The Turks’ travels

They started their travels in AD 600 from the arid wastes of China, moving ever westward with the Mongols, with Tamerlane and with the Ottomans. Now, centuries later, they have ended up in the rarefied precincts of the Royal Academy of Arts, just off Piccadilly Circus.

“Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600-1600” is the title of a mammoth, eye-catching exhibition that has opened here, and on a recent Saturday the line of spectators reached across the rain-soaked courtyard and beyond the academy’s archway to the opulent shopping emporiums around Bond Street.

At a time when the European Union has committed itself to a process to bring Turkey into its embrace, this show about historical Turks (whose footsteps and impact stretched far beyond the confines of the modern nation-state named for them) has found an extremely eager audience since it opened Jan. 23. Of course, the promise of a colorful and exotic break from the drabness of a typically gray London winter may have helped.

Covering the artistic achievements of successive historical epochs over a wide geographical area, the exhibition’s scope is so large that to some extent it can merely tantalize those who attend, said David J. Roxburgh of Harvard University, an expert in Islamic art and one of the curators.

“As a professor and a person committed to the field, I hope people leave the exhibition with a feeling there’s a lot more to learn, and they’re inspired to go and read more,” he said of the show, scheduled to continue until April 12.

A melange, like the Turks themselves, the exhibition includes many objects and artifacts that have never before left the Topkapi State Museum in Istanbul. It also has borrowed from the collections of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Louvre in Paris and several other institutions to assemble as broad a picture of Turkic history and artistic achievement as is ever likely to be staged anywhere.

It draws together the often little-known legacy of Turkic-speaking peoples who flowed across the deserts and steppes of middle Asia and into the Middle East, before taking root as far afield as the Balkans and northern Africa during the Ottoman Empire.

Over the centuries they embraced many religions -- Nestorian Christianity, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and, of course, Islam. They assimilated, and they touched other groups, nations and communities, among them the Chinese, Persians, Slavs, Indians, Armenians, Greeks and Arabs. With 370 works from 11 countries, the show illuminates little-thought-of connections, recalling that even before motorized transport, people somehow managed to move around quite a lot.

For the Royal Academy, a private association of 80 of the country’s leading artists that since 1769 has been exhibiting artworks to the public, the exhibition is one of the largest shows to date. It is the academy’s first major exhibition of Islamic arts since 1931, and it comes at a time when there is a genuine hunger in the West after Sept. 11 to begin to understand Islamic history and culture in all its complexity and richness, Roxburgh noted.

The exhibition offers a dizzying sampler of the impressive array of aesthetic achievement through the ages by the far-flung communities of Turkic speakers. The works are varied, in painting and drawing, sculpture, calligraphy, textiles, ceramics, metalwork and architecture from cities, lands and historical epochs that are only barely in the consciousness of most Westerners, if at all.

“To describe the array as eclectic and diverse would be the merest understatement. Nothing can prepare you for the sheer oddness of fusions,” said the Observer newspaper in its review of the show. As an example, it cited one 7th century painting from China.

“It shows a dancing devotee, a real sultan of swing, who you might expect to be Chinese but who looks most distinctively Turkish with his fabulous head of hair and razor-sharp mustaches, yet who’s dressed as an Indian Brahmin, carries Buddhist prayer beads and whose arms are tattooed with magical hexagrams.”

Perhaps the highlight is the collection of drawings and illustrations from Muhammad Siyah Qalam, “Muhammad of the Black Pen,” collected in the 15th century at the court of Sultan Yaqub. The spare but lithe and animated figures reveal the lives of ordinary nomadic Turkish people.

Richly evocative and expressive, the pictures may be scores or hundreds of years older; nobody knows. One theory is that they were meant to accompany the roving storytellers who would visit isolated Turkmen communities and share news and myths.

The exhibition begins on a minimalist note, with the enigmatic runes on a stele from western China, one of the earliest written examples of the Turkish language in its primitive form. It slowly progresses through a millennium of culture and 11 galleries of the academy. En route, they provide a window on the Uighur, to the Seljuks, to the Timurids and into the Ottoman period, when European influences began to be apparent, such as a ceramic tankard that looks as if it was made for beer or mead.

Color and complexity

At each stage along the way, the artifacts become richer and more accomplished, with emeralds the size of walnuts, gold-inlaid armor, jade sword pommels and talismanic caftans. The display cases and wall hangings fairly explode with color and complexity during the reigns of Suleyman the Magnificent and his successors.

Wandering the galleries, it’s illuminating to see how Chinese, Persian and Arabic forms were adopted and absorbed by the various Turkic rulers, and how Turkic art motifs were exchanged with other cultures as well, particularly along the Silk Road that tied Europe and southwest Asia to China.

Although Turkey clearly must be delighted by the show’s prominence in West End London, Roxburgh rebutted some “politicized” reviewers here who asserted that the show was meant as a pre-EU membership calling card by the Turkish government and Turkish corporate sponsors.

The show was assembled in just one year to fill a hole in the academy’s schedule, he said, and “contemporary politics did not shape the way that we put the exhibition together.” Besides, he noted, the show is “not really about the modern Turkish republic’s heritage, which is how it is being characterized in some ways.”

Be that as it may, the show carries a transcendent idea: that the far-flung Turks of history were a marvelously versatile people, synthesizing many cultures and zestfully adapting to the other tribes, nations and beliefs they encountered in their meanderings and conquests.

Like the classic Ming ceramics from China that were given to the Ottoman sultans: They was beautiful but still could be made different, better, more fun, with the addition of a dollop of gold and baubles.

Such was the Turkic delight.