Eastern arcade wall-hangings from the collection of the National Museum in Kielce

Abstract

The collection of the National Museum in Kielce includes a pair of silk arcade wall-hangings, the origin of which should be linked with silk workshops in the Ottoman Empire. These fabrics have parallel artefacts in the Polishmuseum and church collections, and the vast majority of them are traditionally regarded as trophies from the relief of Vienna, which, however, is not confirmed in the sources. In the literature to date they have been referred to originating from Persia, Turkey and even Cairo, and dated to the seventeenth century. The high quality of the Kielce fabrics and their unique, eclectic style, in which Oriental details coexist with European ones, allow us to attribute their authorship to Greek silk workshops located, among others, on the island of Chios. Eastern fabrics entered the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania which had been under the influence of Middle Eastern culture since the fifteenth century, especially strongly in the seventeenth century in huge quantities, not only as war spoils or diplomatic gifts, but above all as an object of well-organised trade in which energetic Armenian merchants played a major role.