Sherbet, Julep, and Hand Grenade
Last time we worked out where Kütahya’s lemon yellow came from. Now to the neighbouring cases, which hold objects whose purpose is not always obvious at a glance—and where, once you have worked out the purpose, it turns out there is rather more hidden in the name than in the thing itself.
A Well-Travelled Cup
We begin with the most innocent-looking object in the room. The Ottoman coffee cup, the fincan, had no handle, and the coffee went into it hot, so one held not the cup but its stand. But first the cup, whose history is the better story.
Turkish fincan comes from Arabic fincān فنجان, “bowl, basin,” and that from Persian pingān پنگان, meaning the same. The initial Persian p became an Arabic f for the simple reason that Arabic has no p to put there.
From there the word went off round the neighbourhood with some energy: Albanian filxhan, Balkan findžan and fildžan, Hungarian findzsa, Romanian filigean. And from Romanian, in the eighteenth century, it passed straight into Polish, Ukrainian, and Belarusian, where it settled as filiżanka. A Persian bowl reached Warsaw by way of Istanbul and Bucharest, picking up a diminutive on the road.
There was also a change of object. In Hebrew the word attached itself to the wrong vessel: finjan in Arabic and Turkish is the cup, but in Israel it came to mean the cezve, the long-handled pot the coffee is brewed in. The blame lies with the early settlers, who were invited by their Arab neighbours to come and drink a finjan of coffee and concluded that the finjan must be the thing on the fire.
Zarf, Envelope, Adverb
Now the stand. The zarf was made in metal, in bone, and occasionally, as in this case, in pottery.
Zarf is Arabic for “vessel, container.” Which is where it becomes interesting, because in Turkish the same word also means “envelope”—a container for a letter. And in grammar, zarf is an adverb: a circumstance, a container for the action. One Arabic word, to be found in the kitchen dresser, the letter rack, and the grammar shelf.
The pair above is not from a museum; we brought it back from Sarajevo, from one of the old shops. Note where it was bought. In Sarajevo they drink bosanska kahva, Bosnian coffee, and in Belgrade they will offer you domaća kafa, “home-style coffee”—but the fildžan is the fildžan in both.
Squeezing a Lemon in Arabic
The object on the left is a lemon squeezer, limon sıkacağı. The design is precisely the one in your kitchen drawer: a cone in the middle, a gutter round the rim. Empires come and go; there remains only one sensible way to squeeze a lemon.
The lemon itself came west with its name: from the Malay archipelago to India, from India to Persia as لِیمُو (līmū), then into Arabic as laymūn, and from Arabic into Italian as limone—whence the rest of Europe, English included. In Türkiye it is a loanword too, though Turkish cooking without it is unimaginable.
Look at the spout of the ewer: it is cut through in openwork. The wall text explains that the piercing is not merely decorative—what was poured was strained through it, and it played with light and shadow into the bargain. The museum says outright that in these pieces usefulness and beauty stand on equal terms.
Rose, Water, and the Rest
The vessel with the narrow neck and the round belly is a gülabdan, for rosewater, which was sprinkled over guests. The custom survives as the cologne—lemon, usually—handed round for the washing of hands, as anyone who has taken a long-distance Turkish coach will remember.
The word is Persian and comes apart like a construction kit: gul “rose” plus āb “water” gives gulāb, “rosewater,” plus the suffix -dān, “container for.”
And each part is hiding in a word you already know. Āb is the Punjab, panj-āb, “five waters,” the land of the five rivers. As for gulāb, it went into Arabic as julāb, and thence through the Romance languages into English as julep. The mint julep of the Kentucky Derby—bourbon, crushed ice, and a silver cup—is a Persian rose garden with the roses taken out. The -dān we shall come to shortly; it is worth the wait.
The same object from the sultan’s treasury: gold, painted enamel, applied gold garlands, and a rosebud for a stopper. The same thing, the same purpose, the same rose—and the whole distance between a Kütahya workshop and a palace jeweller.
The enamel, incidentally, is mina, the word the Seljuk ceramics post opened with. It has travelled from clay to gold without changing.
One further observation. In Tunisia the same little flask comes with the coffee, but what is in it is jasmine water rather than rose. The shops sell rose, and orange-flower, and even geranium; the coffee, however, invariably arrives with jasmine. The vessel goes on being called a rose-thing all the same. The name has outlived its contents.
Everything Ending in -dAn
The Persian suffix -dān is exceedingly productive: it attaches to more or less anything and means “the thing you keep it in.” Şamdan, the candleholder, takes its first part from Arabic šamʿ, “wax, candle.”
For jāma, “garment,” English speakers need look no further than their own wardrobes: Persian pāy-jāma, “leg-garment,” is where pyjamas come from. Put the same jāma with -dān and you get jāmadān, a garment-container—which travelled through Turkic into Russian and became chemodan, the ordinary Russian word for a suitcase. Pyjamas and suitcase, cousins at last.
And here is my favourite object in the room. It looks exactly like a teacup with a handle, painted with flowers. The label calls it a tütsü kabı, an incense container. Aromatic resins smouldered in it; it has never seen tea in its life. Tütsü comes from the verb tütmek, “to smoke,” a relation of tütün, “tobacco.”
Six round wells in a single block: a baharatlık, a spice holder. Here the suffix is Turkish, -lık, but the principle is the same. Baharat is Arabic for “spices,” the plural of bahār, “aromatic plant; a plant that flowers after rain in the desert.” That Arabic word is probably Persian in origin: the bahār that means “spring,” and that goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root behind Latin ver and English vernal.
There is a certain meteorological sense in the connection: spices are what has greened and flowered. And since in Türkiye things green not only after the winter cold but after the summer drought, autumn acquired a second name. Beside the native güz there appeared sonbahar, “the last spring”—spring proper being ilkbahar, “the first.”
A Strainer for Sherbet
A bowl with a lid, a spout, and a row of small holes at the base of the spout: a kapaklı şerbet süzgeci, a covered sherbet strainer. Sherbet was made with fruit and petals, and straining it before serving was a point of honour.
Şerbet comes from the Arabic root š-r-b, “to drink.” So does şurup, syrup, and so does the European sorbet. Sherbet, sorbet, and syrup are three forms of one Arabic verb that went their separate ways and ended up on different tables—and, in the English case, in different centuries of the same dictionary.
Holy Water in a Muslim City
A wall basin with a shaped back and a loop for hanging: a kutsal su kabı, a holy water container. These hung by the door of a church.
Which follows directly from the last post: a great many of the Kütahya potters were Armenians, and they worked for the church as well as for everyone else. The seraphim on the hanging ornaments, the gates beneath a cross, and now this basin—an entirely ordinary piece of church housekeeping, made in an Anatolian town by the same hands that painted the coffee cups.
The Money Box and the Grenade
And last, a small ceramic chest of drawers on a foot, with three drawers and a long narrow slot in the top. The museum calls it exceptionally rare in form and notes that the floral motifs show Kütahya’s reading of Chinese porcelain and European ceramics. It then adds a sentence one does not often meet on a museum label: combining beauty with utility, the money box became “a playful object for children and household members.”
Turkish kumbara means “money box.” It also means “bomb, grenade.” Which is to say: a vessel you have to break to get at the contents, and a vessel that breaks of its own accord. One word for both, and the logic of it is impeccable.
The word is usually traced to Persian khumbāra, from khumb, “pot”—a clay pot filled with gunpowder being, as etymologies of ordnance go, entirely self-explanatory.
So the room is craftier than it looks. You stand in front of a shelf of crockery and find an envelope, an adverb, a suitcase, some tobacco, a syrup, and a hand grenade.
