A Close Look at Turkish Ceramics

Lovers of colorful ceramics will be captivated by “Dance of Fire,” an exhibit of the famed İznik pottery, tiles and other objects dating from the 15th to 17th centuries.

But the show, at the cozy Sadberk Hanim Museum in Sariyer, a sector of Istanbul on the European shore of the Bosporus, is more than a look back at a colorful art form, it’s a lesson in economics that resonates even today.

İznik, formerly known as Nicea, site of the ancient Greeks’ Council of Nicea, has historically been an important center for ceramics production. Some of its workshops’ best work can still be seen on the walls of Topkapi Palace in the Sultanahmet neighborhood, or inside the challenging-to-locate Rustem Pasha mosque in Eminonu.

But Sadberk Hanim is the place to go for an intriguing overview of the rise and fall of İznik tile empire, a lesson in supply and demand gone awry.

More than 300 pieces of the highly collectible tiles have been assembled and put on display together for the first time in this jewel of a museum, housed in several rooms of a restored Ottoman-era yali, or river house, that was later used as the summer home of the prominent Koc family.

Visitors learn from the well-written explanations in English and Turkish all about the early, traditional designs (carnations, tulips) and color palates (mainly blues and white) of İznik ware. (Potters, for example, didn’t include turquoise until around 1520, and it took another hundred or so years for them to expand into purples, olives and black.)

The quality of tile production peaked during the second half of the 16th century under the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent when large orders were placed by royal edict.

As production expanded, so did artistry. Designs grew more stylized and the types of objects produced expanded beyond plates and tiles to lidded bowls, water flasks and more.

But at the start of the 17th century, an economic crisis struck. Low-cost porcelain imports from China led Ottoman producers to try to compete and the quality was sacrificed to try to regain market share.

Classic Iznik production essentially ended in 1719, the exhibit says, when one of the last workshops was moved to Istanbul but did not survive for long.