David Ohannessian {1884-1953) and Armenian Potters of Jerusalem

Feast of Ashes The Life and Art of David Ohannessian  by Sato Moughalian

APRIL 2019 440 PAGES. $30.00 Cloth ISBN: 9781503601932

The compelling life story of Armenian ceramicist David Ohannessian, whose work changed the face of Jerusalem—and a granddaughter's search for his legacy.

Along the cobbled streets and golden walls of Jerusalem, brilliantly glazed tiles catch the light and beckon the eye. These colorful wares—known as Armenian ceramics—are iconic features of the Holy City. Silently, these works of ceramic art—art that also graces homes and museums around the world—represent a riveting story of resilience and survival: In the final years of the Ottoman Empire, as hundreds of thousands of Armenians were forcibly marched to their deaths, one man carried the secrets of this age-old art with him into exile toward the Syrian desert.

Feast of Ashes tells the story of David Ohannessian, the renowned ceramicist who in 1919 founded the art of Armenian pottery in Jerusalem, where his work and that of his followers is now celebrated as a local treasure. Ohannessian's life encompassed some of the most tumultuous upheavals of the modern Middle East. Born in an isolated Anatolian mountain village, he witnessed the rise of violent nationalism in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire, endured arrest and deportation in the Armenian Genocide, founded a new ceramics tradition in Jerusalem under the British Mandate, and spent his final years, uprooted, in Cairo and Beirut.

Ohannessian's life story is revealed by his granddaughter Sato Moughalian, weaving together family narratives with newly unearthed archival findings. Witnessing her personal quest for the man she never met, we come to understand a universal story of migration, survival, and hope.

LISTEN TO PODCAST

About the author
Sato Moughalian is an award-winning flutist in New York City and Artistic Director of Perspectives Ensemble, founded in 1993 to explore and contextualize works of composers and visual artists. Since 2007, Ms. Moughalian has also traveled to Turkey, England, Israel, Palestine, and France to uncover the traces of her grandfather's life and work, has published articles, and gives talks on the genesis of Jerusalem's Armenian ceramic art.

SEE ALSO: From Kutahya to Al-Quds | The Birth of the Armenian Ceramics Trade in Jerusalem contribution by Sato Moughalian

Mavi Boncuk |

David Ohannessian, 1884-1953

The Armenian potter David Ohannessian, whose tiles decorate the Rockefeller Museum, was born in a small village in western Anatolia (Muradca, Eskisehir, Turkey) in 1884. At the age of seventeen he joined a pottery workshop in Kutahya and within a short time became its owner. Ohannessian produced tiles and vessels and renovated ceramic revetments on historical buildings, in Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.

During the First World War, Ohannessian and his family were deported to Syria. It was in Aleppo that he met the British diplomat Sir Mark Sykes, who was instrumental in bringing him to Palestine at the end of 1918 to renovate the tiles of the Dome of the Rock. The ceramic workshop he established on the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem was called "Dome of the Rock Tiles. "It produced various types of ceramics and provided tiles for churches, cemeteries, and public buildings, among them Government House and, of course, the Rockefeller Museum. Ohannessian continued to work in Jerusalem until 1948, after which he relocated to Beirut, where he died a few years later.

The tiles produced by Ohannessian for the Rockefeller Museum are the most complicated of all his works, owing to the use of the cuerda seca ("dry line") technique. Their special designs do not appear on any of his other Jerusalem tiles. SOURCE

Rockefeller Museum fountain Tiles, Jerusalem.

 

Detail of a tile panel by David Ohannessian in the Jerusalem Municipal Complex.


Armenian potters from the famous pottery center of Kütahya came to Jerusalem during the early days of the British Mandate to repair and maintain the tile work on the Dome of the Rock. Because of the Armenian Genocide and the subsequent Greco-Turkish War, those potters stayed in Jerusalem. According to Henry Glassie: At the beginning of the twentieth century, half of Kütahya's workers were Armenians. They left to repair the tiles on the Dome of the Rock, never to return, and today their descendants make a variety of Kütahya çini in Jerusalem.

The city of Kütahya in Turkey, birthplace of the Armenian ceramic artists, members of the Ohannessian, Balian and Karakashian families, has been the center of a unique ceramic industry since the post-medieval period, with Armenian artists in its vanguard since the eighteenth century. As early as the fourteenth century, and mainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one could discern large groups of Armenian artists creating ceramic tiles for wall decoration used in churches and mosques, as well as ceramic ware.
David Ohannessian, a master painter of ceramic decoration, designer, and the director of one of Kütahya's three major ceramics studios prior to the Great War, was to be in charge of restoring the tile work on the Dome of the Rock. In 1916 he and his family had been deported from Kütahya. The Ohannessians were exiled toward the Syrian desert and sought refuge in Aleppo. Sir Mark Sykes, the British diplomat and friend of Ronald Storrs, then the Military Governor of Jerusalem, found Ohannessian in Aleppo and gave him the means to travel to Jerusalem to offer advice on the restoration of tiles on the Dome of the Rock. In late 1918, Ohannessian arrived in Jerusalem. He returned to Kutahya in August of 1919, under the auspices of the British Military Administration, which was cooperating with Jerusalem's wakf on a planned restoration of the Dome of the Rock. Eight Armenian ceramics workers and their families returned to Jerusalem with Ohannessian, including the master potter Nishan Balian, and the painter Megerdish Karakashian. The project of restoring the tiles was delayed because of financial and political considerations. The Armenian ceramicists were not allowed to complete the Dome of the Rock decoration due to opposition by the Turkish consulting architect, Ahmed Kemalettin. A complete restoration was finally completed in the 1960s, using tiles imported from Kütahya.

Because the genocide had resulted in the death and deportation of a huge proportion of the Armenians in northeast Anatolia, and the Turkish War of Independence made it impossible to return, the Armenian potters in Jerusalem decided to stay. David Ohannessian opened a pottery workshop in the Old City in 1919, called Dome of the Rock Tiles, on the Via Dolorosa, selling his dishes, tiles and pots mostly to wealthy British and local residents and receiving commissions for monumental new works around Jerusalem and abroad. In 1922 Nishan Balian and Megerdish Karakashian went into partnership and opened another pottery shop referred to as the joint workshop on Nablus Road just outside the Old City. The partnership between Nishan Balian and Megerdish Karakashian lasted many years. Their sons ended the partnership, and now have separate pottery shops.