Faik Kırımlı: The man who pulled İznik pottery from ashes of history

Kırımlı, whom many of us do not know, spent the majority of his life exploring Topkapı Palace and the Ottoman archives for the technique used in the 16th century to make pottery. Today, we can enjoy İznik pottery again thanks to master Faik Kırımlı.

Kırımlı started as a gravure artist, but he became famous for his antique collection. In one television interview, he mentioned that he had the second-biggest collection. One day his friend Polivvi, an antiques dealer, called him to his shop and showed him İznik pottery. It was very hard to find İznik pottery, and examples of it were brought from Europe. He couldn’t get those 300-year-old pieces of pottery out of his mind. He looked up where İznik is on the map and decided to head in a new direction.

When glaze reveals its secret…

Two years later, Kırımlı went to a village in İznik. He met people who dealt enthusiastically with ceramics but weren’t experts. He consulted Celal Esat Arseven and asked him to tell all he knew about the creation of İznik pottery. However, he received a discouraging answer; Arseven told him they had tried but couldn’t figure out how the dyes and glaze were made. He advised Kırımlı not to waste his time. However, Kırımlı didn’t give up; he started experimenting, using the furnace he built in a barn he had rented. But the pottery he put in the oven cracked. Although the pottery cracked, this led him to discover how glaze is made. One day when he was in a movie theater, he was inspired by a commercial for Ottoman tiles. Seeing this, he decided not to give up, and rented a different barn, in the Mevlanakapı neighborhood. But this time, the glaze spoiled the undercoat. He burned kaolinite in the furnace and then crushed it. He made a new undercoat. He drew patterns on three pieces of pottery and put them in the furnace. When he opened the furnace, he joyfully saw that the three pieces of pottery were in perfect condition. That is how he discovered the process.

Kırımlı devoted seven years of his life to exploring pottery-making techniques. He was able to figure out how to make coral red, a very valuable and difficult-to-make color, the second year. In order to revive the art of making pottery, he went to İznik, but the İznik municipality wouldn’t let him build a furnace in the city, since it had the potential to bother the residents. However, Eşref Eroğlu, who later became his student, gave Kırımlı the land he owned there. A furnace and accommodation were built there. They excitedly put the first pieces of pottery in and, seeing that the furnace worked well and the pottery came out in perfect condition, they felt relieved.

Dream herald

The third time he fired up the furnace, Kırımlı took a plate on which Surah al-Ikhlas was written out of the furnace. This plate was later stolen from the Green Mosque in Bursa, where he hung it.

Kırımlı, who put the signature “Amel-i Faik” (Work of Faik) on his pottery, couldn’t shake off the effect of a dream he had the night he first fired up the furnace. In his dream, he heard a voice saying to him: “We knew that pottery was going to arrive here again. We were told so 300 years ago.”

Kırımlı’s student Eroğlu passed away before Kırımlı, and Eroğlu’s wife and her three daughters inherited the art of pottery-making from Eşref Eroğlu. Mentioning her husband’s penchant for tiles, Seyhan Eroğlu said they all worked very hard to figure out how to make the original İznik pottery. She also pointed out that her husband went beyond the coral-red color Kırımlı rediscovered in 1987. She said her husband discovered his own red color by using İznik soil, and Kırımlı was very pleased with her husband’s find.

The master-novice relationship between Kırımlı and the Eroğlu family endured for two-and-a-half years. The three girls took their pottery to him and upon seeing their perfection, Kırımlı told them they had become masters and he had nothing else to teach. Kırımlı departed İznik in 1989, the year devoted to İznik tiles.