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 CA in Bistrita (Romania) in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum.

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Since 1952 the Germanisches Nationalmuseum has had in its holdings 55 Ottoman carpets from the 16th to the 18th c. from the Protestant Parish Church in Bistrita. This collection, unique in terms of its historical completeness, will, for the first time, be the subject of a comprehensive research project, which will analyze not only the significance of the carpets in the early modern period but also their identity-generating role in the 19th and early 20th c. The carpets, made in Anatolia, reached Transylvania via trade routes from the mid-15th c. on. As economically significant luxury items they testify to the intensive commercial ties and the cultural exchange between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe; its hub Transylvania 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 such as customs registers, will aim to pinpoint dates and places of origin to determine time frames and 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 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. Historical inscriptions and graffiti found on the carpets will also be studied. The project will examine the fate of the carpets in the 19th and 20th c. as well. In the first half of the 19th c. 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 endeavors in the 19th c., attempted via their own historical awareness to delimit themselves from the neighboring 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 Transylvanias economic heyday in the 15th to the 17th c., which was strongly influenced by the Ottoman trading links. By means of the Anatolian rugs the project will examine important aspects of early modern period trans-Ottoman trade as well as the use and significance of these goods in the border regions between Transylvania and the Ottoman Empire. New insights are expected on the trade with carpets themselves, which as luxury goods assumed a special status within the commodity groups, as well as their importance and later use in Transylvania to where they transported a piece of Ottoman culture and themselves became an element of Saxon culture.