Markus Ritter

The Lost Mosque(s) in the Citadel of Qajar Yerevan: Architecture and Identity, Iranian and Local Traditions in the Early 19th Century

The mosques in the citadel of Yerevan are lost today and almost unknown. Here, the most significant of them is reconstructed from visual and literary sources, documented by unpublished photographs, and related to the early Qajar period under the last Iranian governor Husayn Khān, prior to the Russian conquest of Yerevan in 1827. The second mosque in the citadel is attributed to the Ottoman period; the third one remains uncertain. While the type of the Qajar mosque is compared to earlier buildings in Yerevan, notably the 18th-century Gok Jāmi, stylistic elements are analysed with reference to early 19th-century architecture in Iran and a building at Qazvīn. The interpretation seeks to understand the different references of the Qajar mosque as the construction of a visual statement of local and Iranian identity in a period of change.

The Heroic Lens: Portrait Photography of Ottoman Insurgents in the Nineteenth-Century Balkans—Types and Uses

In his essay on the constitutive role of photography in the construction of collective identities in nineteenth-century romania, the photohistorian adrian-silvan Ionescu identifies a genre of photographic portraits as representations of “Bulgarian national heroes.”1 unfortunately, Ionescu leaves open the question of what exactly he means by this term, and he does not give a visual example of this photographic genre. Indeed, a large number of portrait photographs of ottoman Bulgarians posed in a “heroic” manner exist, all made in the second half of the nineteenth century in romanian photography studios. Many of them are today an integral part of the Bulgarian historical tradition, and they have become deeply imprinted onto the visual memories of generations as a testimony to and documentation of the Bulgarian national movement against ottoman rule (c. 1396–1878). not a single history book has failed to reproduce them, and they hang in every school and public building. even the uniforms of the national guard today are influenced by this photographic genre, which Ionescu would later accurately sum up as the “Bulgarian national hero.” It is obvious that Ionescu did not derive the term from this particular “heroic” pictorial tradition but from another kind of photographic genre: “oriental-type” photography. More exactly, Ionescu has very likely borrowed it from the title of a photograph taken by the famous Viennese photographer Ludwig angerer (1827–1879) during the Crimean War (1853–1856), probably in Bucharest (fig. 1).2 designating a male portrait with the title “a Bulgarian national hero? or a Turkish Bimbashi?” is both ambiguous and literally questionable. It seems that while creating his term, Ionescu did not know that the two ethnic attributions “Bulgarian” and “Turkish” could not be more disparate from a contemporary perspective. The essentialist historical narrative of the ottoman era portrays the “Turk” as the ultimate enemy of the “Bulgarian” and the “Bulgarian national hero” as fighting against 500 years of oppression by the “Turkish Bimbashi.”3 seen from today’s national perspective, the interchangeability MarTIna BaLeVa

Umayyadisches Ornament und christliche Motive: Marmorrelieffriese (Champlevé) im Palast von Ḫirbat al-Minya

The finds of architectural decoration from the exacavation of the Umayyad palace Khirbat al-Minya near Tiberias in the 1930ies remained unpublished and are the subject of a forthcoming study by the author. This article deals with further questions related to the ornament and decorative programme of the rich body of marble champleve friezes in the finds. It demonstrates, firstly, that material with Christian crosses was adapted to Umayyad re-use by reworking crosses and adding new panels with the same scheme and richer ornament. Other types of ornamented friezes may be entirely Umayyad. Evidence of wall incrustation in the three-nave palatial hall suggests that marble relief friezes formed part of its decoration. Secondly, in the palatial context, the relation of apparently mere decorative ornament to royal motifs is discussed. While a frieze of triangles appears to be the perfect example of an abstract ornament, merlons and palace facades based on a design of triangles offer an iconic analogy. A frieze with an acanthus-fruit-scroll allows the hypothe-sis that such marble friezes constituted an element of imperial style in Umayyad architecture, to expand to the sphere of palaces.

Kunst mit Botschaft: Der Gold-Seide-Stoff für den Ilchan Abū Saʽīd von Iran (Grabgewand Rudolfs IV. in Wien) – Rekonstruktion, Typus, Repräsentationsmedium

A unique cloth of silk and gold with Arabic inscriptions praising the Ilkhan Abū Saʽīd “Būsaʽīd”), Mongol ruler of Iran (1316-35), survives in three pieces used for the burial garment of Rudolph IV at Vienna (d. 1365). Presenting some of the findings from a new study of this ntextile, this article reconstructs the original cloth, draws attention to a specific type of striped design and discusses its context of use. In the reconstructed cloth, bold inscriptions in broad golden letters, alternating with a delicate repeat pattern, ran lengthwise from both short sides in opposite reading directions. Meeting at some point in the cloth, they divided it into two parts, raising questions about its use. While striped designs are well-known, this monumental type with large inscriptions may have been a new form, relating to Iranian textile traditions and ṭirāz inscriptions in Islamic art; contemporaneous Chinese art seems to have had no particular bearing on the motifs. In the cloth as a medium of representation, monumental inscriptions and gold may have visually communicated an identity, both Islamic and Mongol, of the Ilkhanid ruler.