SEEKING THE EAST IN THE WEST: THE ZSOLNAY PHENOMENON

Abstract

In the fall of 1887 Vilmos Zsolnay, the owner of a Hungarian porcelain factory already enjoying European renown,1 sent his son Mikl6s on ajourney to the Middle East. Making purchases in the towns he visited along the way, Mikl6s Zsolnay assembled a collection of 170 wall tiles, which he dispatched to his native town of Pecs, in southwest Hungary. While on his expedition, Mikl6s Zsolnay kept a diary in German, also writing letters-similarly in German-to his family back home. On the basis of this documentary material it is possible to trace the itinerary he followed and identify the places in which he made his acquisitions. The letters tell us that he reached Istanbul on October 24, 1887. Then, in early November, he made a brief, two-day excursion to Bursa. Leaving the Turkish capital towards the end of that month, he proceeded-by way of Izmir, Larnaka, Beirut, Baalbek, Damascus, Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Port Said-to Cairo, where he arrived on December 19, 1887. After spending almost a month in Egypt, he set out for home. On the return leg of his journey he took in both Athens and Rome, arriving in Hungary in February 1888.2 The collection that took shape as a result of Mikl6s Zsolnay's tour was just one amassment of Ottoman tiles to reach Western Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century. We may justly ask who or what prompted Vilmos Zsolnay to send his son collecting in the East, and why someone from Hungary, a country that had belonged to the Ottoman Empire for 150 years, should go looking for Ottoman ceramics there. As we shall see, the answers to these questions shed light on the nature of the Ottoman occupation of Hungary, as well as on the milieu in which the Hungarian intelligentsia lived and worked during the second half of the nineteenth century. VILMOS ZSOLNAY AND THE 1873 VIENNA