Download PDF | (Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, Bd. 63) Brigitte Heuer_ Barbara Kellner-Heinkele_ Joachim Gierlichs - Islamic art and architecture in the European periphery _ Crimea, Caucasus, and the Volga-Ural Region.
300 Pages
Preface
The majority of contributions in the present volume are based on papers presented at the international symposium “Crimea, Caucasus, and the Volga-Ural Region: Islamic Art and Architecture in the European Periphery”, held in Berlin, Sept. 1721, 2004, and organized by the editors of this volume. The symposium brought together 27 scholars from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Germany, the Russian Federation, Turkey, and the Ukraine, as well as from France and the United Kingdom.
In convening this symposium, the organizers attempted to break new ground and give a voice to historians of art and architecture, archaeologists, and curators of museums from what can be termed the European periphery, and to initiate a dialogue with specialists from Western Europe studying art and architecture in the central areas of the Islamic world. Until then, Islamic art and architecture in the European periphery had not been the subject of international conferences or symposia, nor had Western scholarly publications given much space to contributions dealing with the particular character of Islamic art treasures and architectural monuments in the Black Sea area, the Caucasus, and the Volga-Ural region. In preparing the symposium, the organizers met with manifold difficulties that need not be spelt out here. During the symposium, lively discussions on interpretation and approach took place, discussions that shed light on the participants’ diverse academic backgrounds, but also on different levels of financial support, scholarly aims, and public interest.
These differences are also reflected in the symposium papers that the authors revised and sent for publication in this volume. In addition, the editors faced problems of a technical and intellectual order, which forced them to exclude some of the papers presented at the symposium and submitted for publication. The editors tried to compensate for this by inviting papers by authors who had not actively participated in the symposium. Oleksa Haiworonski published his paper presented at the symposium in a different context.' The editors ask the readers to make allowances for the varying quality of the illustrations. The technical means for producing illustrations of a publishable quality still differ considerably from one country to another.
Before publication, the original text of most papers has undergone revisions and editorial changes, the extent of which varies from case to case. In some cases, the editors were not able to clarify vague expressions or incongruities. The editors did not attempt full uniformity in technical matters, respecting the conventions regarding footnotes, transcription, and bibliography the authors had adopted. A number of papers had to be translated from Russian or German into English. The editors are particularly grateful to Dr.des. Rufat Sattarov (Berlin/Baku) and Dr. Kathrin Méller (Berlin) for their great commitment in the translation of these contributions. The extensive correspondence with the authors and the demanding preparation of this volume for publication lay in the hands of Brigitte Heuer, who also participated in the translation process. Without her unrelenting devotion this project would not have materialized.
The editors would like to thank all authors and participants for sharing their research findings and expertise. Without the generous financial support of the VolkswagenStiftung (Hannover) and the Academia Europaea (London) the symposium would not have taken place. Their interest in the important aims of the conference made it a success. VolkswagenStiftung and Academia Europaea also made possible the printing of this book. The financial and administrative help of Freie Universitit Berlin is also gratefully acknowledged. The editors extend their sincere thanks to Prof. Dr. Florian C. Reiter, the editor of the Abhandlungen fiir die Kunde des Morgenlandes, for including the volume in this prestigious series.
A Note on Transliteration
The spelling of the authors’ family names follows their personal preference. Otherwise, Russian, Ukrainian, and Crimean Tatar (in Cyrillic) names and terms follow the transliteration schemes of the Library of Congress”, with the deviation that i and u are transliterated simply as ‘i’ and ‘ts’, 10 and 4 are rendered as ‘yu’ and ‘ya’. For Bashkir, see the note on page 145. Turkish names and terms are spelt according to modern Turkish orthography. In the case of Crimean Tatar names and terms that are found in different spellings in scholarly literature the spelling preferred by the author has been retained.
Neglected Research Topics — Some Remarks
Joachim Gierlichs
In contrast to other regions and centres of the Islamic world, research on the art and architecture of the Crimean Peninsula, the Caucasus, and the Volga-Ural region is only just beginning. There are many reasons for this long neglect, but the political situation since the 1930s, which largely led to an isolation of these regions, must be regarded as the main cause. To be sure, the disintegration of the former Soviet Union and the resulting creation of independent republics lifted some of the restrictive borders. However, the extremely difficult political, social, and economic conditions in the new states enabled only few scholars to make direct contacts with colleagues in the western world or to be engaged with them on a regular and permanent basis. The greatest obstacle for such potentially fruitful intellectual interchange and mutual enrichment has been the lacking knowledge of the relevant scholarly literature. which is true for both sides. Even when publications are known to exist, they are frequently either unobtainable or unintelligible due to language barriers.
The international symposium Crimea, Caucasus, and the Volga-Ural region: Islamic art and architecture in the European Periphery aimed at starting to build a bridge and provide scholars and museum curators with an opportunity to present their research and materials regarding the regions named above to their colleagues in the west.
To our regret, the Volga-Ural region was under-represented at the symposium. This was for the most part due to the fact that scholars working there were unable to come to Berlin. On the other hand, research on the architecture and, above all, the arts and crafts of the Golden Horde has considerably advanced in recent years. This became evident at several large exhibitions in St. Petersburg, Leoben (Austria), and Kazan (Tatarstan) and was documented in comprehensive, well illustrated exhibition catalogues.’ Due to the vast geographical expanse and the length of historical time, many interesting aspects of Islamic art and architecture of the Crimean Peninsula were not covered at the symposium and are not included in this publication. The following article points to a few further topics that should be taken up in future research. It will focus on the Caucasus, on Daghestan, and especially on the collections in Tbilisi, “art marketplace” at the end of the 19" and beginning of the 20" centuries, as well as on some unknown collections of Islamic art in the Ukraine.’ It is to be hoped that at a second meeting, already under consideration, one or the other topic might be dealt with more extensively.
The art and architecture of the North Caucasus with its historical centre Kubachi, famous for its so-called Kubachi ware’ and a series of iconographically interesting figurative stone reliefs from the Middle Ages, have been largely forgotten in our times. The reliefs had already been widely scattered by the 1930s, when they were first mentioned in the scholarly literature.‘ Initially, they had been compared with Seljuk works of Anatolia’, which led to dating them back to Seljuk times qa2"/13" centuries) without substantiating reasons. A later dating to the 14” or even the 15" century has been suggested in the volume “Jskusstvo Kubachi” (The art of Kubachi)® published in the mid 1970s.
The iconographic repertoire ranges from emblematic single figures to more narrative scenes, such as the so-called military game represented on the stone relief that had been transferred from the Makhachqala Museum in Daghestan to the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad (Inv. no. TP-112, TP118, TP-119a, b) in 1928.’ In the early years of the 20" century®, many of the Daghestan stone reliefs found their way into various collections in Europe and the USA, e.g., the one in the holdings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recently attributed to the period of the Golden Horde (15" century).” Such later dates are supported by a stone relief in the State Museum of the History of Armenia in Yerevan. It depicts Amir Hasan II hunting’? who reigned in the early 14" century.'! This relief demonstrates that we should not neglect the material of the “Christian” Caucasus, which at that time was in close contact and favoured artistic exchange with the “Muslim” part of that region.'”
Except for some articles on carpets and textiles,'* nothing has been published on the art of Daghestan since the days of the Soviet Union, when such publications as the aforementioned volume “Iskusstvo Kubachi"'* or other collective works'* appeared, which provide an overview from medieval times to the 20" century. There is a lack of systematic monographic works or articles, of presentations of new findings as well as of existing material. At least in the West, nothing is known about the whereabouts of art objects and in what shape they may be now. Such scholarly work could be the basis for a much needed “History of the Art of the Caucasus in the Middle Ages”, which, as mentioned above, should not omit the interesting interrelations between Armenia and Georgia on the one hand, and Daghestan, on the other.
How important a better knowledge of the development of the arts in this region might be, shows the example of a piece of metal work, which has been assigned to different regions and dynasties: A so-called war mask in the Nasser Khalili Collection in London, belonging to a group of similar objects'®, has lately been connected with the Caucasus area'’, while at the end of the 1980s it was still regarded and published as Timurid'*.
Anyone who pays a visit to the historically important capital of Georgia, Tbilisi, must be impressed by the number of different styles of architecture found within close proximity of each other. Besides a number of “oriental” houses, reaching back to the time when the capital was under Persian-Ottoman domination,’ we find private houses as well as official buildings from the second half of the 19" and beginning 20" centuries, which — although occidental in style —- undoubtedly bear Islamic ornamental elements, a matter still waiting to be looked into.” Especially interesting — to mention just one example — is a house in Chonkadze Street decorated with a Mugarnas frieze (figs. 1, 2). An inscription mentions Mirza Reza Khan, Persian Consul General in Tbilisi from 1889 to 1894.7!
Even more impressive is the rich stock of the Museum of Fine Arts in Tbilisi,”” not far from Revolution Square (formerly Lenin Square). It holds an outstanding collection of Qajar art (see the article by Irina Khoshoridze on Qajar oil paintings in this volume), presumably the largest collection outside Iran. Moreover, we have high-quality objects from the Middle Ages, many of them unpublished. Some of these extraordinary pieces have been published only in conjunction with the holdings of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, in a book meant for a wider public”, i.e., with the assumption that the ordinary reader might not quite realize the different origins of the works of art. Let me mention two examples: a bronze cauldron bearing the inscription of master Abu Bakr ibn Ahmad Marwazi, as well as a big brass tray with silver inlay (69 cm in diameter), believed to depict a remarkable figurative scene at the centre of its inner field: above the ruler’s head, angels are holding the sun’s orb in their hands.* The big bronze cauldron (about 52-53 cm in diameter) belongs to a group of seven identical cauldrons, all said to come from Abu Bakr’s workshop in Merv.?> Moreover, it is quite an interesting statement that “most of the cauldrons of this master come from Daghestan (i.e., they were either bought there or may now be found in various collections)”.”°
In the Museum of Georgian History — now the National Museum — we also have a series of top quality objects, some of them important for showing the development of medieval metal art. Among them is a signed metal jug attributed to the 10"711" century” and, in particular, a jug with figurative decoration dated to the month of Shaban in the year 577 AH (10 December 1181 to 7" January 1182)*, bearing the master signature of Mahmud b. Muhammad Harawi (from Herat).””
In the 19" century, Tbilisi, or Tiflis as the capital of Georgia was called in Russian until 1936, was a lively place of commerce, where one could meet people of a wide variety of professions and ethnic background. The French consul reported in the 1830s: ,,In Tbilisi kann man an einem einzigen Tag Handler aus Paris, Kuriere aus Petersburg, Kaufleute aus Konstantinopel, Englander aus Kalkutta und Madras, Armenier aus Smirna und Usbeken aus Buchara treffen, denn diese Stadt kann sich riihmen, Knotenpunkt zwischen Europa und Asien zu sein.”
Around the turn of the 19" to the 20" century, the town must have been a good place for acquiring Islamic art objects. Several objects in the Berlin Museum of Islamic Art prove this, according to the inventories Tiflis is the provenance." Two metal works were acquired by Friedrich Sarre (1865-1945) during one of his Middle East journeys at the end of the 19" century. In 1904, Sarre became the first director of the Islamic department of the Royal Berlin Museum, which shortly before had been called into being by Wilhelm von Bode (1845-1929). Sarre’s collection had till then been displayed, on loan, in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. In 1922, a majority of it, about 750 objects, mainly metal work and ceramics, was given to the “Islamische Museum” as a donation. On that occasion, Sarre gave a short overview on his collection from which we cite:
wAus den Basaren und von den Antiquitétenhandlern in Konstantinopel, Kairo, Aleppo, Tiflis, Teheran, Isfahan, Buchara und anderen, auch kleineren Stadten des Orients stammt ein groBer Teil meiner Sammlung. [...] So konnte ich im Jahre 1898 die sch6ne sasanidische Bronzekanne [...] und einen wegen seiner Darstellungen besonders wichtigen tauschierten Mossulleuchter [...] von dem Apotheker Roinoff in Tiflis erhandeln [...].""”
The “Sasanian” jug with a handle twisted like a rope — today ascribed to the 8"9" century (so-called post-Sasanian period) — was already shown at the Exposition des Arts Musulmans in Paris (1903). The Mosul candleholder is important due to its iconographic programme: the big foot shows figurative representations on eight outer panels,” in addition to sitting figures (among them a prince on his throne) and antithetical pairs of animals, so-called double-headed eagles (two-headed birds of prey). Such representations are known from the art and architecture of the 13” century, especially in Seljuk Central Anatolia and in Artugid south-eastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia.*°
Likewise from Tiflis — although obtained under completely different circumstances — comes the famous knocker with antithetical dragons “threatening” a lion’s head, which reached the Islamic Department of the Royal Museum in Berlin in 1913. Ernst Diez (1884-1964) discovered it in Tiflis, and wrote the following:
»Wahrend eines kurzen Aufenthaltes in Tiflis im Herbste 1912 wurde mir bei einer ansdssigen Familie das hier veréffentlichte Bronzeobjekt gezeigt, dessen Ankauf fiir die islamische Abteilung des Kaiser-Friedrich-Museums in Berlin ich Herrn Professor Friedrich Sarre empfahl.‘”
Ernst Diez described the source only as “a local family”. In the meantime, the source was identified as the Georgian Prince Takaishvili,*® who gained quite a name as an explorer of Georgian architecture in the Tao-Klarjeti area, today north-eastern Turkey.”
The fact that the knocker had been in a private collection in Tiflis and was acquired there is of some interest since two nearly identical knockers were attached to the main portal of the Ulu Cami in Cizre (Jazirat b. Umar)” in south-eastern Turkey, up to the 1960s (fig. 3).*' In the 1970s, one of the knockers was stolen and later acquired by the David Collection in Copenhagen,” while the other came to the Museum of Turkish Islamic Art in Istanbul.”*
In terms of their iconography, the three knockers are very similar,’ however, clear differences can be observed between the Berlin knocker and the pair from the Ulu Cami in Cizre with regard to stylistic details. One of the crucial questions that is still unanswered is whether the knocker in Berlin comes from the same workshop, i.e., whether it has been cast in the same mould as the two knockers from Cizre.** Bearing in mind the stylistic differences and the place of acquisition, the question arises whether the knocker in the Berlin Museum of Islamic Art was only traded in Tiflis or got there later, for it is not known when and how it came into the possession of Prince Takaishvili,” or whether perhaps arguments might be found for the assumption that this knocker was not made in the Jazira, but perhaps in the Caucasus.””
After all, the Caucasus area has for long been known as a centre for metal works, for example, the well known cauldrons in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg or in the Museum of Islamic Art in Teheran. The cauldron kept in the Hermitage (Inv. No. TP-175) is datable to the second half of the 14” century and, by its “exaggerated horizontal rim’*, is attributed to Daghestan (Kubachi or Zarkan, a village west of Kubachi®).
Other important metal works, which came to the Hermitage in the 1920s and 1930s, originate from the North Caucasus, Daghestan, and Chechnya. There is for example a bucket from the second half of the 15" century, acquired in 1926 in Kubachi,” now in the Hermitage (Inv. no. IR-2177). Of special interest, however, is an aquamanile, transferred in 1939 from the Chechen-Ingush Museum in Grozny to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg (Inv. No. IR-1567).°' It had been taken by Russian soldiers from an Ossetian shrine in the Central Caucasus.” The bird figure made of bronze - a comparable object is found in the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin (Inv. No. I. 5623)° — is dated by the inscription to the end of the 8” century AD (180 AH/796-97 AD). It bears a master’s signature (Sulaiman), which poses considerable problems as far as the reading and interpretation of the nisba are concerned: the name of the town can be read as Madinat al-Fazz (a quarter of Nishapur),° Madinat Kashan or Madinat Kasan, respectively.°°
Moving from the Caucasus to the Ukraine, the collections in the Khan Saray at Bahcesaray (fig. 4), the former palace of the Giray Khans on the Crimean peninsula, represent a desideratum of research. As far as I know, neither the numerous ethnographically interesting objects of a later date have been summarized, nor the objets d’art (in some cases of high quality) from the Middle Ages either.’ These days, many of the objects can no longer be found in their original locations, however, with some effort they may at least be traced back. A crucial event was the conquest of the Crimea and the Palace of the Giray Khans in Bahcesaray by the Russian Tsarist Army in 1783. Almost 200 years later, important art objects were still taken from there to distant Leningrad. A piece of evidence for this may be a candlestick dated 725 AH/1325 AD, signed by master Ruh ad-Din Tahir, which was included in the inventory of the Hermitage in 1966 (Inv. no. IR-1980).*
Other Islamic collections in the Ukraine are practically unknown in the West. The Museum of Western and Eastern Art in Odessa shows mainly Qajar objects — metal work and textiles (fig. 5)? —, but part of a ceramic frieze, probably datable to the Timurid period, for example, is also on display.
Even a greater surprise is the Islamic collection, formerly housed in the Museum of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev, now in the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko Museum of Arts in Kiev.” This collection was formed by Bohdan Khanenko at the beginning of the 20" century and contains outstanding Islamic art objects, such as a dated Persian tile from Kashan with a depiction of Bahram Gur on a camel inscribed with Persian poetry on the border of the tile, or a miniature signed by the famous painter Reza Abbasi (1575-1635), dated 1037 AH/1627-28 AD. From the examples of the metal work I would like to mention two objects: firstly, an unusual bronze casket (fig. 6) dated to the 14" century with a rich iconographic programme showing various skills and techniques,” secondly, a basin from the 13" century, ordered by the well-known ruler and art patron Badr ad-Din Lu’lu’ who reigned in Mosul, northern Mesopotamia, from 1233 to 1259. While the inscription is well published, there is, to my knowledge, not even one good illustration available of this important object itself.
In some cases there is no need to go as far as to the areas we focus on here to find unexpected objects: a Caucasian dagger has made its way into the Deutsche Klingenmuseum in Solingen. The label on the show case dates it to 1254 AH (27 March 1838 to 16 March 1839).” The dagger had been the property of the Russian Governor General of Georgia (1837-1842), Evgenii Aleksandrovich Golovin, whose name is supposedly engraved on the blade.”
It is our hope that the few examples highlighted here could sketch out the wealth of archaeological and art-historical material in regions immediately adjacent to Western Europe that is waiting to be discovered and to be properly studied.
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