The Tortoise Trainer

Painted in 1906 by the Ottoman archaeologist-painter Osman Hamdi Bey (1842–1910), 'The Tortoise Trainer' shows an elderly man in dervish dress playing a ney flute to a group of tortoises crawling slowly across an Anatolian tiled floor — widely read as a gentle satire of the Ottoman Empire's halting modernisation. The principal version is a centrepiece of the Pera Museum in Istanbul; related variants hang in several Turkish and European collections.

Exhibition Venue

Pera Museum

Istanbul, Türkiye