The ICTA’s founders in 1959 intended it to draw the attention of the academic world to the aesthetic creativity and distinctiveness of Turks’ art compared to other Muslim peoples. The ICTA’s territorial scope extended beyond the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire, or the Seljuks’ and other Anatolian Turkic states. This is obvious, as the ethnogenesis and history of the Turkic peoples encompass a significant portion of the Islamic world, stretched between the Altai and Atlantic. At the same time, chronologically and culturally, they are not limited to the Islamic culture.
Therefore, it is important to emphasize that the exploration of the artistic culture of Turkic peoples extends beyond the territory of Turkey itself, encompassing regions such as the Middle East, the Balkans, Iran, India and Central Asia. Research also reveals historical and cultural connections between Christian Europe and Turkic states and societies. Therefore, the study on Turkish and Turkic artistic culture demands a comparative and interdisciplinary research approach. ICTA
The long tradition of ICTA has developed a thematic typology organizing the scope of research. It well reflects current trends in research on Turkish art.
Polish organizers of the 17th ICTA proposed newly formulated topics to be introduced. The Art at War (including especially metalwork, textiles, miniatures and iconography) was meant to present the artistic splendour of military sphere in everyday life of Turkish (particularly Ottoman) state and society which impressed the European neighbours and left its mark in their culture in the past, and in the museum collections in modern times. The Art of Tombs and Tombstones responded to the intensively growing interest and developing research on Ottoman and other Turkic art and epigraphy of tombs and tombstones, which is a phenomenon that deserves to be recognized as a special category of research, requiring an interdisciplinary approach (including sculpture, architecture, archaeology, epigraphy, literature, linguistics, history of society and religion).
We also hoped to encourage to pay attention to historical phenomena of transmission of culture between the Turkish and other interacting societies, as in Central and Eastern-Southern Europe, and especially in the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth where Turkish and Turkic cultural influences, with an important role of the Black Sea trade, significantly contributed to the shaping of their multi-faceted culture. For Polish-Turkish interrelation we provided a special section, modelled on the practice of previous ICTA congresses.
We would like to have seen the Congress also as a forum for museum, library and archive experts that might contribute to establishing links between their institutions and to intensifying the popularization of Turkish art in the world through museum presentations as well as through deepening knowledge of monuments of Turkish art preserved in world collections. Therefore we have formulated the section Art in Science and Society hoping to draw the attention of these specialists.
The 17th ICTA in Warsaw provided a special opportunity to highlight the historical and cultural ties between the countries of Central Europe and the Black Sea: Turkey, Crimea and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which included the nations of contemporary Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. It was on the lands of this Commonwealth that a unique culture was formed, referred to as the Sarmatian culture, which in its code of visual identification – having a deep, ideological and political basis – adopted the components of the culture of the Ottoman elites. The Polish-Lithuanian Tatar community has also taken root on the lands of this Commonwealth, which is a historical reminiscence of the geopolitical role of the emerging union of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 14th and 15th centuries, and today is a model of centuries-old integration and identification of a community of Turkic origin with the local society of Europe Central.
In this context, the 17th International Congress of Turkish Art in Warsaw contributed to develop awareness and understanding of the region’s special cultural ties.
