A Madrasa Named After a Ruby

Rather a long one today, I am afraid, but it is all so interesting. Do stay to the end, and do look at the pictures.

Madrasas—Islamic colleges combining the functions of a secondary school and a theological seminary—began appearing in Central Asia in the tenth century. The fashion travelled to the Armenian Highland and Anatolia with the Turkmen Seljuks and the Mongols.

One of the two most celebrated madrasas of Erzurum still standing is the Yakutiye, built in 1310.

The governor, the gemstone and the Spartan boy

It is named after the man who built it: Hoja Yakut, governor of Erzurum under Ghazan Khan, the Ilkhan of the Mongol state in Persia.

And Yakut means ruby.

The word came into Arabic and Persian from the Greek ὑάκινθος (Latin hyacinthus), which covered a range of colours running from dark blue through deep red to violet. Which is precisely why you already own the word, twice over.

English took it once through Latin and French as jacinth—the gemstone of Scripture, listed among the foundations of the New Jerusalem in Revelation and among the stones of Aaron’s breastplate in Exodus. And it took it again, later and more directly, as hyacinth, the flower.

That flower, in turn, is named after a person. Hyacinthus was a Spartan youth loved by Apollo and killed by him—by a discus, thrown by the god and blown off course, in most tellings, by a jealous west wind. From the blood that spilled, the flower grew. (Botanists are fairly sure the ancient hyakinthos was not our hyacinth at all, but a larkspur or an iris. The blood, at least, was the right colour.)

So: a Mongol governor in eastern Anatolia, a stone in the walls of the New Jerusalem, and a dead boy outside Sparta, all wearing the same name.

The other Yakut

A word of warning for anyone who has met the name elsewhere. There is a Siberian people called the Yakuts, whose homeland is the coldest inhabited region of Russia, and the resemblance is a complete coincidence.

Their own name for themselves is Sakha, and it goes back to a Turkic *yaka, “collar, edge, borderland,” which in their language became first *čaqa and then sakha. Their Siberian Turkic neighbours, whose languages had not made that consonant shift, went on calling them yakut—and it was from those neighbours that Russian colonists heard the name in the seventeenth century. One word, two forms, and which one you use depends entirely on whom you asked.

The building

In plan the Yakutiye is very like the madrasas of Bukhara and Samarkand: cells around the perimeter, a great hall facing the main entrance. But there are significant departures.

First, the courtyard is roofed. Over the crossing—where the naves meet, running between the deep iwans with their improbably Gothic-looking pointed arches—there sits a dome, as in a Christian basilica, lined inside with the honeycomb vaulting called muqarnas and pierced with the smoke-hole characteristic of nomad dwellings.

The museum now housed in the building has even installed a reconstruction of a traditional Erzurum tandır house with just such a yurt-like roof.

Second, the central iwan opposite the entrance is continued by a gombad, a mausoleum in the form of a rotunda with a conical roof. It calls to mind both the pre-Ottoman Seljuk architecture of Anatolia and the domes of Armenian churches—though these conical caps seem, in fact, to arrive with the Ilkhanids, the Mongol state that occupied the south-western quarter of Genghis Khan’s fragmented empire, from eastern Anatolia to western Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

What the Mongols were good for

It is generally reckoned that history owes to the unified Mongol Empire, and to the Ilkhanate that inherited its political and commercial ties with imperial China and the other khanates, a very substantial easing of trade across the whole of Asia. (The Silk Road—remember it? It runs right through here.) And, in due course, the rise of the Safavids, and the Iran we know.

And, finally, Pushkin again

Here is a drawing by a French archaeologist showing the Yakutiye as he found it in 1840. Which means that Pushkin, who was in Erzurum only eleven years before that, could have seen something much like it.