The Evening Standard (London)
January 14, 2005

TREASURES ON THE TRAIL OF THE WANDERING TURKS

by BRIAN SEWELL CRITIC OF THE YEAR

IF ANY of us think of Turkey as more than a place of inexpensive
holiday resorts, it is less in terms of an eastern heritage than one
of the ancient west. Dutifully, sand washed from our toes, we trample
hard into the earth the few remaining beauties of Xanthus, first
pillaged by cricketing sailors of the British fleet in 1842;
dutifully, carried thither in a char-a-banc, we trudge the streets of
Ephesus and are reminded of St Paul; and dutifully, with shoulders’
brush and the increased humidity of tourists’ breath, we scrub early
Christian imagery from the volcanic walls of Cappadocia.

Where most tourists go, Turkey’s classical and Christian past is much
in evidence for those who care to see it, a palimpsest of cultures
overlaid, the diaspora of ancient Greeks, the Hellenism of great
Alexander, the eastern reach of imperial Rome, the theological
establishment of Christian belief, Byzantium and its crusading
wreckers all sandwiched between the Gallipoli campaign and the voyage
to Colchis of Jason and the Argonauts. These we acknowledge easily —
we may even know that into this fabric we should weave Noah and
Abraham, the Hittites, the mysterious inhabitants of Catal H|y|k, the
birth of Priapus and two of the Seven Wonders of the World — but,
apart from recognising that the exemplary events of Marathon and
Thermopylae would not have occurred had ancient Anatolia not been
Persia’s pathway to the west, we know little or nothing of Turkey’s
links with the east.

It was, however, mirror-image invasions from the east that formed
Turkey as a western power, transformed the Mediterranean into a
Turkish lake and carried Islam to the gates of Vienna. This east
still plays a major role in western politics, as unfathomable now as
it was when, on 29 May 1453, young Mehmet II took for his seat of
power in Asia and Africa the great European city of Constantinople,
and formed the Ottoman Empire.

Who were these Turks? The question is to some extent answered by the
Royal Academy this winter, with an exhibition of which the romantic
sub-title is A Journey of a Thousand Years, this millennium defined
as between 600 AD and 1600, a period much shorter than Anatolia’s
role as a sphere of Greek and Roman influence. The journey of this
title is that made over centuries and generations by a nomad people
who set their tents in what is now western Mongolia and Sinkiang,
north of Tibet, but, as one writer in the exhibition’s catalogue
cautions, the history of this journey is “murky” and “much …
remains unknown”, and another uses of their settled destination the
term “forged” in the punning sense of history composed to give
background and legitimacy to a regime.

DEMONSTRABLE historical foundations to these Turkish origins there
undoubtedly are, but their adjustment and revision recall the similar
scholarship of the Germans in the Age of Enlightenment, discovering
that their origins lay in ancient Greece. Let it be enough to say
that these peripatetic tribal Turks had political reason to move
westward and away from their Chinese neighbours. The complexities of
this movement are more matters for historionomers and for the
archaeologists of language than for art historians and such an
institution of the visual arts as the Royal Academy — indeed the
exhibition is much more the business of the British Museum — and the
catalogue essays on the subject, written by experts for experts, will
be of little use to the RA’s customary visitors, few of whom will
understand the transliterations, most of whom will find the unedited
repetitions irksome, and all of whom will be confused by alternative
spellings Malazgirt/Manzikert) and contradictions.

In waves, unsteadily but inexorably, the Turks moved to the west, to
the north and south of it, but always west; one “collective
sovereignty” of Turks achieved supremacy, and then another and
another, and we are able to give an identity to three short-lived
empires that pulled up their eastern borders and moved on before the
fall of Constantinople stabilised the onward drift and anchored it in
1453.

The thousand years chosen by the RA is a nice round figure, the 600
AD a trifle arbitrary, the 1600 reflecting the geographicaland
cultural zenith of the Ottoman Empire, but I am inclined to argue
that the aesthetic journey continued into the early 20th century, in
the long, slow decline of Ottoman taste and its surrender to
sometimes ghastly European influences.

In the sense of tribal migration the journey ended with the expiry of
the Byzantine Empire and 1453 is a convenient and symbolic date for
it. By then the Turk no longer looked Mongolian; in crossing central
Asia he had absorbed and been absorbed by the inhabitants of what are
now northwest India and Pakistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan,
Uzbekistan, Iran, Iraq, the riparian peoples of the Caspian and by
Armenia; he had assimilated alien languages and customs; religious
confusions he had resolved by adopting Islam, a faith new just as he
began his westward trek and a faith that had advanced east to meet
him.

He had learned to settle in cities, to build mosques and their
associated buildings, to decorate them with ornate brick and plaster,
to embellish them with glistening tiles. He had become a poet and a
teller of great tales. In short, he had become civilised and these
interactions and incorporations were the cultural baggage that he
carried to the Christian and antique city of Constantinople to make
it, as Istanbul, the greatest city of its day in Europe.

What was a Turk by the time the Turks settled for ever in Istanbul?
He had no sense of nationhood or nationality. He was so racially
mixed that his forefathers from the empire of the Uighurs on the
western edge of China would not, eight centuries on, have recognised
their kinship. They might, but only just, have understood his
language which, in 1453, after eight centuries of being a transient
population over a crow’s flight of 4,000 miles, was as different as
ours is from the English of King John; the language of the Ottoman
court, Osmanlija, a hybrid of old Turkish intermixed with classical
Arabic, the language of law and religion, and the Persian that
endowed Ottoman culture with a heritage of poetry, history and
romance, would have been beyond their comprehension.

The court was the driving force in cultural matters. The Ottoman
emperor might drop unfaithful houris of the harem into the Bosporus
in a sack of scratching cats and have all his brothers ceremonially
strangled by deaf mutes with bowstrings, but he was at least as
likely to be something of a poet, a bibliophile with his own
scriptorium, a connoisseur of carpets, ceremonial clothes,
embroidery, arms, armour, porcelain and even of paintings by Italian
artists.

SULEYMAN the Magnificent, Sultan from 1520 until 1566, far outdid the
connoisseurship of his near contemporaries Henry VIII of England,
Francis I of France and Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. He spoke
demotic Greek as well as Osmanlija, wrote Persian poetry under the
pseudonym Muhibbi and was a skilled calligrapher; his library was
much enhanced when, on the capture of Buda in 1526, he took the great
Renaissance library of Matthew Corvinus — the act of a civilised and
cultured man compared with the decapitation of a thousand Hungarian
nobles and the display of their heads on poles outside his tent.

His elegant manuscripts of contemporary events, past history, romance
and poetry were bound in leather, sharkskin, tortoiseshell, precious
stones, jade plaques and gold embroidery; these bindings crossed the
bounds of craftsmanship and required the skills of the goldsmith
(Suleyman himself commanded these skills, for it was the custom of
Sultans to learn a practical craft) and the jeweller as well as the
worker with leather, tool and stamp.

All these, Suleyman had in the palace workshops — together with
armourers and damasceners, weavers of silk, brocades and carpets,
makers of lutes, of marquetry, mirrors, lamps and mounts for
exquisitely simple Chinese porcelain — all in permanent employment,
but few were Turks. They were from the territories over which the
Turkish hordes had swept, pooling the resources of Iran and Egypt,
Greece and Hungary, Ukraine, Armenia and all the Balkan states, to
develop in every artefacture an Ottoman court style that could be
repeated in every regional governor’s court within the Empire.

RATHER than the hard physical business of the trek itself, it is the
aesthetic journey from the steppes of Mongolia to Europe that this
exhibition illustrates, and the most important and telling aspect of
it, architecture, has no real presence in the Royal Academy — nor
could it have, for not even videos can play substitute for the real
thing.

Two matters should be borne in mind: the first is that the transition
from brick to stone as a building material could not have been
effected without the employment of the Armenian masons for whom stone
had been a natural and customary material at least since ancient
Roman times (I can think of a dozen Armenian churches and monasteries
built before the arrival of the Turks that would serve convincingly
as mosques and medreses and one, Barhal, that does); the second
matter is Selim Sinan, the most prolific and influential of all
architects in the 16th century, Michelangelo’s younger near
contemporary, a man whose extraordinary aesthetic and engineering
genius dominated the buildings of the Ottoman Empire in its prime.

Without his architecture the exhibition is a feast of hors d’oeuvres,
of wonderful and precious things, most of them of types familiar to
travellers who have visited the museums of Istanbul, unevenly spread
across the thousand years, weighted in favour of their Ottoman end.
Would it be churlish to argue that the other journey, eastward, of
the Greeks and Romans, would, in producing far more art than things,
have made a more exciting exhibition?

* Turks is at the Royal Academy (0870 848 8484, )
from 22 January to 12 April. Admission daily 10am-5.30pm (Friday and
Saturday until 10pm). Admission £11.

rcelain — all in permanent employment, but few were Turks. They were
from the territories over which the Turkish hordes had swept, pooling
the resources of Iran and Egypt, Greece and Hungary, Ukraine, Armenia
and all the Balkan states, to develop in every artefacture an Ottoman
court style that could be repeated in every regional governor’s court
within the Empire.