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# The Tortoise Trainer
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/dressirovshchik-cherepakh/
- Published: 2024-03-16T06:31:06.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:34:17.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: The East, Art, Monarchies, Museums, Mores

The tortoise trainer. Strange as it may seem, such a post really did exist at the court of the Ottoman Sultan. Tortoises are trained by sound, so the trainer's instruments are musical: in this case a pipe and a drum, while nowadays a little bell is used.

The question naturally arises: why train tortoises at all? Modern breeders say, first of all, so that it does not bite, but this is achieved only with difficulty and after long habituation to a single person; if sudden movements are made in front of the tortoise, even a tamed one can easily forget itself.

In the Sultan's palace, however, tortoises were tamed for quite another purpose, and no, not so that the tortoise might demonstratively accept food from tongs or from the hand: rather, so that it would carry a lantern on its back. At the palace's evening entertainments tortoises were let loose with small lamps fixed to their shells, and they crawled about without stopping, creating an intriguing effect of illumination across the space. In essence, the training consisted in cultivating the habit of crawling for a long time without a halt, which was precisely what palace evenings required.

The best-known image of the tortoise trainer in culture was created by the Turkish painter of Greek aristocratic descent Osman Hamdi Bey in 1906-1907\. But the painting is not about training tortoises at all; it is about the protracted disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the unsuccessful, ineffectual attempts at state reform, which the artist likened to the process of training this slow, hard-to-teach animal, and to a goal, moreover, that was obscure and remote from reality. The painting is regarded as one of the artistic harbingers of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.

One of the two versions of the canvas is held in the Pera Museum, the art museum in Istanbul.

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_11539@16-03-2024_09-31-06.jpg)

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_11540@16-03-2024_09-31-06.jpg)

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_11541@16-03-2024_09-31-06.jpg)