Sacred Flower of the East – The Tulip
It is a flawless symbol! Clad in ottoman splendour and wearing a city’s history as its badge, it will stand forever erect, gazing at the sky…
A tall green stem rises between two leaves shaped like spearheads and covered with a fine mist. At the tip of the stem is a solitary, shiny, brilliant colored flower with six, perfectly formed petals of equal size. Its name: The Tulip. Holding his head high, it gazes at me from the glass of my table, like ‘my rosy-cheeked beloved’, ‘a goblet of red wine’, ‘a raging red flame’, ‘my burning hearth’. And why not? There is another flower like it. No other flower has made sultans fall in love with its flawless feminine beauty. No other flowers has held them passionately in thrall to its elegance. No other flower has conquered the lands of an illustrious empire and lent its name to an era! I stand helpless. I have no hope of describing it. No matter how many words, sentences, paragraphs I write about the tulip. It’s no use. Perhaps I would start with the individual letters...
In Arabic the word ‘lale’ is written with the characters ‘aleph’, ‘lam’ and ‘he’, the same letters that are used to write ‘Allah’ and ‘hilal’, God and the crescent moon , symbol of Islam. Based on the ‘ebced’ system of assigning numerical values to the letters of the Arabic alphabet, associations are established among words whose letters add up to the same number. Since the words ‘Allah’ and ‘lale’ both add up to 66, the tulip was regarded as sacred in the belief that it sembolised the unity and beauty of God.
Love, a wound to the Heart
As legend has it, a dew drop on a leaf was stuck by lightning one day. Bursting into flame, it remained red and turned into the tulip. According to same legend, the blackness at the center of the tulip is a single mark left by lightning. “let the tulip try as it will hide its burn wound…”, writes the 17th century Ottoman poet Nabi, comparing the blackness at the centre of the petals to a love wound. “It is this wound burned into its heart that enhances the value of the tulip,” says the great Chaghatay Turkish poet, Ali Şir Nevai.
With the tulip’s ruby hue in my eyes, I am going to delve now into the black heart concealed at the base of its petals and, inflicting a little pain on that love wound, try to uncover its story.
Tulip is the common name of some one hundred species of bulbous plants that make up the ‘tulipa’ genus of the lily family. They first appeared in Central Asia, on the northern slopes of the Tien Shan Mountains and the 5000-meter high peaks of the Pamir range. Unlike today’s tulips which prefer dry summers and harsh winters, they bloomed there quietly, on short stems, in their isolated habitat for thousands of years. Until, that is, the Turkish tribes acknowledged them as a harbinger of spring and, investing them with all kinds of special meanings, began bringing them down from the summits to the slopes and eventually to the lands where they migrated and settled.
Odourless, Thornless, and Wild
Even if we can’t say anything definite about its homeland based on the numerous legends that surround it, the tulip is without a doubt a flower of the East. According to the ‘lalename’ or ‘book of the tulip’ written by Besir Ayvazoglu, the earliest evidence of the tulip coinciding with the existence of humans was encountered in archaeological excavations carried out in Kazakhistan. Tulip motifs were embroidered on covers and items made of felt in the tents of the nomadic Turks, who brought their precious tulip bulbs with them as they migrated westwards.
The tulip, whose every feature has been powerfully personified by the poets, arrived in Anatolia via Iran in the 11th and 12th centuries. Mevlana Jelaladdin Rumi, for example, speaks of magnificent ‘lalezar’ or tulip gardens. And the Ottoman poet Necati Bey in his lines, “They barred the tulip from the parties in the rose garden, saying it came to the land of the lawn from the countryside”, tries in vain to make the proud tulip bow its head, claiming it to be wild and uncouth country bumpkin because it originated in the mountains!
But the tulip eventually found a home where it would occupy pride of place, becoming the sacred symbol of an empire on the rise through conquests and appearing as a talismatic symbol on weapons, horses’ harnesses, and the uniforms and armor worn by soldiers in war. Mosques and fountains were adorned with tulip motifs, and the tulip, conquering the hearts of the Ottoman sultans from Mehmed the Conqueror to Suleiman the Magnificent, established a sultanate of its own as a decoration on the imperial caftans.
During the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Sheikhulislam Ebussuud Efendi and his gardeners got hold of a variety of tulip called the ‘lale-I Rumi’ or Tulip of Anatolia. Close to 2000 varieties of this tulip, with its long, pointed, almond-shaped petals were cultivated in Istanbul and became known generally as the ‘Tulip Istanbul’. Some 49 of them were even recorded in illustrations. Nonetheless all of them disappeared without a trace in mid-18th century when interest in the flower began to wane.
The tulip’s Eurean adventure also commenced during the period of Suleiman the Magnificent.
Source: Doğa Magazine
Lalehan Uysal
Hakan Zümrüt
A tall green stem rises between two leaves shaped like spearheads and covered with a fine mist. At the tip of the stem is a solitary, shiny, brilliant colored flower with six, perfectly formed petals of equal size. Its name: The Tulip. Holding his head high, it gazes at me from the glass of my table, like ‘my rosy-cheeked beloved’, ‘a goblet of red wine’, ‘a raging red flame’, ‘my burning hearth’. And why not? There is another flower like it. No other flower has made sultans fall in love with its flawless feminine beauty. No other flowers has held them passionately in thrall to its elegance. No other flower has conquered the lands of an illustrious empire and lent its name to an era! I stand helpless. I have no hope of describing it. No matter how many words, sentences, paragraphs I write about the tulip. It’s no use. Perhaps I would start with the individual letters...
In Arabic the word ‘lale’ is written with the characters ‘aleph’, ‘lam’ and ‘he’, the same letters that are used to write ‘Allah’ and ‘hilal’, God and the crescent moon , symbol of Islam. Based on the ‘ebced’ system of assigning numerical values to the letters of the Arabic alphabet, associations are established among words whose letters add up to the same number. Since the words ‘Allah’ and ‘lale’ both add up to 66, the tulip was regarded as sacred in the belief that it sembolised the unity and beauty of God.
Love, a wound to the Heart
As legend has it, a dew drop on a leaf was stuck by lightning one day. Bursting into flame, it remained red and turned into the tulip. According to same legend, the blackness at the center of the tulip is a single mark left by lightning. “let the tulip try as it will hide its burn wound…”, writes the 17th century Ottoman poet Nabi, comparing the blackness at the centre of the petals to a love wound. “It is this wound burned into its heart that enhances the value of the tulip,” says the great Chaghatay Turkish poet, Ali Şir Nevai.
With the tulip’s ruby hue in my eyes, I am going to delve now into the black heart concealed at the base of its petals and, inflicting a little pain on that love wound, try to uncover its story.
Tulip is the common name of some one hundred species of bulbous plants that make up the ‘tulipa’ genus of the lily family. They first appeared in Central Asia, on the northern slopes of the Tien Shan Mountains and the 5000-meter high peaks of the Pamir range. Unlike today’s tulips which prefer dry summers and harsh winters, they bloomed there quietly, on short stems, in their isolated habitat for thousands of years. Until, that is, the Turkish tribes acknowledged them as a harbinger of spring and, investing them with all kinds of special meanings, began bringing them down from the summits to the slopes and eventually to the lands where they migrated and settled.
Odourless, Thornless, and Wild
Even if we can’t say anything definite about its homeland based on the numerous legends that surround it, the tulip is without a doubt a flower of the East. According to the ‘lalename’ or ‘book of the tulip’ written by Besir Ayvazoglu, the earliest evidence of the tulip coinciding with the existence of humans was encountered in archaeological excavations carried out in Kazakhistan. Tulip motifs were embroidered on covers and items made of felt in the tents of the nomadic Turks, who brought their precious tulip bulbs with them as they migrated westwards.
The tulip, whose every feature has been powerfully personified by the poets, arrived in Anatolia via Iran in the 11th and 12th centuries. Mevlana Jelaladdin Rumi, for example, speaks of magnificent ‘lalezar’ or tulip gardens. And the Ottoman poet Necati Bey in his lines, “They barred the tulip from the parties in the rose garden, saying it came to the land of the lawn from the countryside”, tries in vain to make the proud tulip bow its head, claiming it to be wild and uncouth country bumpkin because it originated in the mountains!
But the tulip eventually found a home where it would occupy pride of place, becoming the sacred symbol of an empire on the rise through conquests and appearing as a talismatic symbol on weapons, horses’ harnesses, and the uniforms and armor worn by soldiers in war. Mosques and fountains were adorned with tulip motifs, and the tulip, conquering the hearts of the Ottoman sultans from Mehmed the Conqueror to Suleiman the Magnificent, established a sultanate of its own as a decoration on the imperial caftans.
During the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Sheikhulislam Ebussuud Efendi and his gardeners got hold of a variety of tulip called the ‘lale-I Rumi’ or Tulip of Anatolia. Close to 2000 varieties of this tulip, with its long, pointed, almond-shaped petals were cultivated in Istanbul and became known generally as the ‘Tulip Istanbul’. Some 49 of them were even recorded in illustrations. Nonetheless all of them disappeared without a trace in mid-18th century when interest in the flower began to wane.
The tulip’s Eurean adventure also commenced during the period of Suleiman the Magnificent.
Source: Doğa Magazine
Lalehan Uysal
Hakan Zümrüt
About
Events
Latest Activity
Badge
© 2009 Created by Pip Shea on Ning. Create Your Own Social Network
