in almost all Ottoman cities, small and large, in the last quarter of the 19th century is a fact that directly related with the reorganization of administrative structure in provinces during the process of the development of modern bureaucratic state. The government houses of the Tanzimat Period were completely different from the structures of the previous period, which were named as "pasha gate", "governor's palace" or "governor's mansion". These buildings might be considered as concrete proofs showing that the Ottoman provincial administration has begun to be depersonalized and that the patronage and protection system has turned into a professional bureaucracy. Moreover, it is worthy to note that government houses were seen as symbolic power centres that reminded the Ottoman subjects the political and administrative power of the sultan and the supremacy of the state. As a matter of fact, although some of them were modest in size, these buildings had always been given importance by both the central government and the local government due to their symbolic representative character. In this study, the government house of Jerusalem, which may be considered as one of the first buildings of that kind in the Ottoman provincial cities, is evaluated regarding its urban location, its relationship with the urban residential and commercial areas; its functional features and the structural changes in the building from the 1850s to 1917 are examined as well. The construction of a new government house in Jerusalem, which has become an important agenda item in urban politics since the 1900s, has been subjected in order to explain the relations of the urban notables with the local and central government and their activities in the city. In this context, issues such as the functioning of the bureaucracy between the imperial center and the provinces, the domination of central government over local administration, the dependency of the Jerusalem governors on the central government were evaluated.