Trade with the Orient in the Early Modern Period and the Formation of Identity of the Transylvanian Saxons: The Ottoman Carpets of the Protestant Parish Church in Bistriţa (Romania) in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum

Stephanie Armer, Eva Bergt und Anja Kregeloh

Since 1952 the Germanisches Nationalmuseum has had among its holdings 55 Ottoman carpets from the 16th to the 18th centuries from the Protestant Parish Church in Bistriţa. This collection, unique in terms of its historical completeness, will, for the first time, be the subject of a comprehensive research project, which will analyse not only the significance of the carpets in the early modern period but also their identity-generating role in the 19th and early 20th centuries. From the mid-15th century on, the carpets, made in Anatolia, reached Transylvania and testify to the intensive commercial ties and the cultural exchange between the Ottoman Empire and Transylvania that was at times subject to Ottoman dominance. Art-historical and art-technological examinations of a representative selection of 20 carpets and analysis of written sources aim at identifying the carpets’ dates and places of origin as well as trade routes more accurately. As status symbols and gifts the carpets played a role in the representational culture of the German nobility and middle class as well as the guilds in Transylvania. Starting with the Reformation they found their way into Protestant churches, usually as donations, where, despite their Islamic roots, especially those of the prayer rugs, they were accorded functions in the liturgy and ceremonies. Sources such as inventories, sacristans’ registers and wills are expected to shed light on this. In the first half of the 19th century they were not greatly esteemed by the parishioners, as witnessed by their present condition. Yet they were a part of the German-speaking culture in Transylvania and assumed an identity-shaping role for the Transylvanian Saxons, who, in the course of Romanian nationalist endeavours in the 19th century, attempted via their own historical awareness to delimit themselves from the neighbouring ethnic groups. From 1907 on the carpets were treated as museum items, often filling large wall spaces in Protestant churches. There they were displayed as testimony to Transylvania’s economic heyday in the 15th to 17th centuries, which was strongly influenced by the Ottoman trading links.