Origins of this yatagan.

[Battara]

Not considered these thoughts. Good for learning...........

[TVV]

Originally Posted by estcrh

I do not think anyone here will object to examples that can be learned from being posted.

Here are some examples of work from a contemporary restorer in Bulgaria: as you can see, a good craftsman with the right materials and good knowledge can indeed restore hilts to look very close to original. There is nothing wrong with this, just like there is nothing wrong with some of the work of forumites such as Battara, especially since to my knowledge none of the examples I am showing were ever meant to deceive anyone.

Good work as this is neither easy nor cheap, but of course, not every restorer out there is of the same skill level or integrity.

Sincerely,
Teodor

[estcrh]

Originally Posted by ariel

TVV is correct: Bulgaria is not the only one place in the world exporting benign or not so benign:-) "restorations". Simply I saw quite a lot of things on E-Bay coming from there with similar features and very similar wooden ears of a non-traditional contour.

I have been watching Ebay auctions for years, and while I have seen many, many types of restorations were the person who made the handle and or scabbard etc did no better than a crude replica of the originals, this one is different than any other I have seen so if you or anyone here has an example that they think is similar work please post it for future reference.

There is a difference between a folkish restoration and a crude one, we all know that many weapons have been worked on at one time in their lives such as hilts, scabbards etc. Since I have seen this yatagan up close I can say that the work does not appear to be crude, someone knew what they were doing, maybe working within their abilitys but there is an artistic/folk art aspect to the work, certainly there was no attempt to fool anyone or it would not look like this.

If the work is new or much newer than it appears to be (which I know may be a possibility), someone was quite good at aging, when looked at closely nothing about it looks new, it could easily be 50 yrs old or 6 months old, which is why I posted it here, to see if any similar examples turn up.

[ariel]

Sorry, but I can't help you: I had never saved pics of what I viewed as obvious forgery.
But you might be right: it might have been an honest but semi-competent restoration with no intent to deceive. We will never know: there is no way we can read thoughts, be it those of an unnamed restorer, admiral Angria's or a Sikh "immortal" hurling his chakra at the enemy.
We can be reasonably sure that our dogs respect us, but the cats? Never.

[estcrh]

Originally Posted by ariel

Sorry, but I can't help you: I had never saved pics of what I viewed as obvious forgery.

There is a big difference between a "forgery" which implies an attempt to decieve and a restoration, no matter what the level of workmanship. As for yatagan, many original ones were not very elegant, some I have seen could be called crude when compaired to the ones made for wealthy individuals. There was a wide gap between the plain and elaborate examples.

[gp]

Just stumbled on this exchange of visions concerning yataghan restorations and would like to thank all as this is one is personally most interesting for me on the forum since years

I would highly welcome if there would , could be any updates or new additions by the forum members!
Great from a learning perspective and great help on cleaning and restoring this beautiful cold weapons!