Turkey's Erdogan planning to expand palace with residence
Ankara (AFP) - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is planning to expand his already controversial new presidential palace with a 250-room residency building, Ankara's top architect was quoted as saying Thursday.
The vast new presidential palace on the outskirts of Ankara has already been bitterly criticised for its size and what some see as a misguided architectural fusion of Ottoman and modern elements.
The opposition has even compared the new complex -- which takes up an area of 200,000 square metres (2.1 million square feet) -- to the notorious Palace of the People of deposed Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Tezcan Karakus Candan, chairman of the Turkish Chamber of Architects in Ankara, said the organisation now had information that an additional residency complex was to be built adjacent to the palace.
"The complex does not only consist of an unlicensed palace," Turkish media quoted her as saying.
"The residence where the president will live is set to be around 7,000 square meters, according to our calculations."
"It is about 4,000 square meters in surface. If each room is 20 meters, then it means he is building himself a residence with 250 rooms."
Known officially as the Presidential Palace but dubbed universally as the Aksaray (White Palace), the complex has 1,000 rooms and draws its architectural inspiration from Turkey's Ottoman and Seljuk heritage.
The comments were seized upon by Erdogan's opponents as the latest evidence of his excesses. "1,000 rooms were not enough," said the opposition Cumhuriyet daily.
But Erdogan, who became president in August after over a decade as prime minister, has insisted that the new palace is needed as a symbol worthy of what he describes as the "new Turkey", a fast-growing and diplomatically powerful nation.
A senior presidential official on Thursday lashed out at accusations the palace had been built without proper legal permission.
"These claims have no basis. We have a licence that granted us a construction permit as well as another licence for the use of the building," deputy chief of the presidential administration Metin Kiratli told the official Anatolia news agency.
"Therefore there are no administrative problems," he added, without commenting on the alleged residency building.
- 'Pope urged to avoid palace' -
Environmentalists, who lament the building of the palace in one of Ankara's last green areas, say the palace was built in defiance of a court injunction blocking its construction.
Controversy over the palace soared when Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek said last week that the total cost so far was 1.37 billion Turkish lira ($615 million), around double the original price tag.
Even one of Erdogan's oldest allies, Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc, admitted "this was not a small sum of money."
The first foreign guest in the palace is set to be Pope Francis when he visits Ankara at the start of his three-day visit to Turkey on November 28.
But the Turkish Chamber of Architects in Ankara on Tuesday sent a letter to the pope, asking him not to set foot in the palace in order "not to legitimise the illegal building."
"The architects asked the pope not to honour an invitation to this building," it said on its website.
Another top visitor expected this month -- US Vice President Joe Biden -- will not have to worry about the palace dispute as he will only visit Istanbul.
