Sally A. McDonald and Dr. Cynthia Finlayson, Art History and Cultural Studies

It is hard to know where one will be taken when researching an obscure topic. It is the exhilaration of the mysterious as well as the frustration of the unexpected that takes the researcher on a journey into the unknown, leading them to an unforeseen destination. This was what happened to me during the past year as I researched the costuming of the Ottoman Empire for exhibition purposes at the Azem Palace in Damascus Syria. Being one of the few remaining palaces from the Ottoman Era, the Azem Palace has been turned into a museum that houses valuable artifacts from this time period.

At the beginning of this project my proposal originally stated that I was planning to travel to Damascus to study, catalog, and create exhibition panels for the textile collection at the Azem Palace. However, my plans fell through as my path to Damascus ended and I found myself entering the realm of libraries and research. Having had an extensive background in academic research, I originally believed that I would find all the necessary information within a matter of weeks. However, as I began to study the iconographic symbolism of the traditional nomadic costuming, I discovered that the information that I was searching for was buried in the sands of the Ancient Near East. I unfortunately was forced to take a detour on my road to enlightenment, which led me to Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. I had traveled to the Bay Area with the hope that I would be able to study some of the pottery on exhibit to compare the ceramic decorations with the examples of textiles I had been able to find. However, when I arrived I discovered that the exhibit was much smaller then I thought it to be, with an even smaller selection of pottery from the time period I was studying.

With yet another dead-end under my belt I returned to Utah and concluded to take yet another route in my investigation. I decided to research and compare the Ottoman Imperial clothing found at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul with the nomadic clothing of the Azem. Like the Azem Palace, the Topkapi was also a royal residence for the Ottoman Sultans and which has now been turned into a museum containing a large collection of royal period textiles. As I glanced through the numerous miniature portraits of the courts I began to notice a system of dress within the depictions. This system could then be read as a road map of a person’s life if only the legend to decipher it was available. As I analyzed this system I found a woven pattern, called the cintemani motif, which would become the decoder for this nameless system. Consisting of three spheres arranged in a pyramid shape with a pair of wavy lines this pattern established much needed background information about the role of costuming in Ottoman society, class structure, and culture.

Unknowingly I had found the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, and began some intensive research on the imperial costuming of the Ottoman Sultan’s and their courts. I discovered that this pattern was directly associated with either the sultan himself or with someone immediately connected with him. As I researched the origins of this simple motif I began to recognize that the majority of designs, colors, and patterns held historic, symbolic, and social importance to those who wore them. This then allowed me to journey into the past, through three thousand years of history, several different religions and governments, and many myths and legends to arrive at the cross-roads of exhaustion and discovery.

This cross-road came in the form of a final research paper that explained the evolution and theoretical origins of the cintemani design. Besides discussing the cintemani motif as a conglomeration of many different societies and belief systems, I discussed the highly important role of textiles in Ottoman society. A role that determined who one was, where they came from, their social station, occupation, lineage, and wealth. It was at this point that I arrived at the conclusion that even though the nomadic costuming relied on many of the same regulations of the Ottoman traditions, the decorative styles varied widely. It was this conclusion that connected my original proposal with my research, thus creating a very crude guideline for labeling and cataloging the clothing at the Azem Palace.

Through this project I have learned many interesting lessons. The first of which is to expect the unexpected and to never get overconfident in your ability to find what you are looking for. For when you do, it will be farther away then what you expected it to be. The second of these lessons is to think creatively. For it is the thinking creatively that sheds a new light onto any difficult situation, thus illuminating information that had never been considered. The final and most important of these lessons is that the journey to knowledge if full of twists, turns, dead-ends, detours, and cross-roads. You never know what obstacle or shortcut will be in your path to hinder or assist in your journey. Much like life, the road to one’s final destination is one that is ever changing, without end, and contains many signs to lead you in the different directions. It is the interpretation, reading, and following of these signs that lead to somewhat unexpected, random, wonderful, exciting, obscure and unknown destinations.