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Printing Pilgrimage: Replication and Imagination between Tokat and Jerusalem
Abstract
Sometime before 1689, a pilgrim named Ignatios returned home, having earned the honorific title mahdesi, an appellation reserved for those who travelled to Jerusalem. This definitive moment in his life (and later, career) was not written in a colophon or logged in tax or census ledgers, but rather, documented on the surface of a printed altar cloth prepared in his hometown of Tokat—a burgeoning industrial center in the northern provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In a series of images and inscriptions that span the length of the curtain (approximately three and a half meters), Ignatios documents his movements to and through holy sites and spaces, identifying, in his own words, where he was and what he saw. In addition to preserving his pilgrimage journey in both text and image, the majority of the curtain’s surface is stamped with an overwhelming number of liturgical objects and actors. Once in place, this altar curtain joined those same liturgical wares to conduct the holy Armenian rite, or patarag, a dramatic and sensually affective spectacle, which held its viewers in suspense as a means of spiritual access. This paper weighs Ignatios’ choice to identify as mahdesi against the production and function of the object on which it appears. I elaborate on the technical peculiarities, function and audience of his commission and discuss it as a microcosm of Ottoman-Armenian industry, pilgrimage and liturgy. I treat the Tokat curtain and its iconography as emerging from overlapping visual, material, and literary cultures—an object symptomatic of the interconnected industries, faiths and communities co-existing within the empire. While the curtain functioned statically as a virtual pilgrim guide by projecting far-off places, its liturgical context created micro-architectural spaces within a church and a temporary visual boundary during ritual. I marry these two notions and argue that the Tokat altar curtain reflects an evolving early-modern devotional structure that was centered on sensual experience during the performance of the Armenian rite.
Discipline
Art/Art History
Geographic Area
Anatolia
Armenia
Caucasus
Israel
Ottoman Empire
Turkey
Sub Area
None