Page 242 - The Age of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent

and by Greek churches and monasteries, including those in clined, and iznik potters started mass-producing wares for do-
Istanbul and Mount Athos. 35 mestic use and for export. Evliya Çelebi commented on this
Over the centuries Europeans purchased large quantities of sad state of affairs and mentioned that in the mid-seven-
iznik ceramics, which are now housed in public and private teenth century iznik had only nine workshops in contrast to
36
collections in various countries. The value attached to Turk- around three hundred at the beginning of the century.
ish ceramics is attested to by the metal mounts added to Although iznik was the site of the royal kilns in the six-
some of these pieces, frequently in an effort to restore broken teenth century, ceramics were also produced in other centers.
spouts, handles, and rims. 37 Objects were also commissioned The potters who made the tiles of the Dome of the Rock in
by foreign diplomats, including a series of plates decorated Jerusalem worked on location and moved to Damascus after
with the coat of arms of the Mocenigo family of Venice. 38 their project was completed, thus helping to reestablish the
Items commissioned by the Europeans caused concern in the Syrian industry, which had stopped production after the mid-
palace, as they forestalled the delivery of the tiles needed for fifteenth century. Their first commission was the decoration
the imperial buildings. Fermans issued in the late sixteenth of the Süleymaniye Complex in Damascus, which was com-
century attempted to curtail the production of wares for for- pleted in 1554. The tiles of this edifice reflect the provincial
eigners and ordered the potters to work on the tiles required applications of the nakka^hane themes and employ blue, tur-
by the court. 39 Prices fixed by the state had forced the potters quoise, black, purple, green, and a weak pink under a crack-
to seek other markets and take on outside commissions, led glaze, the workers being unable to duplicate the brilliant
which were far more profitable. red and superior glaze of iznik. 41 A similar provincial produc-
Price-fixing is usually given as the cause for the decline of tion is seen in Diyarbakir, where the local potters were also
Iznik workshops in the seventeenth century. 40 However, the unable to produce the bright red. 42 Kütahya, a flourishing
construction of imperial compounds had also diminished and pottery center today, was also active in the sixteenth century
the demand for tiles was greatly reduced, iznik's primary and is thought to have produced at least one vessel—the bro-
function was to provide tiles to decorate both the religious ken bottle dated 1529—for the Armenian monastery in An-
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complexes and the Topkapi Palace pavilions. Once this came kara. The manufacture of ceramics in Cairo has not yet
to a halt, the potters sought other clients, who purchased ves- been studied in detail, although there exist several objects
sels and plates. When imperial patronage stopped, quality de- datable to the sixteenth century that appear to have been
made there.
istanbul also had a local production which, according to
Evliya Çelebi, consisted of one hundred shops with three
44
Fig. 26. Tile panels from the mihrab of the Mosque of Sokollu Mehmed Pa§a, hundred potters in the seventeenth century. There is no rea-
c. 1572 son to doubt that a number of the so-called Golden Horn
pieces, especially the group found during the excavations of
the post office building, was not made locally. Their quality is
inferior to iznik wares and indicates a nonimperial workshop.
The Ehl-i Hiref registers also include tile makers (kaciciler);
45
one master and eleven apprentices are listed in 1526, four
appear in the 1557-1558 register, and three are recorded in
1566. The limited number of tile makers and the reduction of
their number from twelve to three between 1526 and 1566
indicate that there was no great need for their services and
that these men were obviously not producing tiles for the im-
perial structures in the capital; they may have been responsi-
ble for making cartoons sent to iznik and involved with the
installation of the panels after the tiles arrived in istanbul.
Ottoman pottery appears to have been more popular in Eu-
rope than within the empire, since the largest collections of
sixteenth-century objects are outside Turkey. They were cher-
ished as works of art and not used on a daily basis, which
may explain the survival of such large quantities in England,
France, Austria, and Italy. It should be mentioned that a sub-
stantial percentage of these collections was amassed in Tur-
key during the nineteenth century, when there was no local
interest in Iznik wares. Although these wares were all func-

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