A Castle Named After a Bowl
Last time it was İznik and its two borrowed names. Now the last of the ceramic rooms in the Tiled Kiosk, and the last town in this series: Çanakkale. The place every English speaker knows under another name entirely—Gallipoli, the Dardanelles, 1915. Before all that, it made pots.
The Bowl Inside the Name
One has to begin with the name, because in this room the name is the best exhibit in it.
Çanakkale is çanak, “bowl,” plus kale, “castle.” The fortress on the Asian shore of the strait was officially Kale-i Sultaniye, the sultan’s castle; western charts called it simply the Anatolian castle. The locals called it after the village next door, which made crockery—and the locals won. The castle is still standing; the town is named after its bowls.
England, it should be said, does exactly the same thing and thinks nothing of it. North Staffordshire is the Potteries, and one goes to Stoke-on-Trent without once reflecting that an entire conurbation is named after its kiln output.
Now for çanak itself. It is a diminutive of Old Turkic çan, “bowl, goblet”—and çan, as Nişanyan has it, was borrowed from Chinese 盞 zhan, a small cup.
Which is a joke at English expense, and the English walked into it first. China is the word this language uses for its crockery: the country stamped onto the object, so thoroughly that one can say “wash the china” without thinking of Asia at all. Turkish did the same thing a good deal earlier and rather more quietly—the Chinese cup is sitting inside çanak, invisible, and from there it climbed into the name of a castle, a strait, and a campaign.
There is a further turn of the screw. İznik, as we saw last time, was finished off by the flood of Chinese porcelain into the empire. The town that outlived İznik by two centuries and more carries a Chinese cup in its name. The porcelain came and went; the word stayed on the map.
Red Clay and a Free Hand
The wall text sets the terms at once. Çanakkale was a local ceramics centre from the late seventeenth century to the first quarter of the twentieth, and travellers who got that far in the late sixteen-hundreds already mention the local wares.
Then comes an honest list of what this production was not. The pots were for everyday use. Wall tiles were not made here at all. The clay is coarse and red, sometimes beige. Over a white slip, free brushwork under a transparent glaze, coloured or colourless.
Which is the exact inverse of İznik, working for the palace to drawings sent down from the capital. Here nobody sent anything down.
Large plates, shallow bowls, and jugs. The motifs went on freely and variously: mosques, pavilions, sailing boats, rosettes, leaves, cages, and also birds, fish, and giraffes. The colours are greenish, brownish orange, dirty yellow, and beige.
Note the yellow ring-shaped jug on the right. The Kütahya lemon of the post before last was an imported fashion, read off Indian textiles. This yellow is the town’s own: muddy, earthy, and answerable to nobody.
Here is that whole list of motifs at once: a rosette in the middle, a crescent around it, stars, sprigs running in a circle, and lattice at the rim. No subject, no symmetry—whatever came to mind went on.
A Town at the Bottom of a Dish
The nineteenth-century Çanakkale plate gets a wall text of its own, and an unexpectedly good one. The plate, says the museum, is both a functional object and a vehicle of visual narrative. The naive pictorial approach of the local workshops combines topographical elements with architecture: mosques, masjids, mansions, and features of the natural environment hold a significant place in the collective memory of the people. The fluidity of the colours and the simplicity of the form, it adds, emphasise the provincial originality of these wares. And it concludes that Çanakkale ceramics are valuable as ethnographic documents reflecting perceptions of daily life and space in the provincial art of the Ottomans.
Translated into English: the potter painted his town as he saw it. The minaret taller than life, the cypress thinner, the house with one window and one door because there was no room for more. This is not a survey map. It is what a man carries in his head when he thinks “our town.”
Birds, Fish, and a Giraffe
In the middle, a giraffe. Not the animal one expects on a Dardanelles dish, and the museum lists it quite calmly alongside the birds and the fish.
Turkish for giraffe is zürafa, from Arabic زرافة zurāfa. The same word gave Italian giraffa and from there the European names, English included. The Arabic is itself thought to be a loan from an African language: the animal arrived in the dictionaries together with the stories told about it.
Whether the potter of Çanakkale ever saw a live giraffe, one can only guess. Perhaps he simply read somewhere about the African curiosity. Or perhaps a giraffe really was shipped through the Dardanelles, and the spectacle earned itself a plate.
One Ship in the Middle of the Dish
The ships have a wall text to themselves, and it deserves repeating in full.
Ships built in and around Çanakkale came to life on ceramic plates through the creative qualities of folk art. On sixteenth-century İznik ware, ships are shown in groups, in a manner reflecting the power of the Ottoman navy; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, typically a single ship is portrayed. It generally sails to the left, and it sits at the centre of the plate.
The museum then lists the types of vessel, and this is where the philology starts. The plates often feature warships with checkerboard-patterned hulls—the pattern standing in for rows of gun ports. There are kalyon, galleons. And there are çektiri, oared galleys drawn in simple lines beneath the sailing ship and without a single figure aboard. These depictions matter, the label concludes, because they illustrate the variety of ship types.
Checkerboard in Turkish is satranç tahtası, a chessboard. And satranç travelled west without once changing its meaning.
It begins with Sanskrit चतुरङ्ग cáturaṅga: cátur, “four,” plus aṅgam, “limb, component”—“the four-part thing.” That was the army of four arms: infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots. From Sanskrit the word passed into Middle Persian as čatrang, from there into Arabic as شطرنج šaṭranc, and from Arabic into Turkish. A game named after the order of battle ended up as the Turkish word for a chequered pattern—and with that pattern a Çanakkale potter drew the side of a man-of-war. The army went back to being an army, having spent the intervening centuries as a board game.
Kalyon came a long way too: from Venetian galión or Spanish galeón, and those from Medieval Greek γαλέα, “galley,” which goes back to Ancient Greek γαλεός. A γαλεός is a dogfish. The ship is named after a fish, and on Çanakkale plates it sails about in the company of real ones.
The Ship That Nearly Vanished
I stood in front of this one for some time. At first there appears to be no subject at all: a few strokes across the green glaze, a row of teeth at the rim, and that is the lot. Then the eye assembles it, and it is a ship again. The long horizontal at the bottom is the hull; the diagonals running up and to the right are rigging; the chequered rectangle on the right is a sail or a flag; and the whole thing heels to port, because a ship on a Çanakkale plate, as the wall text has just taught us, sails to the left.
Only by this date nobody was taking any trouble over it. Between the plate with its careful gun ports and this bowl lies a century of copying one subject, and what survived the century is the gesture: the hand knows where to take the brush, and what precisely it is drawing has stopped mattering. The museum dates the piece to the second half of the nineteenth century—the late period of which the label says, with some candour, that the forms are rough and the quality low.
I would dispute that. A detailed ship with gun ports and anchors is craft. This is very nearly painting, albeit by accident: a ship reduced to a few strokes and still recognisable. Abstraction was half a century off, and here it arrived early, out of sheer poverty.
When It All Went to Pieces
From the second half of the nineteenth century comes the late period, and the wall text describes it with the same bluntness it used last time on the end of İznik: rough forms, low quality.
The range, on the other hand, is something to behold. Barbecue grills, candlesticks, hookahs, flasks, vases, figurines of people and animals, and vessels with stylised bird or horse heads and winged necks. Rosette wreaths were modelled separately and applied on top—a technique the museum calls by its French name, barbutin, from barbotine, and that from the verb barboter, “to paddle about, to stir up mud.” Jugs with ring-shaped bodies were made as well: the yellow one from the first case.
A separate label explains what had happened. These vessels are examples of a distinctive production of the late nineteenth century, in which folk art intertwined with European baroque. The decoration on the body offers not only visual but tactile richness: the thick glaze enhances the volume of the applied motifs. The piece, says the museum, is a successful example of local craftsmanship enriched by European influences, reflecting an effort to bring aesthetics into everyday life through humour, symbolism, and ornamentation.
Humour is a rare word on a museum label, and here it is used deliberately and correctly. Look at the horse. This is no noble charger and no heraldic griffin; this is a horse to whom, on the whole, it is all one. The museum remarks in the same room that late Çanakkale ceramics display “an exaggerated sense of form and a sculptural style.” Exaggerated is the word.
A Souvenir for the Mantelpiece
And who, precisely, were these winged horses being made for?
Çanakkale sits on a strait that nobody gets past. From the middle of the nineteenth century foreigners began buying the local wares—not for the kitchen but as keepsakes: the steamer lies off the shore, and the shop is selling something unaccountable and cheap. Ottoman household crockery turned into a travelling souvenir, and the souvenir turned into a museum piece: Çanakkale ware entered the Musée national de céramique at Sèvres, the Victoria and Albert, and the Benaki in Athens. In the twentieth century the fashion died away, and it was private collectors who kept buying; the best holdings today carry their names.
Hence the paradox of the whole room. The early plates, the ones the museum praises, were made to eat off and were accordingly broken. The late ones, of which the label says “rough forms, low quality,” were made to sell to people passing through: nobody used them, they went onto a shelf, and they are the ones that reached the case intact. Quality did for the first lot; uselessness saved the second.
The Tradition Continues
The wall text ends on a sentence İznik never got: the ceramic tradition of the region continues to this day.
Which is, in the end, what one takes away from the room. İznik made the finest things in the empire and died. Kütahya made things for everybody and survived. Çanakkale made them roughly, cheerfully, and for its own—and not only survived, but handed the name of its trade to a castle, to a strait, and to everything that later happened in that strait.
One small room of the Tiled Kiosk is left—not ceramics this time, but the pavilion’s own decoration. That next.
