A Lemon from Malabar
We are still in the Tiled Kiosk. Last time it was İznik, with its two borrowed names; now to the town that took its place.
When İznik came to its sorry end, the field passed to Kütahya, a town in western Anatolia where the rich clay beds had kept potters busy since time out of mind. The difference between the two towns proved decisive. İznik worked for the palace: imperial commissions, mosques, vast consignments of tiles made to drawings sent down from the capital. Kütahya worked for everybody else. When the court orders dried up, it simply carried on doing what it had always done—making pots for people. Which is why İznik is in museums today and Kütahya is still in the shops.
Where the Yellow Came From
And here is what kept me in the room. In the first half of the eighteenth century the Kütahya workshops began turning out fine, elegant wares, white or cream-bodied under a clear glaze. And on them appeared a colour Ottoman ceramics had never seen before: a bright lemon yellow.
Where did it come from? The wall text answers with admirable directness: Armenian cloth merchants were bringing textiles into Kütahya from the western coasts of India, and the potters set about imitating their colours and patterns. Hence the lemon yellow, the earth red, and the sawtooth-edged medallions framing stylised flowers.
The yellow on these pots is Indian chintz—or rather its reflection. The cloth came by caravan from the Malabar coast through Persia; the colour the Kütahya potters worked out for themselves, on their own clay.
The same case holds cups, cup holders, sugar bowls, ewers, and rosewater flasks. But those objects, and the question of what on earth they were for, deserve a post of their own—half the room consists of things whose purpose no one could guess at first sight.
Girl in the Garden
A genre of its own is the kızlı tabak, the plate with a female figure, made from the middle of the seventeenth century onward. The museum maintains that one can study Ottoman fashion by them: the young woman wears a cepken or a long kaftan over shalwar trousers of selimiye, the fashionable cloth of the day, with a flower tucked into her tall headdress and a garden all about her. The English label calls them Girl-in-the-Garden plates.
On the first plate, note the yellow kaftan—our lemon—and the red flowers with their earthy cast. It is the same Indian cloth, now worn by a lady painted on a dish.
And here is the second. Everything is according to the canon: black cepken, green skirt, blue headdress with its flower, plaits to the waist, flowering branches to either side. Only the lady regards the visitor with an expression that can best be rendered as “well, what did you expect?” The plate is the better for it.
After the proclamation of the Republic such plates became a prized part of a bride’s trousseau, packed into her chest. An object we look at through glass as archaeology was, a century ago, travelling to a new house with its young mistress.
The Label Passes Sentence
From the second half of the eighteenth century the decline set in, and the wall text describes it with a bluntness rare in museums. Analysis showed that not only the quality changed but the composition: the body, initially very fine, thickened steadily over the course of a century. Traditional Turkish motifs came to dominate, but the ware, as the museum puts it, confined itself to poor imitations of the “Damascus style”—so called, as we saw, by mistake.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century Kütahya had declined altogether, and in the last quarter of it revived. In the early years of the Republic the state took the craft under its wing. Today the town is full of workshops turning out both everyday pots and things to give as presents.
Seraphim Among the Flowers
And here begins the best part, which the wall text approaches sidelong. Listing the motifs of Kütahya ware, the museum mentions depictions of the Kaaba, stylised leaves, drops, vines, radial lines, and animal figures. And then, in the same level enumerating tone: the Virgin Mary, Jesus, saints, seraphim, crosses, and scenes from the Bible and the Torah.
The explanation is simple. A great many of the Kütahya potters were Armenians, and they worked, among other commissions, for the church. On this tile are the gates beneath a cross, between two drawn curtains.
These are askı top, hanging ornaments, suspended on chains in a church and painted with angelic faces among green wings. Beside them a cup with the same faces—the same workshop, the same hand, only domestic.
The Jerusalem Thread
The story has a sequel a long way from Anatolia, and a remarkable one.
In 1919 Sir Ronald Storrs, the first British Military Governor of Jerusalem, conceived a plan to retile the Dome of the Rock, whose Süleymanic tiles had been shedding for some time. Storrs was a man of formidable cultivation—he founded the Pro-Jerusalem Society, played Schubert, and read his Dante in the original—and the notion of rescuing a monument by importing a craft appealed to him exactly. Craftsmen of that kind were not to be had in Palestine; but there was David Ohannessian, a ceramicist from Kütahya who had reached Jerusalem after the genocide. He was asked to assemble a team, and that autumn the painter Mgrditch Karakashian and the potter Neshan Balian joined him.
The project was in the end abandoned: the money was not found, and politically it proved altogether too delicate. The craftsmen, however, stayed. In 1922 Karakashian and Balian opened a workshop on the Nablus Road, and from it grew the Armenian ceramics of Jerusalem, which continue to this day.
From the same source came the ceramic street signs of the Old City that every tourist now photographs. What followed is instructive. Storrs ordered them trilingual: English at the top, Arabic in the middle, Hebrew at the bottom. Under Jordanian rule Arabic moved to the top and English was removed altogether. After the Six-Day War the Israelis restored the Hebrew. Not long ago the municipality remade the signs again, putting Hebrew first.
A craft that survived in three men became the face of a city not its own—and, incidentally, that city’s way of keeping count of which languages it speaks.
So a good deal has come together on these pots: Indian chintz, Armenian merchants, Armenian potters, seraphim, and a bride’s trousseau. Next time we shall work out what all those baffling objects in the next case are for, from the money box to the sherbet strainer.
