The Fingerprints in the Gold: Arsen Yarman’s Monumental Study of Armenian Goldsmiths under the Ottomans

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

In a workshop somewhere in Istanbul, an Armenian goldsmith bent over a diamond intended for the sultan. He had been working so long, with such concentration, that the world outside his bench had receded entirely. A hair fell from his head onto the stone, unnoticed; when he looked down again and saw the fine dark line crossing the facet, he thought he had cracked the gem.

Arsen Yarman tells this story in the preface to his two-volume Jewelry and Armenian Goldsmiths under the Ottomans. At first reading, it is a small human moment. Look again, though, and it contains almost everything the book is about: the master absorbed in the material; the near-invisible weight of what he is attempting; and — crucially — the fact that, for most of four centuries, the hands that made Ottoman jewellery remained unnamed.

For those four centuries, such hands shaped the jewelled objects that dazzled the Ottoman court. The aigrette pinned to Sultan Abdülmecid’s turban; the diamond-set gun of Mahmud I, now at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore; the earrings Refia Sultan ordered from her goldsmith Manas Hekimian in correspondence preserved in the imperial archives. Anyone with a passing familiarity with Ottoman jewellery has long accepted that a substantial share of this splendour was Armenian-made. Until now, no comprehensive scholarly work had named those makers, traced their workshops, or reconstructed the families who carried the craft through the centuries.

The archaeologist who came back

What Yarman brings to the project is a biography that shadows his subject. In 1968 he enrolled to read archaeology at the University of Padua, convinced that the stones and pillars of a vanished civilisation could be reassembled if one looked carefully enough. Family circumstances intervened; he was redirected into mechanical engineering and a long career in industry. The archaeologist waited.

When retirement came in the early 2000s, Yarman returned to history with the accumulated force of four postponed decades. In steady succession there appeared studies of the Osmanlı Sağlık Hizmetlerinde Ermeniler ve Surp Pırgiç Ermeni Hastanesi Tarihi [Armenians in Ottoman Health Services and the History of Surp Pırgitch Armenian Hospital] (2001); the provincial archives of Sivas and Palu-Harput (2008 and 2010); Armenian written culture (2012); and, most consequentially, Sultan II. Mahmud ve Kazaz Artin Amira (2013), his book on Mahmud II’s Armenian sarraf. Each of these quietly pointed toward the present volumes, which took a further seven years.

At the origin of the work, by Yarman’s own account, stand three family heirlooms: his grandfather Harutiun’s pocket watch; his grandmother Armenuhi’s wedding ring, made in Tokat in 1889, its design two small hands clasped in gold; and Setrag Yarmayan’s wrought-copper mess kit, made in the same Anatolian town in 1896. History, beauty, labour — the three axes on which the book is eventually built — were, he writes, already legible in these three objects from a single Anatolian family’s keeping.

Two volumes, 7.8 kilograms

The finished work sits on a desk like an object of its subject. Two large-format volumes (24 × 33 cm) in a protective hard case, together weighing 7.8 kilograms — and inside, nearly 2,000 jewellers’ names and works from 1700 onwards, each with their seals and signatures; over 750 archival documents; 1,200 images, photographs and tables; 300 jewellery drawings; 54 pages of reference notes; 18 pages of bibliography; a 39-page index. Published by Yapı Kredi Yayınları, Turkey’s largest publishing house, it is, before anything else, a reference work built to last.

History, labour, aesthetics

Yarman’s method rests on what he calls a three-axis approach: history, labour and aesthetics. The history comes from the Ottoman archives — the Cevdet classification first, because of the depth of early-period material — cross-referenced against the Mekhitarist monastic archives in Venice and Vienna, private family papers, memoirs, and oral-history sessions with the last apprentice-trained masters of the Grand Bazaar. The labour is recovered through workshop records, masters’ fees, material costs, and the 300 drawings reproduced in the volumes, many from personal family archives and most never previously published. The aesthetics are read through the objects: liturgical silver, orders and medals, arms and swords, watches, and courtly ornaments whose styles shift visibly as Ottoman taste pivots from Safavid-influenced setting toward European diamond-cut brilliance. The three axes are not a framework imposed on the material; they are how Yarman first learned to look, beginning with a wedding ring.

A diamond in a pastrami pouch

One figure from the early chapters will stand for many. In the late eighteenth century, the Armenian merchant Apraham Sofialian came into possession of one of the world’s great diamonds — the Nur-el Ayn, the Light of the Eye — and faced the problem of getting it from Persia to Istanbul without being robbed and killed for it. His solution, recorded in a 1788 dispatch by the Swedish ambassador Heidenstam, was to disguise himself as a cameleer and hide the stone inside a pouch of pastrami. He arrived safely.

The detail, absurd and arresting, is representative of the world the book excavates. Armenian sarrafs — the moneylenders and bankers who functioned as a kind of Ottoman-Armenian nobility — were at the centre of the precious-stone trade that flowed from India and Persia into Istanbul, and from there into the workshops that served the palace. Serpos Amira Yerevantsi built a fortune on saffron, silk and precious stones; his rival Yacoub Amira Hovhannessian reached, at his height, a position in which scarcely a significant stone could change hands in the capital without him. Their wealth, Yarman argues, rivalled that of the great European banking houses of the same period. A long chapter devoted to the Duzian (Düzoğlu) family traces three centuries of service at the Imperial Mint and Goldsmiths’ Guild, their relations with Kazaz Artin Amira Bezdjian, their role in diplomatic gift-giving, and the periodic reversals that struck them down.

The later chapters move the lens outward and then inward. Liturgical commissions for the Catholicosates of Etchmiadzin and Cilicia and the Armenian Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Istanbul occupy a full chapter; Ottoman orders and Western-style brilliants of the nineteenth century, another. The last of them closes with the custodians of the tradition — Levon Mazlumyan (1869–1933), the Kirazyan archive of drawings, the Şadyan brothers, Misak Oskanyan, and the diamond master Zare Goboyan — who carried the craft into the Republican era. Along the way, near-forgotten techniques resurface: diamond-cutting done with foot pedals; the use of breath rather than oxygen for welding; and tombac work, a copper-zinc gilded technique described here in such detail that Filiz Vural Aram of URART Design, a jewellery designer of three decades’ standing, has said she encountered it properly for the first time in these pages.

The tombstone at Balıklı

Much of the book’s most important work is quiet. The swords of Chief Sword-maker Sarkis Adjemoğlu are displayed at the Topkapı, the Harbiye Military Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Benaki Museum of Athens — the last two recording his name simply as “Acem oglu,” without nationality. Yarman picked up a trail that the scholar Kevork Pamukciyan had laid down in 1952 and went looking for Adjemoğlu’s grave in the Armenian cemetery at Balıklı, in Istanbul. The cemetery’s administrative records had been destroyed by fire during the September 1955 events aimed at the city’s non-Muslim communities, and the administration could not help him. Wandering among the stones without much hope, he noticed a large gravestone off the main alley, overturned and half-buried. When it was lifted — by crane — the two crossed swords on its face emerged. The chief sword-maker had a name, and a place, again.

Similarly, the jewelled gun of Mahmud I in the Walters Art Museum, with a dagger and writing utensils concealed in partitions carved into its stock, is here restored to the workshop of Hovhannes Duzian — a reattribution Yarman develops through a 2015 essay by Bora Keskiner, Tim Stanley and Rüstem Ünver in Pearls on a String. Reinforcing this institutional recovery, the book reproduces in full the thirty-four articles of the 1898 Armenian Artisan Goldsmiths’ Guild Charter (Ganon Garkatrutyants Joğovo Vosgeriç Arhesdavorats), originally published in the magazine Luma. Its provisions extend well beyond a trade guild’s expected remit, regulating apprenticeship, workshop conduct and guild governance alongside something close to a mutual-aid structure covering illness, old age and death. Alongside the sarraf lists of 1691–1872 and the silversmiths’ lists of 1761–1820, the Charter completes a portrait of Armenian goldsmithery as a profession with its own institutions, ethics and social safety net — not a scattering of individually gifted men.

The workshop is never empty

What the book pointedly is not is a hagiography. Armenian contributions appear throughout as part of a broader Ottoman goldsmithing milieu that also included Greek, Jewish and Muslim masters, each with their own workshops and networks. Yarman declines to include some of the most prominent contemporary Armenian jewellers — Avedis Kendir, Sevan Bıçakçı, Arman Suciyan — on the stated ground that they lack the multi-generational family tradition the book is designed to document. That the excluded have themselves publicly praised the volume, Bıçakçı and Kendir among nine testimonial figures that also include the Ottomanist Christoph K. Neumann, reads, quietly, as a vindication of the criterion.

For collectors, historians and saleroom specialists, the practical value is immediate. Pieces catalogued under general headings — “Ottoman court,” “Istanbul school,” “Turkish, 19th century” — can now, in many cases, be tested against a corpus of named makers, documented commissions, seals and signatures. Signed works that lost their attribution between sales may recover one. For institutions, this is the consolidated reference Ottoman jewellery studies have long lacked. None of the rigour obscures the pleasure of the objects: the aigrette set with brilliants at Abdülmecid’s turban, the silver vase wrought by Nigoghos Tchizmedjian for Abdülhamid II’s twenty-fifth enthronement anniversary, the letter from Refia Sultan to Manas Hekimian over an earring order, the gold-and-silver Santa Maria that Avedis Kendir built over nearly a decade.

Yarman writes in his preface that a goldsmith’s workshop is never empty. Even when the master sits alone at the bench, his own master is beside him, and behind them both the master’s master, and so on — a lineage holding the hand that holds the hammer. In a sense, this is the work his book performs. It fills the workshops of four hundred years with the names, the seals and the stories that have been missing from most of our histories. And he is not finished. The next volume, he signals, would follow Armenian goldsmiths beyond the Ottoman frontier: there are, contemporary travellers report, workshops as far afield as China where Armenian is still spoken.