Yatagan or ??

[TVV]

Originally Posted by Atlantia

Hi Battara,

I always thought the occasional Yats with straight blades were just semi-atypical anomalies.
What would make this knife/dagger specifically a Yataghan, and not something else?
I'm not disagreeing with you, just curious and wanting to extend my own knowledge

Best
Gene

As to what makes a yataghan, that is a good question and hard to answer, precisely because of the variety of hilts and blade shapes. Also, there are swords with recurved blades (say, from Southern India), which are not yataghans, just like not every dagger with a flamboyant blade is a keris (and there are straight keris as well).

That being said, there are plenty of straight yataghans, which appear to have been popular in the North-Western Balkans, judging on the abundance of such specimens in the Croatian History Museum catalogue, as opposed to the Askeri Museum catalogue, where there are only two.

It would appear that just like with keris, the blade and mountings of yataghans were dictated by regional preferences. However, the yataghan never really had the same cultural significance as the keris, and therefore there are not any features that need to be present on a dagger to qualify it is a yataghan. As a result pretty much any eared pommel dagger of Balkan and/or Turkish origins of significant proportion could be classified as a yataghan.

If you feel this is not very helpful and quite confusing, you would be correct - welcome to my world.

Regards,
Teodor