Flowers of Sorrow
To continue with the exhibitions. Another that we saw at the art museum in Erzurum was Flowers of Sorrow, by the painter Zeliha Bazoğlu. The pictures are of children—children living, as the artist puts it, in difficult circumstances, and looking at the world all the same with their eyes wide open.
The distinctive feature of the technique is appliqué: pieces of cloth worked in traditional cross-stitch and lace, laid onto the painted surface. The raised fabric on the flat canvas produces the effect of an icon in its riza—the metal cover that leaves only the face and hands exposed—except that this revetment is not beaten but sewn.
The artist says her inspiration was an inherited chest: her great-grandmother’s dowry chest, carried out of Thessaloniki by her family during the Greek–Turkish population exchange of 1923—the same upheaval that emptied the Black Sea coast of its Greeks and left their dance behind.
The title is a quotation rather than a description—the scarf here is closer to coral than to scarlet. Selvi Boylum, Al Yazmalım is one of the best-loved Turkish films ever made (1977, directed by Atıf Yılmaz), taken from a novella by the Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov, and known in English as The Girl with the Red Scarf. In Türkiye the phrase now belongs to everybody, rather as “girl with a pearl earring” does elsewhere.
On the title Nar-ı Beyza
I am not certain how this one should be translated, and the uncertainty is the interesting part.
Literally, in its correct Ottoman spelling Nâr-ı Beyzâ, it means “white fire”—fire above about 1,800 °C, the incandescence attributed in the Arabic scientific tradition to the stars and to the earth’s core, and, by extension, the fire that burns in hell. I can see no connection whatever between that and the painting.
One dictionary of Ottoman gives the phrase a second sense: a verse of the Quran recited or carried on the person as a plea to God for protection. That feels rather closer to the image.
And finally: the absence of the circumflex over the a. Dropping it is entirely normal in modern Turkish, but here it may be doing some work, because nar without the circumflex means pomegranate—which is, sure enough, what we are looking at in the picture.
So the title may be reading three ways at once: white fire, a written charm against harm, and a pomegranate. Which for a painting of a child in difficult circumstances, dressed in her great-grandmother’s embroidery, is not a bad set of meanings to hold simultaneously.
