Exhibition at the Benaki Museum of Islamic Art presents the history of ceramics in Kutahya, Asia Minor
Imagine yourself at 14:30 on July 4, 1921, in Kutahya, Turkey. What would you see? A division of Greek army infantrymen getting ready to march triumphantly into the city. The operation to capture the city was part of a larger effort to seize control of the Constantinople-Baghdad railway, at Eskisehir, a key transit hub.
News of the capture was met with great enthusiasm by Greeks in Greece, Smyrna and the rest of the coast of Asia Minor. The famed pastry shop Luxe on Athens’ Patission Street soon even started selling “Kutahya” and “Eskisehir” ice cream. In just 15 months, however, the sweet taste of victory would turn bitter, and the triumph of the Greek forces on the other side of the Aegean would go the same way as Kutahya’s famed pottery: smashed into pieces like a ceramic plate falling on the floor and scattering its shards into the four winds. A civilization that was thousands of years old came to a violent end, uprooted and evicted.
Greek cavalry officers and soldiers pose for a photograph in Kutahya in 1921.
Historians later tried to put the fragments of the story back together. Then, a century later, a lawyer with a passion for the history of ceramics called Dinos Kogias came along and, with patience and dedication, completed the narrative with his research into the work that was done by Kutahya’s pottery workshops.
The items he collected along the way are a charming demonstration of the way that Kutahya managed to steal the pottery crown from Nicaea (Iznik) with utilitarian and decorative ceramics, such as tiles that graced Christian churches (across the Aegean and all the way to Mount Athos) and mosques in the Ottoman Empire.
This journey is the subject of an ongoing exhibition at the Benaki Museum of Islamic Art titled “Souvenir from Kutahya” and comprising 129 unique exhibits that relate not just to the period when the Greek soldiers were there, but also provide a more general overview of the local tradition in pottery before their arrival and after their departure.
