Not Made in Damascus
Last time we went through the Kütahya crockery and the words hiding inside it. But before Kütahya came to rule Ottoman ceramics there was İznik, to which the Tiled Kiosk devotes three small cases. For the most famous name in Turkish pottery that is meagre provision; on the other hand, the three cases contain two mistakes that nobody has any intention of correcting.
A City with a Preposition for a Name
Begin with the name itself. İznik is the Greek εἰς Νίκαιαν, “to Nicaea”: what the Turks heard was not the name of the city but the phrase in which people said they were going there. İstanbul is put together the same way, from εἰς τὴν πόλιν, “to the city,” and so is İzmir, from εἰς Σμύρνην. Three of the largest cities in western Anatolia are named after a Greek preposition.
And Nicaea is that Nicaea: the council of 325, and the Creed still recited at Mass on Sundays. In 2025 the Creed turned seventeen hundred, and at the end of November Pope Leo XIV came to İznik to hold an ecumenical service with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew among the excavations of the basilica of Saint Neophytos, under the motto “One Lord, one faith, one baptism.”
İznik passed into Ottoman hands in 1331, and from the mid-fourteenth century to the late seventeenth it was, the wall text says, the leading centre of pottery and tile production in the whole of Anatolia. The city that gave Christianity its central text spent four hundred years supplying tiles for mosques.
The First Mistake: Miletus
İznik ware is divided into two groups by the colour of the body, red and white.
The red is the earlier, fourteenth and fifteenth century, made for everyday use and decorated in three techniques: incising, slip, and the one known as Milet işi, “Miletus ware.” The museum displays it as folk art, which it is.
And here is the first mistake: the ware has nothing whatever to do with Miletus. The name stuck in the early twentieth century, when similar sherds turned up in the excavations there, and it has held ever since, in the teeth of everybody knowing perfectly well that the stuff was made in İznik.
Miletus, mind you, is no minor town. Thales came from there, and Anaximander, and Anaximenes—the whole Ionian school, and with it the habit of asking what the world is made of. So one Greek colony lent its name to the pottery of another Greek city, which the Turks had meanwhile renamed after a preposition.
Blue and White
From the late fifteenth century came the hard white body, and it was this that made İznik’s name. Blue under a clear glaze; mosque lamps, dishes, ewers, and cups inscribed with names, Quranic verses, hadiths, and prayers. The wall text calls these the finest things produced in the entire Ottoman period, and one is disinclined to argue.
The pitcher in the middle of the case was found at Yenikapı—the same Yenikapı where the Marmaray excavations turned up the Byzantine harbour of Theodosius. A mid-sixteenth-century İznik pitcher was lying in the same ground as ships eight centuries older.
This one comes from the neighbouring case and from a different Istanbul hole in the ground: it turned up during a foundation excavation beside the Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha Medrese at Çarşıkapı. Two pitchers, two building sites, one city. Istanbul gives up İznik ware every time somebody puts a spade into it.
Look closely at the body. Along curving lines that stand for hills sit buildings with domes and crenellations. The same buildings, the wall text observes, appear in the work of Matrakçı Nasuh, the miniaturist of Süleyman the Magnificent’s reign, in his depictions of the holy places around Baghdad. The İznik potter, in other words, was working neither from life nor from imagination, but from the same pictorial formula as the court painter: a hill, a dome, a battlement—and there is your sacred site.
The painter’s byname is worth a detour. Matrakçı means a player of matrak, a mock combat fought with clubs, and matrak itself is Arabic مطراق miṭrāq, “mallet, beetle,” from طرق ṭaraqa, “to strike, to beat.” Modern Turkish has taken the word a considerable distance: matrak now means “amusing,” and matrak geçmek is to pull somebody’s leg. A man called Cudgel, who in today’s Turkish would be called Funny, painted the shrines of Baghdad—and his buildings went out on the crockery.
A band of inscription runs round the neck and turns, at the top, into flowers resembling palmettes. Letters becoming ornament: half of Ottoman decoration rests on that move.
The Second Mistake: Damascus
From the middle of the sixteenth century sage green and purple joined the blue and turquoise for the first time. Enormous plant forms broke out across the dishes and bowls: artichokes on stems thick enough to pass for tree trunks, and large pomegranates, which had not been seen before.
This group was christened Şam İşi, “Damascus ware,” on the strength of its resemblance to tiles made in Damascus. It was, of course, made in İznik. The wall text says as much—“mistakenly referred to”—and goes on referring to it that way.
Damascus is generous with its name. Damask is the figured cloth; damascened steel is the blade; and the damson is a shortened prunum damascenum, the plum of Damascus. A city that traded in everything ended up lending its name to fabrics, sword blades, plums, and—as it turns out—İznik bowls.
Coral Red
The signature of the sixteenth century is the coral red, laid under the clear glaze in a slightly raised layer. You can see it and very nearly feel it: the colour stands a fraction proud of the surface.
The wall text attributes this to the influence of the Saray Nakkaşhanesi, the palace studio of designers. Nakkaş, “decorator, ornamentalist,” is Arabic, from naqš, “pattern”; -hane is Persian for “house.” The house of pattern-makers. Which is to say that the designs the İznik potters worked from were drawn in the capital, and the tiles let you follow the fashions of the court.
From the 1550s, and for about thirty years, another technique came in: coloured slip, in which a ground painted coral, terracotta red, or purple-blue served as the background, with naturalistic flowers laid over it, often in raised fillings. The plate in the middle of the case is one of those—pale blue ground, white carnations.
The cup on the right was found at Silivri; the jug body at the Selimiye in Edirne, Sinan’s mosque. İznik ware travelled the length of the empire, and archaeology picks it up wherever it happens to fall.
Grapes, Bitter Oranges, Pomegranates
This panel is my favourite thing in the İznik cases. A tree hung with round orange fruit, which the museum takes for bitter oranges, with carnations and buds at its foot. Look at the edges: the motifs break off mid-word, so the composition ran on beyond them. What we have is a piece of a wall, not a finished picture.
The label adds an observation worth having. The fruit on İznik tiles runs to three sorts only: grapes, bitter oranges, and pomegranates. They arrived under Far Eastern influence, first on the blue-and-white ware, and spread onto tiles in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. And from the Tulip Era onward fruit leaves the crockery for public fountains, gravestones, and painted walls.
The Bucket and the Band
Since the Tulip Era has come up: the tulip reached European languages from Turkish, and reached them by mistake. The Turks call the flower lale. Europeans named it after the turban its bud resembles: Ottoman tülbent, “muslin, turban,” from Persian dūlband. Hence Dutch and German tulpe, French tulipe, and English tulip.
Dūlband comes apart into two pieces, and both are worth having. The second, band, “binding,” goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root that gave English bind, band, and bandage, and German Binde. The first, dōl, means “bucket, wheel”—the word sitting inside Persian dōl-āb, the “water wheel,” from which Turkish dolap, a wardrobe, descends. And behind that stands Akkadian dalū, “bucket,” which is what the Babylonians called the constellation we call Aquarius, the Water Carrier.
So the tulip, the wardrobe, the bandage, and Aquarius are distant relations, and the whole family rests on a bucket.
This has a by-product worth a term of its own. Doublets are words that go back in one language to a single source but arrived by different roads, and consequently fail to recognise each other. Tulip and turban are exactly such a pair: both from Persian dūlband, the one arriving by way of the Dutch and the French, the other by way of Italian turbante and French turban. English has a still better specimen in cipher and zero—both from Arabic ṣifr, “nothing,” and you would never guess it.
We have met doublets in this blog before without calling them by name. In the first post of this series the Persians, having lost their own kōšk, borrowed it back from French as kiyosk—a doublet of their own word. And last time we were handed a full triplet: sherbet, sorbet, and syrup, three forms of one Arabic root that went to three different tables.
The End
İznik ended badly, and the wall text describes it with unusual candour. Europe took an interest in İznik ware, production turned towards export, Europe then learnt to imitate it, the economy worsened, palace orders dried up, and Chinese porcelain poured in. By the end of the sixteenth century output was falling; by the eighteenth it had stopped entirely.
There was a rescue attempt. The Grand Vizier Nevşehirli Damat İbrahim Pasha gathered the surviving craftsmen and moved them to Istanbul, to the Tekfur Palace, where he set up a tile workshop. There were too few of them left.
The palace, which English guidebooks are as likely to call the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus, takes its Turkish name from Armenian: tekfur is թագավոր, takavor, “king.” It is what the Ottomans called the Byzantine lords, and the building in the Theodosian wall was named after its former occupants.
It, too, has reopened after restoration, and what it shows is precisely what the İznik masters managed to make in their new quarters. We got there; the post about it I never managed. Perhaps I shall yet make amends.
İznik’s place was taken by Kütahya, which worked not for the palace but for everybody else—and is alive today for that very reason.
So three small cases hold a whole plot. A Greek city with a Turkish preposition for a name. Pottery named after somebody else’s colony, and more pottery named after somebody else’s capital. And a flower named after a headdress, which then stopped recognising its own relation. Some things are called by the wrong name; some words refuse to acknowledge their own family. Both hold fast.
