At the entrance to the archaeology department of the Trabzon Museum the visitor is met by a bright and, one would think, promising timeline. On it are the principal historical figures connected with the city and the key events of its fortunes. A thoroughly standard museum device: history in five minutes.
What surprises is not the device but the contents. Between the Bronze Age and Suleiman the Magnificent there are barely a dozen milestones. And that is the lot—as though nothing further had occurred in the city after Suleiman was born here.
I suspect this has less to do with a shortage of sources than with the curators mentally trying on the point of view of the “average visitor,” who is unlikely to recall anybody beyond Xenophon, Justinian and Mehmed the Conqueror. Very well; let it be so.
The house itself
Even that benign simplicity begins to wobble, however, if one walks round the ground floor.
The museum occupies a magnificent mansion of the early twentieth century, built for the Greek banker Kostaki Theophylaktos—requisitioned first by the Russian army of occupation, which held the city from 1916 to 1918, and afterwards by the new Turkish authorities. The building has had a turbulent life, almost no documentation survives, and the room descriptions consequently rest on art-historical intuition and guesswork. Occasionally on guesswork of a distinctly strained variety.
Here, for instance, is one of the formal ground-floor rooms, bearing no sign whatever of having been private quarters, labelled the prayer room. On what evidence? On the evidence that it has murals with people praying in them.
The murals also contain some rather more secular items. A train, for one.
The academic literature, for its part, describes the same room as a study, or a study-cum-oratory—and “study,” it must be said, sounds a good deal more convincing. All the more so because Ottoman Trabzon was not short of churches. There was simply no call to fit out a private chapel in the drawing room.
Easier to entertain
But in museum logic it is evidently simpler to say “prayer room.” The tourist understands it at once, and nobody suffers any culture shock.
One might have preferred an explanation: that a decorated interior does not necessarily have a liturgical purpose, that a wealthy Pontic Greek banker in 1900 might commission murals for the same reason a Victorian merchant commissioned a painted ceiling—because he could.
But explaining is difficult. Entertaining is always easier. Particularly if the educating would have to start from the very beginning.
