Bosnian Bichaq Comments/Help?

Rumpel · 1st March 2010, 09:15 PM

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.

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1st March 2010, 09:15 PM	#9
Rumpel Member Join Date: Aug 2009 Posts: 63	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.