Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [22]
“Turkish Delights” was published in 1966, when an exhibit entitled Art Treasures of Turkey toured ten American cities. The exhibit was arranged by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service after years of negotiations with the Turkish government. Many of the loans were from the Topkapı Palace and included works from the Late Stone Age and the Hittite, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk Turkish, and Ottoman periods. A caption in the original Horizon piece referenced a companion book entitled Treasures of Turkey, by Swiss publisher Skira. I was curious to see if the book was still available, and a search on Abebooks.com revealed it was—and it’s a gorgeous book: an oversize cloth-bound hardcover, 254 pages, with color and black-and-white inlay illustrations. Scholars from three nations, including Richard Ettinghausen, an American authority on Turkish art, collaborated on the text. Like Horizon, it’s the kind of book no one would dare to publish these days because it would be prohibitively expensive.
NORMAN KOTKER contributed a number of pieces to Horizon as well as to other newspapers and magazines, including Military History Quarterly. He was also the author of The Earthly Jerusalem (Scribner, 1969) and two other novels. He passed away in 1999.
IT IS against the law of Islam for anyone to paint a portrait. On the Day of Judgment, the prophet Mohammed is reported to have said, painters will be doomed to hell for their blasphemous attempts to compete with God by creating life. If the religious laws were practiced as much as they were preached, Moslem artists would never have represented any living thing. Yet the Moslems did develop splendid schools of portraiture and historical painting, for they have been no more noted for strict obedience to religious laws than members of other faiths have been. Over the centuries Islamic artists have painted pictures of dervishes, sultans, and saints, subjects from the Koran, the Bible, and Arab and Persian legends, and vignettes of everyday life, from women in childbirth to street sweepers at work. Palace walls were decorated with hunting scenes, or portraits of conquered kings, or dancing girls, and, in one case, even a representation of a Christian church, complete with praying monks. The Ottoman sultans of Turkey were in the forefront of Islamic society in their patronage of art, commissioning numerous portraits of themselves, their favorites, and their families. But this work was, often as not, done in secret, to keep the sultan’s subjects from discovering that he was breaking the religious law. Despite the secrecy, the Ottoman style of portraiture and miniature painting evolved into a distinctive and sophisticated art form, as splendid in its own way as Ottoman architecture, which is seen in so many beautiful mosques throughout Turkey and is usually considered the noblest accomplishment of Turkish art.
It was not until the eleventh century AD that the Turks themselves began migrating into the country. Their original home was in central Asia, where they were nomadic horsemen roaming the steppes. Even in that quarter of the world—seemingly so remote—the Turks were subject to the influence of the great centers of world civilization. Caravans made their way across the vast Asiatic plains, bringing Greek and Roman coins, silverwork and goldwork from Persia, and paintings and silks from China. At the same time, the Turks ranged widely over the steppes; remains of their own ancient art—showing these strong and varied foreign influences—are found throughout regions of Asiatic Russia, in Outer Mongolia and Afghanistan, and in the part of China that today is called Sinkiang, although it was formerly known as Eastern Turkestan.
By the end of the seventh century the Turkish tribesmen were in contact with the Arabs, whose armies had penetrated as far as the Turkish towns of Bukhara and Samarkand. The Arabs found the Turks to be formidable warriors, and soon the palace