The Turks exhibition at London's Royal Academy is a challenge to Western assumptions about Turkish culture, writes Arminta Wallace
Stones can sometimes talk. Certainly the stone which guards the entrance to the Turks exhibition, currently showing at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, speaks volumes. What, after all, does one expect from an exhibition of Turkish art? Exquisitely illustrated Korans perhaps; royal kaftans encrusted with gold and silver embroidery; Ottoman miniatures depicting urbane courtly rituals. And sure enough, such artefacts are present by the bucketload as the show wends its way from one gallery of stunningly beautiful objects to the next. First, though, the visitor must get his or her head around this stone.
There is nothing courtly or urbane about it. Its egg-shaped grey bulk is beautiful in its own way, of course, as is the inscription in a Turkish runic script which speaks of a dead warrior whose wife "remained a widow in sadness". It has come here all the way from a remote valley in Kyrgyzstan, an extraordinary journey which mirrors that of the Turks themselves. Silently but eloquently, the stone poses the question the exhibition sets out to answer: how did a gang of rough and ready nomadic horsemen from the borders of China, who swept westwards from the seventh century in successive waves across the vast desert of scrub and feathery grasses known as the Eurasian steppe, produce such a diverse and dynamic body of art? In part, the exhibition suggests, because the nomads weren't as rough and ready as we like to think.
Western views of Turkic culture tend to be lamentably simplistic, oscillating between the sickly-sweet sentimentality of "Turkish delight" and the outright hostility of "us and them". To spend a couple of hours at the Royal Academy is to open one's mind to a considerably wider vista which, in the current climate of political and cultural uncertainty on the East-West front, could prove to be of more than simply "artistic" significance.
AT ONE LEVEL, Turks is a tale of the unexpected. What, for example, could explain the presence of a 14th-century gravestone carved with a Nestorian Christian cross and two angels? Well, it may have something to do with the fact that the Uighurs, leaders of a Turkic tribe which hailed from Mongolia and Siberia, were briefly converted to Manichaeism by refugees from the Middle East - though they later flirted with Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. From the Uighurs through the Seljuks through the Timurids to the Ottomans, the Turkic peoples absorbed the diverse cultures and religions they encountered in their wanderings: the songs of the shamans, the chants of Buddhist monks, Chinese pottery, Persian poetry. As the gallery guide points out, although the Turks were not always the makers of works of art, "they played an important role in the formation of new artistic traditions and presided over polyglot societies that were characterised by dynamic cultural exchanges".
Thus many of the exhibition's oldest images are strikingly "Chinese", as are a series of large blue-and-white 17th-century ceramic bowls whose designs look exactly like those of Ming pottery until closer examination reveals the "corporate logo" of the Ottoman Empire: highly stylised tulips and other floral forms. But then, what to make of a portrait of a court attendant from 12th-century Iran, whose flowing locks and sky-blue robe would fit effortlessly into the pages of a French medieval romance? Or a 15th-century ink-on-paper painting which looks exactly like one of those Picasso drawings of bulls, with their bold, semi-abstract black-and-white lines? Stand in front of a 14th-century Timurid tombstone in the shape of a ram, and you may feel you have arrived at some essential truth of Turkic nomadic culture - the ram, after all, was a marker of social status in central Asia, with the rival dynasties to that of Timur, aka Tamerlane the Great, known respectively as the "White Sheep" and the "Black Sheep". A mere century later, however, Timur's grandson, Ulugh Beg, was busy building an observatory in Samarkand which turned out to be one of the greatest monuments of Islamic science. Not bad for a nomad.
The final three chapters in this complex story are devoted to the Ottoman Turks, and pieces more readily recognisable as "Turkish" to Western eyes: the flowing forms of Islamic calligraphy; a pair of walnut doors inlaid with ebony, ivory, turquoise, mother of pearl, mahogany and metal stringing; embroidered textiles, Korans, turban covers. Many of these have never been exhibited outside Turkey before, though they will be well known to anyone who has visited the galleries at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul or who has strolled across the Hippodrome to the elegant (and infinitely calmer) environs of the Museum of Islamic Arts.
Indeed, regular visitors to the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin will find much that looks familiar. But to see them here, juxtaposed with things that are infinitely strange - a bronze incense-burner in the shape of a lynx, say, or carved poplar stakes from a first- century Uighur temple - is to see them through new eyes.
"Turkish art," as an introductory essay by the exhibition's curator, David Roxborough, and writer John Freely in a special issue of the Royal Academy's magazine, RA, puts it, "remains a fascinating conundrum". And then some.
Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600-1600 runs at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, until Apr 12. Admission: £12. The exhibition is open until 10pm on Fridays and Saturdays, with free live Turkish music on Friday evenings. Further information: www.turks.org.uk