PAINTINGS THAT PROTECT

Reverse-glass Calligraphic Painting

Unknown artist (Turkey)

If you lived in Turkey during the 19th or 20th centuries, how would you protect your home or business from the evil eye and attract prosperity?

You’d hang a reverse-glass painting with a religious theme like this one on your wall. But as the public’s tastes changed, such paintings were increasingly relegated to the dusty shelves of antique shops. And so I found mine in Istanbul’s colorful Kadıköy neighborhood.

It’s an example of tasviri hat (pictorial calligraphy) in which Turkish calligraphers transform Arabic phrases into the shapes of objects. They do this by elongating, wrapping, and rotating letters to create the outline and details of the object being drawn.

Curious about the meaning of the Arabic, I turned to my friend and linguist Şeyda Ergül, who explains its several Quranic verses and important Islamic phrases…

The pink sail, for instance, contains the ‘Shahada,’ one of the Five Pillars of Islam: There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah. The red sail states the first phrase of the ‘Basmala’—In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful—a phrase Muslims frequently recite before starting daily activities and religious practices. Ship compositions like this one often include on its hull the names of the ‘Companions of the Cave’ (‘Ashab al-Kahf’)and their dog.

Interestingly, this story about six youths who escape religious oppression by hiding in a cave where they sleep for 300 years (guarded by their dog) parallels the Christian ‘Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.’