Yataghans:bibliography and identification

[TVV]

Ms. Mankova,

I will second Jim's suggestion about trying to obtain a copy of Elgood's "The Arms of Greece and (some) of its Balkan Neighbors". Not only the chapter on yataghans will help answer your questions about the origin of the form, but the first few chapters in the book provide a great background into the history of arms and armor and their manufacture and trade within the Ottoman Empire. This background is essential in trying to understand the yataghan, especially when you consider that a blade hilted in Foca may have been mounted in a silver scabbard in Istanbul and sold to a client from Asia Minor.

The Askeri Museum catalog, along with the Zagreb History Museum catalog are just this: catalogs. They have some general history chapters, but the goal of those books is to list a whole bunch of examples, without any real study into areas of origin. You can see the materials, the translated inscriptions and a date for most of the examples, but that is about it. The Dora Boskovic book could be useful as it has multiple similar yataghans to the ones you are tasked with restoring, as the focus of that collection is yataghans from the Western Balkans.

I would be very careful using Astvatsaturian's book, as the yataghan typology there is purely the author's guess, as she admits in the text. She tries to examine the decorative techniques used to come up with geographical attribution and for example ends up attributing a group of Greek yataghans to Eastern Anatolia because of the use of niello, which she believes has to be tied to the Caucasus.

To sum it up, my recommendation is for you to obtain Elgood's book. If all you need from the museum catalogs are the pictures and descriptions of similar yataghans to the two you are restoring, then I can probably help with that.

Sincerely,
Teodor