Hi,
Firstly, the sheath and inlay on the handle are silver- or "silver"- rather than brass. Blame the poor photography for the yellowish tinge...
The closest parallel I could find is on p.45 of this book:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=T...bichaj&f=false
The bichaq (spelled bichaj
) shown there is practically identical, save for being slightly longer, and dates from the turn of the 18th/19th centuries.
.
I wonder if this is an earlier variant to the more commonly seen Bosnian bichaqs with a wider blade and scimitar stamp. In fact- and I admit this is a flight of fancy- I do wonder if the scimitar stamp on later bichaqs, which resembles an Orientalist fantasy of an Eastern sword more than it does a pala or kilij, say, made them more attractive as souvenirs for Austrian officers etc, or were a hallmark of Sarajevo work for the same market.
The only stamp on the blade of my bichaq is the Arabic/Osmanli lettering reproduced above, which would lead me to assume it was the work of a Muslim bladesmith.
I'm fairly sure that in the Ottoman Balkans, with a few exceptions (Jannina and so on) the cities were predominantly Muslim, and the craft guilds even more so.
Elgood's latest is quite good on Ottoman Balkan guilds, and shows a couple of similarly-shaped Bosnian bichaqs from the early 19th c, though without fullered blades, and with silver, rather than horn, hilts.