Travellers in Ottoman Lands is the latest in a long line of publications arising from conferences held by the Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East (ASTENE). ASTENE members are typically fascinated by the lives of individuals who added greatly to our knowledge of faraway places, but whose contributions might otherwise remain unsung. One of the four thematic sections in the present volume, Botanist-Travellers, acknowledges this rich seam, while others focus on Ottoman Gardens, Bulbs and Conifers, and Art and Botany. The 2017 conference out of which the papers arise was held at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (RBGE). As these proceedings demonstrate, the meeting of historians and art historians with plant-people and garden-people proved highly productive.
In the first specialist chapter, Susan Scollay considers the Bodleian Library's unique manuscript of the Dilsūznāmah ('Book of Compassion'), a poem composed by an itinerant Persian merchant who visited Edirne in 1391. The manuscript was copied and illustrated there in 1455-56; its five miniatures are thought to be the work of Mehmed II's Edirne palace atelier. Scollay proposes that their representation of the gardens in which is set this tale of the ill-fated lovers Rose and Nightingale is a verisimilar record of the Edirne palace gardens at the time.
The polymath Evliya Çelebi is the key Ottoman source for fruit and fruit products in the seventeenth century, across the extensive regions he travelled. Evliya writes of fruit varieties and their cultivation, of exotic and new species, and also the gardeners and grafters who raised fruit, how fruit was traded, and its importance as gifts. Priscilla Mary Işın brings to bear the knowledge gained from her own peregrinations to discuss Evliya's detailed observations.
Güllü Yıldız writes on Istanbul gardens as depicted in the travelogues of Persians travelling to the Hejaz for the pilgrimage via the Ottoman capital during the Qajar period (long nineteenth century). The Bosphorus and its gardens particularly captured their imagination: both formal, walled, gardens and open meadows and parks prompted eulogistic remarks. The pilgrims described the plants and architectural elements of the former, and the social interaction they witnessed in the latter; the cemetery-gardens of the city also drew their attention. Some pilgrims wrote approvingly of the mixing of genders and of Ottomans and Europeans in Istanbul's parks, while one considered Istanbul, with its “delightful gardens and parks” to be “a second Paris”.
Promoted as “the only known public Ottoman garden in the world”, the quarter-acre Bakewell Ottoman Garden opened in Missouri in 2006 with a backstory that traces the lineage of its benefactor to Nakşidil, the French-born, putative mother of Sultan Mahmud II (d.1839). Flowing water and plants favoured by the Ottomans are among what Radha Dalal describes as “a pastiche of features referencing horticultural, decorative and fluvial elements”. She finds the architecture of the garden reminiscent less of Ottoman public space than of private, and causes the reader to wonder if the ‘public’ in the promotional material refers to its accessibility to today's visitors, in keeping with the educational mission of botanical gardens in the USA that she explains at length. En passant, we may note that, contra Yıldız's Persian travellers, Dahla's informants see gender segregation rather than mixing in Ottoman public gardens. She focuses on the key question of whether it is indeed possible to ‘read’ a non-native garden transported to an alien cultural milieu, and posits that the Bakewell Ottoman Garden might best be thought of as an Ottoman display garden in an American public space.
Several botanist-travellers are considered here: Dioscorides of Anazarbus in Cilicia, who travelled in the north and east Mediterannean basin in the first century ce; the Swedes, Frederik Hasselquist (d.1752) and Pehr Forsskål (d.1763), who investigated the flora of the Holy Land; the Aleppo-based Edinburgh botanist Adam Freer (d.1811) and his colleagues; the Prussian Carl Haussknecht (d.1903), whose explorations took him to eastern Ottoman lands and Persia; the Istanbul Armenian Georges Vincent Aznavour (d.1920), whose much-depleted collection is today scattered, and Violet Dickson (d.1991), doyenne of western plant collectors in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Dioscorides' treatise is well-known, and Alison Denham contends that his legacy is still palpable in the use of medicinal plants today. She focuses on three: the chaste tree, to illustrate how he describes plants; myrrh, to show his concern with the provenance and quality of medicinal herbs; and St John's wort, a genus whose 96 Turkish species, out of a total 470, demonstrates the difficulties inherent in identifying the plants he describes. Denham makes evident her debt to today's Turkish botanists, thereby raising the question of whether other writers found their research irrelevant to their own argument, or ignored it.
Tobias Morike's thesis is that the Linnean ‘apostles’, Hasselquist and Forsskål—the first botanists to study Middle Eastern flora using Linnean nomenclature—were, unusually for the era, not interested in the flora of the Holy Land for its biblical connections rather they focused their efforts on plants that would survive the European climate and be useful in Sweden, but before their collections could be examined wholly scientifically a century later, they were treated by others first of all as “silent messengers of the Holy Land”, and subsumed within “biblical botany”.
Adam Freer, physician-surgeon to the Levant Company Factory in Aleppo was one of the earliest donors to the RBGE herbarium: some thirty-six of his specimens survive. Janet Starkey emphasises the importance of plant collections to the development of medicine during the Scottish Enlightenment, and traces the interactions between key individuals, and their plant-collecting and publishing. Starkey shows how Freer contributed to Alexander Russell's magisterial Natural History of Aleppo (1756), and especially to his half-brother Patrick's expanded edition of the work (1794).
Carl Hausskecht's plant collections have had a happier history than Freer's—his herbarium in Jena houses 3.5 million specimens. Frank H. Hellwig and Kristin Victor discuss Hausskecht's life and work, with the benefit of his soon-to-be-published travel diaries which run to almost 1,000 pages. They also relate, with the example of Centaurea derderifolia Wagenitz, how important his collections were and continue to be to his successors.
Turkey's rich flora is being destroyed before our very eyes, and Necmi Aksoy's article on the work of Georges Vincent Aznavour, whom he characterises as “the last Ottoman plant collector”, is a sobering reminder that supposedly benevolent institutions can wreak as much damage as bulldozers. Aznavour's study mainly spanned Istanbul and its hinterland—it is estimated that he collected over 15,000 specimens altogether—and he published widely. The bulk of what remains is now in Geneva. Aksoy's account is a summary of, and a tribute to, Asuman Baytop (d.2015), the eminent Turkish botanist who was known to many of the conference's participants.
The late Irene Linning's discussion of Violet Dickson (d.1991) belies Gertrude Bell's appraisal of her as “a fool of a woman”. Married to the Political Agent in Kuwait, and one of a circle of adventurers that included Freya Stark and Wilfred Thesiger, Dickson's desert travels allowed her to amass over 600 specimens that she sent to Kew. Three hundred and fifty of these form an annotated list, the “charmingly quirky” The Wildflowers of Kuwait and Bahrain, many of whose illustrations are her own.
Alison Rix's subject is the tile manufacturer George Maw (d.1912) and his passion for the crocus. This resulted in his monograph on this genus, which he illustrated himself. Like some other individuals whose botanical interests are discussed in this volume, Maw had a wide circle of friends and correspondents to encourage him in his studies, including Charles Darwin and Joseph Hooker. He visited Morocco twice—once with Hooker—returning with a collection of plants. Of particular value is the annotated list of Maw's associates that Rix appends to her article.
Turning to plants rather than people, Ori Fragman-Sapir presents an overview of the more than 250 bulbous flora of Israel, Palestine and Jordan based on the collection of the Jerusalem Botanical Garden. He notes those that are endangered, and the conservation measures being taken to preserve them.
Like Turkey's flowers its conifers are disappearing. Martin Gardener and Sabina Knees provide an overview of the country's threatened species—firs, cedars, pines and spruces—as well as the situation in other of the former Ottoman lands where they grow. Climate change and animal grazing have contributed to the decline in populations, and continuing neglect of measures to manage conifers sustainably is hastening their decline.
Paul Starkey complements Gardener and Knees' article with a study of the cedars of Lebanon in art and literature from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the present: he reveals that the first modern mention of Lebanon's cedars occurs in the mid-sixteenth century travel account of Pierre Belon du Mans. Starkey asks why the cedar's appeal endures, and why the tree remains an inspiration to artists.
The twenty-first century has witnessed the revival of botanical illustration in Turkey. Gülnur Ekşi, herself a botanical artist, traces the history of this remakable skill, and indicates that today's young Turkish painters are worthy heirs to their Ottoman predecessors. Ekşi relates how collaboration with outside artists and a significant injection of private Turkish funding have enabled botanical art to thrive.
In his essay on Ottoman gardens, Gürsan Ergil turns to miniatures to show their evolution from an informal, natural look in early times, to their later formal appearance. He refers to the twelve paintings in a manuscript of the Khamsa-yi Niẓāmī dating from 1399 to suggest that the landscapes of untouched nature therein—“earthly paradise as a virgin land”—would have pleased the early sultans who had memory of the dynasty's nomadic past. Two centuries later, as miniatures painted by Nakkaş Osman in the Surname-i Hümanyun reveal, architectural elements all but dominate garden scenes, while Levni's illustrations for the Surname-i Vehbi of 1720 show “mobile candy gardens”, where plants compete for space with architectural elements made of sugar and sherbet.
Jennifer Scarce discusses the textiles and dress of the court of Süleyman I (d.1566) as described and illustrated by western travellers. She brings these together with surviving examples, and supplies the technical and aesthetic details of different types of silk garment. Scarce emphasises that the rigid dress code of the court determined who wore what, and analyses the individual robes worn over each other in portraits of Süleyman, Selim II (d.1574) and Ahmed I (d.1617).
The topic of Lara Mehling's contribution is the enduring appeal in east and west of the four red or reddish Ottoman flowers—tulip, rose, carnation and hyacinth. This “red quartet” first came into its own in the mid-sixteenth century as a key element in the naturalistic style being developed at the Ottoman court, and the secret of how to produce “Turkey red” became the holy grail of European dyers. Today, when durable red can be produced synthetically, the quartet has “disbanded”.
Gerard J. Maizou and Kathrin Müller have studied the Turkish art of making the lace flowers called oya, that are most commonly seen sewn to the edges of countrywomens' headscarves. Different meanings attach to different flowers, and the authors reveal many of these. It is unclear if their information derives from personal interviews or from the writings of colleagues.
In addition to the specialist studies reviewed here, the volume contains a pair of short prefaces by the editors. Knees provides a summary history of the RBGE and notes the key RBGE-published volumes describing the flora of the former Ottoman empire, while Paul Starkey's framing essay gives a taste of what is to come. Oddly, the volume lacks even a brief survey of the state of the field. Instead, Ines Aščerić-Todd has been charged with attempting the impossible—to fashion a general essay on the Ottoman empire relevant to the topic in hand.
This volume brings together an impressive range of scholarship in many research fields. It is richly illustrated, a sine qua non of books on botany, and deeply interesting. The editors are to be congratulated for attracting such knowledgeable speakers to the conference, and for their quick and handsome publication of the proceedings.
