The Origins of an Iconic Jerusalem Art Form: Armenian Ceramics

Feast of Ashes: The Life and Art of David Ohannessian, by Sato Moughalian. Stanford: Redwood Press, 2019.

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At the end of 1918, an Armenian genocide survivor who had trekked from Turkey to Syria with his family had a miraculous stroke of good fortune. This chance, which came about due to his unique and prodigious talents as a master ceramicist, would bring him to Jerusalem, where he would go on to transform the city’s arts and culture in a fundamental way.

The fascinating story of David Ohannessian, the subject of Feast of Ashes: The Life and Art of David Ohannessian, is told by his granddaughter, Sato Moughalian. An Armenian American flutist with no direct experience of the family’s Jerusalem years (or even of her grandfather, for that matter), her interest in her family’s history developed slowly, fed by a few disparate factoids: the sadness and silence that periodically came over her parents when memories of their past intruded on the present; her mother’s written account of her family’s history, drawing on the recollections of her six siblings; her aunt’s list of her father’s commissioned works; her readings about the Armenian genocide; and a few pieces of pottery created by her grandfather that were in the family’s possession.

In 2007 or so, granddaughter Moughalian felt a need to begin searching “to make sense of my grandfather’s art.”1 The urge to excavate her family’s history would take her over the years to Turkey, England, France, Jerusalem, Egypt, and Lebanon. In piecing together this chronicle of her grandfather’s life, she offers a fascinating glimpse of the development of Palestinian pottery in Jerusalem during the mandate period, a process that he initiated and shaped. She also painstakingly describes the period in which Ohannessian lived, which spanned the end of the Ottoman Empire, the traumatic fracturing of that empire, the British Mandate for Palestine, and the loss of Palestine. This is very much a story of displacement and coping with the repeated loss of safe havens.

Reading Feast of Ashes, one becomes aware of how moments can become turning points that shape a life. In 1911, Tavit (David) Ohannessian, a master ceramicist from Kütahya, a city south of Istanbul in then Anatolia (today Turkey), was hired by British diplomat Mark Sykes (of Sykes-Picot fame) to design 2,700 tiles for a room (“a tiled garden of paradise”) in the family estate in Yorkshire that Sykes was rebuilding after a major fire.2 Sykes, who was very partial to the old Ottoman style arts, wanted to emulate one of the sultan’s apartments in the Yeni Mosque in Istanbul, and the Iznik-style tiles expressed all these old the motifs and techniques brilliantly.3 The result was stunning.

And so, years later, when British administrators in Jerusalem discovered that the Dome of the Rock was in urgent need of repair, they consulted with Sykes and concluded that Ohannessian was the man for the job. He was no longer in Kütahya by then, of course; he and his family, like much of the Armenian population in the area, had been brutally driven out of the Ottoman Empire. The largely Armenian-run Kütahya potteries—which in their heyday in the 17th century numbering about 300—were on the brink of disappearing on the eve of the genocide in 1907.4 Unlike around a million others, they managed to survive the genocide and the devastating year-long trek to Syria.

Taking his family to Jerusalem to tackle the new mission, Ohannessian assessed the task and the available resources at his disposal. In a move of tremendous courage, he returned to Kütayha—the city in which he developed his skill as a master craftsman, and the city from which he and so many other Armenians had been exiled in 1916. The trip was undoubtedly made easier by the safe transit document he had obtained from Istanbul, requested by the British Military Administration. He needed a team of skilled craftsmen and certain supplies to complete the mosque repairs, and he believed Kütahya was the place to find them.

Ohanessian was able to lure at least eight artisans of varying specializations back to Jerusalem in the fall of 1919, among them Nishan Balian, an expert with the potter’s wheel, and Mgrditch Karakashian, a master painter of traditional designs. They worked in Ohannessian’s workshop, named Dome of the Rock Tiles, on Via Dolorosa in the Old City, until 1922, when they left to set up their own studio, Palestine Pottery.7

For a master craftsman who came close to death during the year-long trek to Aleppo from Kütahya, the chance to work on mosque restoration must have seemed like a fairy tale. Here’s how the author described her grandfather’s introduction to the repair work he was hired to perform:

After assessing the scope of the work, he looked at available materials. The author’s description offers an interesting glimpse into the world of professional ceramics. The type of wood determined the temperature at which the kiln could be operated, and the types of clay available determined the palette available to the colorists.

The minerals and woods in the Jerusalem area did not match those available in Turkey and the Black Sea. After months of experimentation with the firing, glazes, and clays available to them, Ohannessian and his team were able to achieve attractive results. In the opinion of British architect on the mosque project Charles Ashbee, who served as Civic Advisor to Jerusalem between 1919 and 1922, the results of Dome of the Rock Tiles compared favorably with tiles produced when the industry was alive and thriving, and they were superior to anything produced in European factories.9

By fall 1922, Ohannessian’s studio had completed only partial repairs on the mosque and was taken off the project by a committee decision to find artisans in Turkey to do the job. According to Moughalian, waqf administrators had inspected the tiles and found the results entirely pleasing, but the oversight committee was reluctant to have Christians repair an Islamic monument, even though Christians had undoubtedly worked on previous repairs, and ethnic cleansing in what became Turkey had already laid waste to the ceramics industry there. Nonetheless, the decision held.

Fortunately, Ohannessian was a good businessman; he had realized that he needed to diversify to generate the volume needed to cover the expenses of his growing staff, and his quality work was in demand.

By 1928, Ohannessian was doing well enough that he could buy the building in which his workshop was located. He had been in Jerusalem for 10 years by then and had moved his growing family to a spacious home in Upper Baq‘a.

By way of giving thanks, he created an altar in the courtyard of the Armenian Church of St. Saviour, just outside Zion Gate. An elaborate inscription in classical Armenian translates as follows:

The altar had the same arabesque motif that covered much of the Dome of the Rock, but it also included black crosses in memory of the Armenians who perished during the genocide.

Tiles produced in Ohannessian’s workshop were exhibited in major residences as well as international exhibitions in the 1920s and 1930s. Ohannessian worked with local architects to design tiles for the villas of prominent people like writer and educator Issaf Nashashibi in Sheikh Jarrah and Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat in Talbiyya, whose home was locally known as Villa Harun al-Rashid. The American Colony Hotel was also one of Ohannessian’s early customers. His workshop produced tiles that graced the residence of British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel, as well as trilingual tiles for the street names in the Old City. Other important commissions included the Dabbagh Mosque in Beirut in 1932 and the Palestine Archeological Museum in Jerusalem in 1934.11

Ohannessian’s workshop products were featured in the Palestine and Cyprus Pavilion for the British Empire Exhibition in London in 1924, the residence of the British representative in Amman, the Exposition international des arts decoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris in 1925 (seen by 16 million attendees), and the Palestine crafts display in the British Empire Pavilion. The British Mandate also had a Palestine Pavilion in the Paris Colonial Exhibition in 1931. In 1933, Ohannessian participated in “A Century of Progress International Exposition” in Chicago.12

By the early 1930s, Ohannessian was importing materials, several tons at a time, because he knew from a geological study that Palestine did not have “the precious white china clay that had given Anatolian ceramics their inimitable glow.”13

The workshop produced items that could be sold to the tourist market—and all tourists, sooner or later, passed by the workshop, conveniently located on the Via Dolorosa. The items, including mugs, plates, vases, and bowls, were also suitable for shipping. They were imported to England, France, and the United States. In describing the design, Moughalian writes, her grandfather “drew inspiration from thirteenth-, fourteenth-, and fifteenth-century Islamic designs and united the facets of the interior with a range of intense cobalt and turquoise blues in opaque and transparent variants—the colors of water and the sky.”14

By 1944, Ohannessian’s pottery was available not only in the US and England, but in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Egypt, France, the Netherlands, Lebanon, and Syria.

By 1944, he had to take a leave of absence for health reasons; he used that time to work on designs and develop glaze formulas.

In 1948, David and Victoria Ohannessian faced a nightmarish repeat of the turmoil they had experienced in Kütahya 30 years earlier, and again they had to flee for safety, their fate intertwined with that of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were dispossessed and exiled by Zionist forces and never allowed to return. While the family took refuge in the region for some time, within a few years, most of them immigrated to the US. Three did not. One son had already immigrated to Armenia years earlier, and another son managed to remain in Jerusalem. He would eventually shut down his father’s workshop. David Ohannessian died of a massive stroke in Beirut in 1953. He was buried there.

Moughalian’s memoir is fascinating on many levels. The story of David Ohannessian’s life is one of huge personal successes following major political upheavals. He established a Jerusalem pottery tradition that continues to this day. The memoir paints a moving portrait of a battered and traumatized minority’s ability to reconstitute itself in Jerusalem and to thrive and contribute a major art form for the city that remains in high demand today. And it describes in detail the havoc wreaked by statelessness and instability in individual lives. The last entry on her grandfather’s installation list was an Episcopal Methodist Church in Brooklyn, which has since changed names. After years of searching, she finally found it in a church she had unknowingly passed by many times, on the same block as the music academy she frequented.

The story of the writing of this memoir is moving as well. The author was assisted in her mission by relatives who conveyed as many details as they knew, which explains the narrative’s occasional inclusion of minute details. Strangers, too, pitched in. She reached out on social media and elsewhere and found people willing to help, including with Google Earth to discover remnants of towns that have been renamed and largely emptied of residents. She identified her grandfather’s ancestral town that way, and within an hour of posting a query, she had an offer of help from complete strangers who offered to drive her to the remote mountain village. A press conference was held in Kütahya in which she describes her mission; the event was announced in a local newspaper and was read by descendants of the master ceramicist who had trained her grandfather. Members of three generations of his family descended on the hotel to meet her and greeted her like an old friend; they had lost their ancestor following the population transfer and wanted to learn more about the history of his art.

Moughalian’s mission resonated with strangers presumably because she tapped into something shared among humans—the quest to know more about the stock we come from, the desire to come to terms with events beyond our control that shape our options in life, and the realization that our lives might have played out very differently.

This book is a gem that offers fascinating insight into the intertwined histories of Jerusalem and its cultural heritage and the part of the Armenian community that survived and sought refuge from the genocide there and then became an inextricable part of Jerusalem’s diverse tapestry and its Palestinian community.