Nikolaos Vryzidis
This post will briefly expose the many lives of the Ottoman fabrics in the collection of the Byzantine and Christian Museum of Athens. This group will act as a case study for the decontextualization and recontextualization that takes place when objects travel from one environment to another. While the Ottoman fabrics of the Benaki Museum’s Islamic art collection were mostly private purchases or donations, the Byzantine and Christian Museum’s so-called ‘oriental textiles’ (ανατολικά υφάσματα) present a completely different history, one that could also be studied through the lens of object biography (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Case of ‘oriental’ textiles at the Byzantine Museum, Athens, in the year 1983. (Archive of Elena Papastavrou, former curator of the Byzantine and Christian Museum).
This methodological approach marshals information on the life of objects, aiming at the recreation of their previous whereabouts before entering a museum rather than assessing just their physical characteristics. The study of an object’s manufacture, ownership, use and reuse, can reveal otherwise hidden cultural dynamics or even new perspectives on established narratives, thus, problematising and nuancing them. But above all, the object biography approach allows us to follow the complex lives of transcultural objects, in this case woven fabrics, that travel through different contexts and acquire novel meanings.
The core of the museum’s general holdings consists of the collection of the Christian Archaeological Society (ChAE). It is thanks to the scholarly missions undertaken by the passionate Byzantinist Georgios Lampakis (1854-1914) that a relatively large number of objects was amassed from ecclesial sacristies located within the borders of the Greek state. This important collection was later complemented by refugee heirlooms brought from Asia Minor/Anatolia, as well as some donations and purchases. Lampakis was not concerned with the art itself, as his criteria of gathering objects did not seem to be primarily aesthetic or perhaps even historical. On the contrary, his attraction was centred more on the objects’ status or function as sacred relics. In other words, objects used in the Orthodox liturgy with an association to prominent ecclesiastical figures. No doubt, this approach went along with what such society, which kept its name to this day, would regard as its main mission. But it fell out of line with the basic principles of contemporary to that period archaeological and art historical research, which was governed more by the logic of stylistic or chronological taxonomies than anthropological or religious criteria. Nonetheless, the picking of holy relics unintentionally produced an eclectic assemblage that was representative of different aspects of Greece’s heritage, perhaps even without the filter of the Modern Greek national narrative and its cultural priorities. In fact, one should conceive the museum’s holdings of Ottoman fabrics as a beneficial aspect of Lampakis’s approach (Fig. 2). Indeed, most of these fabrics come from vestments that, alongside other liturgical objects, were collected from monasteries and churches, with their documented provenance allowing us to trace the distribution of this consumption pattern in Greece under Ottoman rule. As a side note, the collection of refugee exchangeable property was governed by the same logic: they were heirlooms that Greek Orthodox from Asia Minor had brought with them when they were forcibly relocated to Greece. Many of these Anatolian Christian heirlooms included Persian fabrics. An aspect of heritage one would not imagine to have been a priority for the Modern Greek national narrative thus came into being.

Fig. 2. Fragments of a vestment (possibly an epitrachelion), lampas weave, silk and metal thread, Constantinople or Bursa, sixteenth century, Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens. (Image courtesy of the Byzantine and Christian Museum, photographer: Nikos Mylonas; inv. no. BXM 1693).
The vestments that Lampakis collected are a remnant of a very specific consumption practice that characterized ecclesiastical material culture: the use of sumptuous cloth by the Greek Orthodox Church. The first episode in their life took place in the weaving workshops of Ottoman Bursa and Constantinople, where Muslim, Christian and Jewish artisans produced fabrics with generically secular patterns for a religiously diverse clientele. The Christian elite consumed artifacts that conveyed prestige and visually spoke of its position to the wider society. Besides the textile market, pious oblations and the custom of the robe of honour were alternative channels through which the Church gained access to this kind of cultural capital. With this in mind, it seems reasonable to assume that the material of these vestments already could have had a previous life as secular furnishing or vesting items. At the same time, the further recycling of fabrics within the context of the sacristy is another dynamic worth considering when looking at them. Thus, these fabrics already enjoyed a remarkable intracultural and intercultural mobility, with the end-product of this process being their sacralization. As already stated before, it is this complex life that paved their way for a new context, that of the museum.
Nonetheless, while it is remarkable that an aspect of Ottoman heritage was saved by Lampakis as a Christian relic, the integrity of its identity had to wrestle with the dynamic of the Byzantine Museum’s museological approach at that time. First of all, it seems that the keepers of the collection reserved a special case for those vestments tailored of “anatolika (ανατολικά)”, meaning oriental, fabrics. This categorization effectively separated them from the religious embroidery produced at Christian workshops (Fig. 1). In this case, fragments extracted from the vestments were put together for the creation of panels with a focus on the overall integrity of the woven pattern (Fig. 3). The treatment reserved for these objects does not only imply that their sacred status was put aside, but also that this new taxonomy led to a moderate distancing from this type of Ottoman heritage. Nonetheless, the exact same practice points out that despite their ‘orientalisation’ the fabrics were appreciated for their aesthetic value and materiality. Otherwise, why would they have been included in the permanent display of one of the three major national museums in Athens (the two others being the National Archaeological and the Museum of Folk Art (now Museum of Modern Greek Culture))?

Fig. 3. Panel of the fragments in Fig. 2, rearranged in a new display (Image courtesy of the Byzantine and Christian Museum).
In an attempt to contextualize, it could be argued that Greece’s shift from being an Ottoman province to a European nation-state, more or less under the political and cultural influence of the collective West, was to a certain extent responsible for this approach. After all, the then director of the Byzantine Museum, George Sotiriou (1880-1956), had spent time in a Germanic environment during a period when Islamic art was gaining more attention, as the 1910 Munich exhibition Meisterwerke Muhammedanischer Kunst also hints. It cannot be a mere coincidence that the only major change in the second edition of the museum’s catalogue, that Sotiriou authored, was the appearance of the new taxonomy of “oriental fabrics”. This state of affairs continued for pretty much the whole of the twentieth century and until the museum’s refurbishment in the early twenty-first century. Perhaps the recent openness and acceptance of Ottoman heritage by Greek archaeologists and art historians calls for a new understanding of these remnants, following the complexity of the many lives they led before and after arriving at the museum.
Further readings
Olga Gratziou and Anastasia Lazaridou (eds.), Από τη Χριστιανική Συλλογή στο Βυζαντινό Μουσείο (1884-1930) [From the Christian Collection to the Byzantine Museum (1884-1930)], Athens, 2006.
Elias Kolovos, Georgios Pallis and Panagiotis K. Poulos (eds.), Οθωμανικά μνημεία στην Ελλάδα: Κληρονομιές υπό διαπραγμάτευση [Ottoman Monuments in Greece: Heritages under Negotiation], Athens, 2023.
Elena Papastavrou and Nikolaos Vryzidis, “Sacred Patchwork: Patterns of Textile Reuse in Greek Vestments and Ecclesiastical Veils of the Ottoman Era”, in Ivana Jevtić and Suzan Yalman (eds.), Spolia Reincarnated: Afterlives of Objects, Materials, and Spaces in Anatolia from Antiquity to the Ottoman Era, Istanbul, 2019, p. 259-286.
George Sotiriou, Guide du Musée byzantin d’Athènes, Athens, 1932.
Nikolaos Vryzidis and Elena Papastavrou, “The double life of ‘oriental’ textiles at the Byzantine & Christian Museum, Athens: interpreting storage and displayability of Ottoman silks in 20th-century Greece,” in Mirjam Brusius and Kavita Singh (eds.), Museum Storage and Meaning: Tales from the Crypt, Abingdon – New York, 2018, p. 218-228.




