Cat on a Hot Tile
Last time I promised to get round to the collections, so let us begin with the Tiled Kiosk, freshly emerged from three years of restoration. And let us begin not with the Ottomans but with their predecessors—the Seljuks.
The Other Seljuks
The Seljuks arrived in Iran from Central Asia in the eleventh century and with commendable speed assembled an empire stretching from the Amu Darya to the Mediterranean. After Manzikert in 1071 they moved into Anatolia, where one branch of the family founded the Sultanate of Rum—Rum because the land had been Roman, which is to say Byzantine, and nobody saw any reason to update the name. The Great Seljuks of Iran were finished by the twelfth century; their Anatolian cousins held on until the early fourteenth, when the Mongols finally sat on them.
The gallery text candidly admits that the Seljuks did not invent ceramics. The art came with them from Iran and Mesopotamia, and in Anatolia absorbed Byzantine traditions as well. What the Seljuks did was raise it to a level that gave the Ottomans something worth building on. Nor was pottery the only thing these Oghuz Turks carried out of the Iranian world: chancery, scholarship and architecture came too, as we saw in Erzurum with its kümbets.
Seven Colours and Two Firings
The first case is devoted to mina’i ware. The name is Persian: mīnā means “enamel, glaze,” and mīnāʾī “enamelled.” Turks still call enamel mine, and Georgians keep the word in minankari, their name for cloisonné enamel—“enamel work,” built, as we have already discovered, on the same pattern as the Turkish filigree telkari. Georgian craftsmen made it famous as early as the Middle Ages: witness the enamels of the Khakhuli triptych.
The secret lies in the two firings. First blue, purple, green and turquoise are applied under the glaze and fired. Then yellow, red, black, white and sometimes gold are painted over the glaze, and the piece goes back into the kiln at a lower temperature so as not to spoil the layer beneath. The result is pottery painted very nearly like a book miniature, and priced accordingly. The chief centre of production was Kashan in Iran, and after the Mongol invasions of the 1220s the technique all but vanished—the Mongols, whatever their other accomplishments, were not great patrons of the decorative arts.
On this pitcher two horsemen ride towards each other. Fine kaftans, harness, birds at the shoulder: the museum sees a courtly hunt or festivity here, and reads the Kufic band round the neck as good wishes. The bird perched behind the rider is the çakırdoğan motif, well known from the ceramics of Iran and Khorasan.
In the centre of this turquoise bowl sits a portly, bearded rider; around him, three more, with triangular pennants in between. Who is riding where is not entirely clear, but it all looks tremendously important.
A Rooster Among Jugs
My personal favourite is the jug with a rooster’s head. Its body is double-walled: the inner vessel holds the liquid, while the outer shell is pierced with openwork in which beasts and birds frolic. A piece strictly for show—drinking from a rooster, one suspects, was never a comfortable experience.
Its neighbour has acquired a horned head in place of a spout. Bull or ram, the label declines to say, so I leave the question to the reader.
A Shaman in a Green Bowl
The green bowl with its incised figure is an altogether different matter. The little man wears a radiant or perhaps feathered headdress and holds a branch in his right hand and a large-beaked bird in his left. The museum sees a shaman with the Tree of Life and a totemic bird—a rare record of pre-Islamic Central Asian beliefs surviving in folk culture well into the Islamic period. Plausible enough: the Turks had not been Muslim for very long, and old gods rarely leave without a fuss. Recall the bull, snake and eagle in the niches of Emir Saltuk’s kümbet, so suspiciously like signs of the Central Asian animal calendar. I would only add that the artist was plainly no court painter: with the mina’i ware a few feet away, this is very nearly a child’s drawing. Which is exactly its charm.
A Palace by the Lake
The jewels of the gallery are the tiles from Kubadabad, the summer palace Sultan Kayqubad I built in the 1230s on the shore of Lake Beyşehir. Only the foundations survive, but excavation turned up hundreds of tiles, and what tiles! Eight-pointed stars alternated with crosses on the walls, and on the stars were birds, peacocks, lions, dogs, horsemen and courtiers. The Islamic prohibition on depicting living creatures does not seem to have troubled the Seljuk sultans unduly—at least not in the privacy of their own apartments.
The palace’s name is Persian too: Qubādābād, “the town of Qubad.” The suffix -ābād, “inhabited place,” will be familiar to anyone who has looked at a map of Ashgabat, Islamabad or Hyderabad.
Cat on a Hot Tile
The gallery’s second technique is lustre. Here the design is painted onto an already glazed, matt white surface with a mixture containing silver, copper and metal oxides, and fired again at a low temperature. The metal settles into an extremely thin film, and the piece begins to shimmer. Lustre was invented in the ninth century in the Abbasid Caliphate, and Iran and the Seljuks took it up with enthusiasm.
The Turkish name for the technique comes in two versions: lüster and perdah. The first is the English lustre, arriving via French from Italian lustro, “sheen,” and ultimately from Latin lustrare, “to illuminate.” The second is Persian pardākht, “polishing, finishing,” and Turks still use perdah for putting a gloss on anything at all, from furniture to a freshly shaved cheek.
And here is our title character: a spotted cat strolling past a sun with a human eye. The label assures us that this is a panther embodying the ruler, who moves “silently yet with eternal authority” across his lands. I cannot help thinking of the Lion and Sun, which appears on Seljuk coins and would later become the emblem of Iran. The spots, admittedly, suggest this particular beast has some growing to do before it makes lion.
Most lustre tiles are star-shaped as well, but more ingenious forms turn up among them, like this one with a hare among flowers.
Beyond the Glaze
The last case holds plain unglazed pottery: a lid with a horseman in relief, a pigeon-shaped vessel from Tell Halaf in Syria, a flask from Diyarbakır. Humbler, but closer to life—these were the vessels drunk from not by sultans but by everybody else.
And a small reward for the attentive. On several labels the English text gives the origin not as Unknown Provenance but as Unknown Providence. Considering how some museum pieces came to be in museums at all, it seems, if anything, rather honest.
