Anatolia's memory of colour has more often been written on cloth than on paper. Yazmacılık, the craft of block-printed textiles, is the art of turning a plain piece of cloth into a patterned surface with the help of carved wooden blocks and dyes; sometimes the design is drawn freehand with a brush, but far more often it is made by striking a dye-soaked block against the fabric again and again. In Amasya and its surroundings this skill lived on as part of the old economic life of the Yeşilırmak valley, closely bound up with weaving, and it served both as a livelihood and as an aesthetic language of everyday life. Printed cloth could be found in almost every corner of the house, from the yemeni scarves that women tied over their heads to trousseau bundles, quilt covers and tablecloths. Although the town that first comes to mind today when one speaks of yazma is neighbouring Tokat, the court registers of Amasya recorded in detail how widely these fabrics were used in the city, where they came from and what they were bought and sold for.

Amasya's relationship with printed cloth is best understood within the weaving, dyeing and textile trade that the city sustained over the centuries. In the Ottoman period the city had dyehouses, looms weaving silk and cotton, markets selling cloth, and caravans bringing fabrics from distant towns. The printer's block, the weaver's loom and the dyer's cauldron were links in the same chain. The technique of yazma, its motifs and its place in the home take on their meaning within this wider framework.

Yazma, Basma and Yazmacılık: The Terms

The Turkish words for this art have become tangled with one another. Finely woven, patterned cottons used across Anatolia mainly as women's headscarves are called "yazma", and the work of printing designs onto cloth with blocks is called "yazmacılık". "Basma" is a broader term and refers to any fabric patterned by printing. In the literature the terms baskıcılık, basmacılık and yazmacılık are sometimes used in the same sense and sometimes interchangeably. The yemeni belongs to the same family: the name is given to a printed headscarf of fine cotton cloth whose edges are often trimmed with needle lace (iğne oyası).

Yazma is made in two main ways. In brush-work yazma (kalem işi) the design is drawn onto the fabric with a brush and coloured with a brush as well; this work is close to painting, demands great skill, and surviving examples are few. In printed yazma, by contrast, the design is carved into wooden blocks, and the block is dipped in dye and struck onto the cloth. Because printed work can be reproduced and lends itself to production, yazmacılık is generally understood to mean this second method. Researchers place a third technique between the two: in the brush-and-block technique the outlines of the design are printed with a block and the interiors are afterwards coloured with a brush. Most of the old Istanbul yazmas were made in this way.

The idea of leaving an impression with a block is known to be very old. It is recorded that in Mesopotamia wooden blocks were pressed into clay and that seals and stamps of baked clay belonging to the Hittites have been found in Anatolia; some sources claim that the first printed examples were made with these spiral and four-petalled flower-shaped stamps, but this remains a hypothesis. The oldest known example in the world of cloth printed with a wooden block is a child's tunic of the fourth century found at Akhmim in Egypt. In Anatolia the technique is thought to have been used before the Turks by Armenian and Syriac craftsmen as well. Yazmacılık developed in Tokat, Bartın, Gaziantep, Diyarbakır and Kastamonu, and produced its finest examples in Istanbul in the seventeenth century. Today Tokat, Kastamonu and Bartın are counted among the main places where traditional yazmacılık continues.

Weaving and Dyeing in Ottoman Amasya

Amasya was one of the important stations on the great trade route that ran from Tabriz to Bursa. This road shaped the city's destiny, turning Amasya into a centre where Persian silks were marketed, where the first stages of silk processing were carried out and where cloth was woven. In the sixteenth century the city had a dyehouse, a candle workshop (şem'hane) and a mint, and silk weaving was widespread. In 1554-1555 the quantity of silk that entered the city through official channels and was weighed within ten months reached 10,632 lodra, roughly fifteen tonnes. Amasya is said to have been one of the five or six cities where, in the second half of the sixteenth century, silks of a quality fit to be presented to the palace were woven. For a city whose population stood at around seven thousand in 1523, this was a remarkable productive capacity.

The dyehouse holds a special place in the history of printed cloth. Historians of the Ottoman city count the dyehouse, along with the bakery and the slaughterhouse, among the indispensable workshops in the founding or rebuilding of a town. It is known that the yarns and textiles produced within the sanjak were dyed in these dyehouses. According to Adnan Gürbüz's study of the sixteenth-century sanjak of Amasya, Amasya kirbas, Merzifon kirbas tent cloth, Ladik prayer rugs, Amasya kutni, Amasya red boğası and Gümüş boğası were goods sought after in the Ottoman cotton market for their quality. Boğası was a cloth woven in plain weave from thick cotton yarn spun by hand or on the spinning wheel, resembling today's unbleached calico, and it was used for a great many articles, from kaftan linings to wrapping cloths, from kerchiefs to pillows. It was woven white, but there were dyed varieties as well, which were given names such as "nar neftisi", "cengârî", "samanî", "cevizî" and "darçınî" according to their dyestuff and colouring technique.

Some of these names directly evoke plant dye sources such as pomegranate and walnut, and they call to mind a world in which cloth around Amasya was coloured with vegetable dyes. The raw materials the printer needed, plain-woven cotton cloth and vegetable dye, were already being produced in the city and the sanjak. The French traveller Tournefort, who came to Tokat in 1701, is reported to have written that in this period Tokat and Amasya produced as much cloth as the rest of the country. Even if the remark is an exaggeration, it reflects the weight of the two neighbouring cities in the textile life of the region.

Weaving kept its place in the city's economic life in the centuries that followed. Evliya Çelebi writes that in the seventeenth century Amasya had busy and prosperous markets with some 1,060 shops. The French geographer Vital Cuinet records that at the end of the nineteenth century there were close to 2,500 weavers in the city; some local sources give the same figure for Gümüşhacıköy. In 1863 Amasya was among the pilot regions chosen for trials of cotton seed brought from Egypt. In 1864 an annual fair was established that opened on the fifteenth of December and ran to the end of the month. In a city where cotton, weaving and trade were so lively, it is no surprise that printed cloth spread into everyday life.

Yazma, Basma and Yemeni in the Islamic Court Registers

The documents that best show how widespread printed cloth really was in Amasya are the qadi's registers. When a person died, the qadi drew up an inventory of the property to be divided among the heirs, put a value on each item and entered them in the register as an estate record (tereke). In these records the name, type, origin and price of fabrics were written down with care; the detail of the entries shows that the qadis knew their textiles well. Halil İnalcık points out that estate inventories and price registers are exceptionally valuable for showing which social groups used which textile products. Hüsnü Yücekaya examined more than two hundred estate records spread across seven Amasya registers from the years 1784-1880 and brought the city's world of fabrics to light.

In these records 59 different fabrics were identified, and 105 kinds when their sub-types are included. At the head of the cottons come chintz (çit), dimity, sheeting (çarşaf), yazma, basma, peştamal, yemeni, muslin (tülbent), handkerchief cloth, peşkir, towelling, batiste (patiska) and lining. In register no. 61, covering 1784-1786, basma and yemeni already appear at that date. In register no. 68, dated 1811, fabrics such as çiçekli, hatayi, sheeting and peşkir are recorded alongside basma and yemeni. Among the fabrics recorded under the name yazma, "Frankish yazma", "Tokat yazma" and "red yazma" (al yazma) are listed separately. In the register for 1862-1868 Frankish yazma was valued at 3 kuruş, Tokat yazma at 4 and red yazma at 60. In the same period a yemeni was valued at 5 kuruş, while a yemeni of Diyarbakır basma was recorded at 72 kuruş.

The Rise of Basma

The most striking finding of the registers is that the fabric most used in Amasya in the nineteenth century was basma. In frequency basma is followed by broadcloth (çuha), and then by sheeting and shawls. From the 1830s onwards basma begins to appear in the records with steadily increasing frequency. In register no. 78, covering 1839-1845, basma is mentioned 23 times among the ten most frequently named fabrics and makes up fifteen per cent of them. In register no. 89, from 1862-1865, basma is mentioned 58 times and reaches twenty-six per cent of the ten most frequently named fabrics; when all fabric entries are taken into account, roughly one in five is basma. Yücekaya looks for the likely cause of this rise in the changing methods of cotton production and in the reflection on the city of developments in the textile industry.

Basma came in several kinds. Alongside Diyarbakır basma, cüveydi basma, English basma and batiste basma, the records list printed shawls such as the "Frankish basma shawl" and the "round basma shawl" (basma şal değirmi). The prices reflect this variety: a bolt of cüveydi basma was recorded at 154 kuruş, one endaze of basma at 3.5 kuruş and a Frankish basma shawl at 8.5 kuruş. These figures show that cheap kinds of printed cloth suited to everyday use existed side by side with expensive, refined ones. Printed shawls and yazma headscarves were spread across a price range wide enough to find a place in the chests of households of every class in the city.

Tokat Yazma and Fabrics from Elsewhere

A quarter of the kinds of fabric identified in the registers were brought from outside Amasya; around nine per cent were imports from foreign countries. Among the imports are Frankish yazma, English basma, the Frankish basma shawl, Indian shawls and Persian shawls. Until the 1830s imported fabrics were mostly of Iranian origin; thereafter the share of Western fabrics grew. Among those from within the empire, Diyarbakır, Damascus, Aleppo and Tokat stand out. Alaca, basma, gezi and çitari are seen to have come from Diyarbakır, alaca, kutnu and çitari from Damascus, and tent cloth and kutnu from Aleppo. On the basis of this picture Yücekaya stresses that imported fabrics held only a limited place in the Amasya market until the 1880s and that Ottoman textile production rested on many centres.

The fabrics from Tokat are of particular importance for Amasya's yazma culture. The fact that they were recorded separately in the registers as "Tokat yazma" and "Tokat yemeni" shows that the printed headscarves of the neighbouring city were a well-known and sought-after commodity in Amasya. No named yazma design peculiar to Amasya, however, is recorded in the sources available today. This suggests that the use of yazma in the city was supplied to a large extent from Tokat, the great printing centre of the region, and from distant centres such as Diyarbakır, and that local craftsmen worked within this broad regional tradition.

Making the Blocks

The foundation of yazmacılık is the carving of the design into a wooden block. The block needs a wood that is easy to carve, light, durable and absorbent. Craftsmen most often prefer lime (linden); pear, the wild pear known as ahlat, hornbeam and pine are also used. The most serviceable blocks are said to be those made of lime and hornbeam. In Tokat yazmacılık blocks are carved only from lime, preferably from trees grown in damp ground; this wood is soft, water-resistant and holds gum well. Because wood cut along the grain leaves unwanted lines in the print, the wood from which a block is to be made is cut across the grain.

Before carving begins the wood is dried of moisture and the piece to be carved is dipped for a while in a molten mixture of paraffin and beeswax. The sources record the mixture as roughly three-quarters paraffin and one-quarter beeswax; tallow is sometimes used in place of paraffin. This treatment both makes carving easier and allows the block to be used for a long time without being affected by the dye. The design is transferred onto the block in reverse and then carved with small knives called "nakış bul". The depth of carving varies between one and one and a half centimetres depending on how dense the design is; if the depth is too shallow, dye smearing onto the ground of the block spoils the print. A single block is enough for one-colour designs, but for the multicoloured printing called "elvan" a separate block is prepared for each colour. Block-cutting is therefore a speciality in its own right, and the carving of a good block can take days.

Metal blocks have also been used in yazmacılık alongside wooden ones. Made by bending metal strips to the shape of the motif and driving them into wood, these blocks are useful for printing very fine lines and in certain dyeing techniques. Craftsmen used their blocks for many years, repaired worn ones and carefully kept those that were well carved. The preservation of more than two hundred yazma blocks in the Kastamonu Museum shows that these blocks were regarded as valuable holdings passed from generation to generation. Around Amasya, too, it is said that some blocks were treasured as heirlooms and handed down within the family.

Dyes and Colouring Techniques

In traditional yazma the dyes were obtained from plants. Buckthorn (cehri), madder, walnut husk and leaf, pomegranate rind and onion skin are the best-known dye sources. In Kastamonu walnut leaves, walnut husks and peach and quince leaves are gathered while still fresh and boiled together with the red roots of a plant called sarmaşık otu; once cooled, glue (çiriş) is mixed in to thicken the dye and fix it, and this dye is called "leaf dye" (yaprak boya). These vegetable dyes give the yazma a calm, soft colour drawn from nature. Over time ready-made aniline dyes, bought because they are practical and cheap, became widespread, and today synthetic dyes are mostly used in yazmacılık.

Tokat's famous red is the most laborious example of this tradition. Onto cloth that has been washed and stripped of its finish, the outlines and details of the design are first printed in black. Next a mordant ground is applied with a mixture of alum and black dye; depending on the proportions of the mixture, the yazma turns out red or red-purple. The cloths used to be left in stables for fifteen days, then boiled over a wood fire in cauldrons containing alizarin, juniper berries and buckthorn, kept constantly in motion so that they absorbed the dye. Last of all, after being rinsed in cold water and dried, the cloth was printed with the elvan colours one by one. The colours of yazmas made by this method were bright and fast. With alizarin dye going out of production this technique was abandoned, and with it the colour known as "Tokat red" (Tokat alı) disappeared.

Researchers distinguish four methods of colouring yazma. In the karakalem technique black is printed on white cloth. In the discharge technique (aşındırma) a block coated with a mixture of plum gum and lime paste is printed onto damp cloth dyed black; when the cloth has been left for twenty-four hours and washed in plenty of water, the areas touched by the lime turn white and white designs appear on the black ground. In the dipping technique (daldırma) the printed motifs are covered with glue or beeswax, the cloth is dipped in the dye vat, and only the ground outside the motifs takes the colour. In the blue-bleaching technique (mavi ağartma) white cloth is dyed with the powdered indigo that printers call "kozan blue", outlines are printed on it, and after several stages of dyeing and washing the yazma is completed by printing elvan colours of the desired shade onto the areas left white.

Work at the Printing Table

The kind of cloth also matters in yazmacılık. Cotton is the most suitable material because it absorbs dye quickly and prevents it from running; synthetic fabrics are not favoured. Unbleached calico, known locally as kaput bezi, muslin and mermerşahi are the most commonly used fabrics; cottons such as Şile cloth and batiste are also used. The cloth is cut according to its intended use; for headscarves and covers there are various sizes, from squares of one hundred centimetres to pieces of more than two metres.

Printing is done on a table covered with felt. The felt ensures good contact between block and cloth and absorbs excess dye. The dye is held in an arrangement of two nested trays: the large lower tray holds the dye mixture and the small upper one a felt pad soaked in dye. The craftsman presses the block onto this felt to pick up the dye and strikes it onto the cloth. As the felt runs low, fresh dye is transferred from below; this is done with a tool called a "yağlangıç", made by binding felt to the end of a wooden handle. If there is too little dye on the felt the design comes out faint, and if there is too much it blurs; striking this balance is possible only through long experience.

The craftsman usually plans the composition in his head, without making any mark on the cloth, and chooses the appropriate blocks. The block dipped in dye is pressed lightly onto the cloth to transfer the design. Each impression must follow the previous one in perfect harmony, because the evenness of the repeating pattern betrays the training of the craftsman's eye and hand. If the design comes out faint in some place, it is retouched with a fine-tipped brush. When printing a border or a central medallion, if the block does not fit the remaining space, part of the cloth is covered with paper and the block is printed so that it overlaps the paper and completes the design. The consistency of the dye, the humidity of the air and the type of cloth all directly affect the result; all are fine adjustments learned through experience.

Motifs and Their Meanings

The motifs on yazmas are mostly drawn from nature. Compositions are built by bringing together flowers, leaves, branches, fruit, trees and animal figures. Under the influence of the attitude to images in Islamic art, these motifs are rendered in stylised form. Motifs vary with their use, region and period; among the designs carved on blocks, besides floral and geometric ornament, one also finds objects such as ewers and teapots, script, and even human and animal figures. The fabrics named "çiçekli" (flowered) in the Amasya registers show that flower-patterned cloth was recognised in the city as a distinct type.

Popular tradition attaches various meanings to yazma motifs. The carnation stands for love, the tulip for grace, branch and leaf for abundance, and the tree of life for the continuity of the lineage. In this sense each motif is regarded as the bearer of a wish, a prayer or a hope for plenty. In neighbouring Tokat there are named designs such as "Tokat içi dolusu" and "Tokat elmalısı"; Tokat elmalısı consists of apple motifs printed in red or red-purple on a black ground and is used around Zile, a district bordering Amasya. The "Çengelköy" design, of Istanbul origin, was also printed in the Tokat area. A similar naming tradition is found in weaving: in Amasya's Yassıçal çuha cloth each motif has its own name, such as "tekke peşkuru", "eminem" and "sinekli".

Yazma in Daily Life and the Trousseau

The most common use of yazma is as a woman's headscarf. It is also used as a wrapping cloth, quilt cover, tablecloth, peşkir and kerchief, so that the art reaches into the most private corners of the home. A trousseau wrapped in a yazma bundle, or a tulip falling across a headscarf, dresses everyday life in the language of beauty. In Amasya needle lace is widespread throughout the region and is used above all for edging yemenis; trimming the border of a printed headscarf with lace brings two separate domestic arts together in a single piece. Today lapel flowers, handkerchiefs, scarves and purses are also embellished with lace.

The yemeni also has a place in Amasya's traditional dress. The costume of the village of Ilısu in Göynücek, accepted as the region's authentic women's dress, consists of ten pieces, and a sequined yemeni is laid over a fez decorated with beads. The yemeni has its place in wedding customs too: the bride's family ties gifts such as yemenis, chiffon and towels to the cars in the convoy that comes to fetch the bride. Yazmas, which once had a place in every household's chest, were an inseparable part of the trousseau. The estate records in the registers also show that these fabrics were among the items valued and divided as inheritance, in other words that they were counted as part of the household's movable wealth.

From Master to Apprentice

The most precious aspect of yazmacılık is the way it is taught. A master can pass on to his apprentice the carving of the block, the preparation of the dye in the right measure and the striking of an even impression only over many years. Researchers emphasise that, along with custom and tradition, the master-apprentice relationship has been decisive in keeping yazmacılık alive to the present day. Although local yazmacılık was hardly developed to meet the needs of the day, the continuing demand for yazmas in dress and household goods has allowed the art to preserve its vitality, even if within limited circles.

Around Amasya this knowledge has often survived within the family, passing from father to son and from mother to daughter. The same is seen in Amasya's other crafts: Neşe Aşçı, master instructor of Yassıçal çuha weaving, relates that she learned weaving from her mother and grandmother. Each yazma therefore carries the trained hand and the judging eye of a craftsman, and the art becomes a family inheritance.

Industrial Printing and the Present Day

The abundance of basma seen in the registers of the nineteenth century foreshadowed, in a sense, the future of traditional yazmacılık. As first English and Frankish basmas and then cheap factory-printed fabrics entered the market, hand-printed yazmas became rarer. As technology advanced, the wooden-block technique changed too; screen printing, easier and better suited to mass production, came into use. For this reason, even in Tokat the original yazmas have largely lost their distinctive colours and techniques. Today the colouring of fabrics is mostly done in dyeing and printing factories.

Even so, efforts are being made to revive this fine craft through courses, adult education programmes and cultural tourism events. In Amasya the best-known example of this is in weaving: the Public Education Centre (Halk Eğitim Merkezi) has kept the endangered Yassıçal çuha alive through courses and trained master instructors in a two-storey timber mansion used as a place for teaching, production, display and sale. The çuhas once woven from wool yarn coloured with root dyes now use cotton-blend yarns, and the traditional motifs are being adapted to home furnishings and clothing. The transfer of yazma motifs to cushions, wall panels and souvenirs follows the same path, turning yazmacılık from an object of memory into a living design language.

Today in the province of Amasya carpet and kilim weaving, the weaving of peştamal and sheeting on treadle looms in Merzifon, the spinning of kırnap cord and rope in Gümüşhacıköy, and needle lace throughout the region all continue. Among these crafts, yazma survives mainly within the traditions of the headscarf, lace and the trousseau. Yazmacılık is an art that demands patience: the carving of the block takes days, the preparation of the dye takes mastery, and the completion of the print takes care. The little gardens that fall onto cloth in Amasya are one of the traces that the city's centuries-long accumulation of weaving and dyeing has left to the present.

Chronology

4th century: The oldest known example of cloth printed with a wooden block, a child's tunic found at Akhmim in Egypt.

1523: Amasya's population is about seven thousand; in the sixteenth century the city has a dyehouse and many silk weavers.

1554-1555: The quantity of silk entering Amasya through official channels within ten months reaches 10,632 lodra (about 15 tonnes).

1701: The traveller Tournefort writes that Tokat and Amasya produce as much cloth as the rest of the country.

1784-1786: Basma and yemeni appear in the estate records of Amasya Islamic court register no. 61.

1811: Register no. 68 records 22 kinds of fabric, including basma, yemeni, çiçekli and hatayi.

1839-1845: In register no. 78 basma is the most frequently named fabric, appearing 23 times.

1862-1865: In register no. 89 basma is named 58 times; Frankish yazma, Tokat yazma and red yazma are recorded separately.

1863: Amasya is included among the pilot regions for trials of Egyptian cotton seed.

1864: An annual fair opening on 15 December is established in Amasya.

1867-1880: Register no. 94 is the last Islamic court register recorded for Amasya.

2009: The Amasya Public Education Centre continues its courses to keep Yassıçal çuha weaving alive.

Bibliography

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