A treasure-packed new exhibition in Rome tells the fascinating 7,000-year-old story of the land occupied by present-day Turkey. The show runs at the Palazzo Quirinale, the official residence of Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, until March 31.
It features 43 precious pieces created by the many peoples that have settled in or conquered the Anatolian peninsular, such as the Hittites, the Greeks, the Romans and the Turks.
The works come from Turkey's top museums including Istanbul's Topkapi Palace - the home of the Ottoman sultans between 1465 and 1853 - and Ankara's Museum of Anatolian Civilizations.Seven of the exhibits have never been loaned outside Turkey before, including a terracotta seal dating back to the seventh millennium BC.
Another of these treasures is a fourth-millennium-BC statuette of a mother deity found at Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement in the plain near the city of Konya."The statuette portrays a woman in the act of giving birth," explained Louis Godart, the exhibition's curator. "The mother deity was a symbol of the land's fertility."
The statue is evidence of the spread of new cults linked to the Neolithic revolution, the move from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society, at that time". A striking gold statue of a women made by Bronze Age craftsmen in the third millennium BC is making its international debut too.Tablets with written records of trade between Assyrian and Hittite merchants take visitors out of pre-historic times. The exhibition then presents objects left behind by the ancient Greeks, Romans and Byzantines.
When Sultan Mehmed II took Constantinople - today Istanbul - in 1453, the Muslim Ottoman dynasty completed its conquest of the peninsular and killed off the Christian Byzantine Empire. The contribution of Islamic culture is demonstrated with exhibits like a beautiful 16th-century Koran studded with precious stones.
A colourful 17th-century portrait of a Turkish woman smelling a flower with a flirtatious look in her eye and a delightful pair of 19th-century gold earrings are among the other highlights from the Ottoman period. Godart said that, when choosing the works, he aimed to stress that Anatolia "reached its cultural high points in the periods when it opened up most to other societies".
The exhibition, entitled Turkey, 7,000 years of History, has been organized to mark the 150th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Turkey-the Ottoman Empire. It was inaugurated on Wednesday during Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer's state visit to Italy.
Entry is free.
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