{"id":6843,"date":"2019-09-20T11:30:24","date_gmt":"2019-09-20T10:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.facsimilefinder.com\/articles\/?p=6843"},"modified":"2020-01-10T11:09:52","modified_gmt":"2020-01-10T10:09:52","slug":"poems-in-bloom-unraveling-a-sultans-quest-for-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.facsimilefinder.com\/articles\/poems-in-bloom-unraveling-a-sultans-quest-for-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Poems in Bloom: Unraveling a Sultan’s Quest for Love"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In the mid 16th century, Constantinople had reached its zenith as a bustling capital of arts and culture. Kanun\u00ee Sultan S\u00fcleyman<\/strong>‘s imperial art societies had attracted dozens of talented painters, bookbinders, and goldsmiths from every corner of the Ottoman Empire as well as recently annexed European territories. In the city’s medreses<\/strong> (colleges), boys of all ages were learning to count, read, tell the position of the stars, and use philosophical thought to make sense of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Promoting the arts<\/strong> was like breathing to Sultan S\u00fcleyman, who composed poems both in Turkish and Persian in a style known as diwan<\/strong>, under the pseudonym Muhibb\u00ee<\/strong> (true friend, lover). Since 1557, his imperial painting studio had a new head painter: Kara Memi<\/strong>, who combined both traditional and innovative motifs in his artworks, including naturalistic flowers<\/strong> and abstract geometric patterns<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Muhibb\u00ee<\/strong>, meaning lover, is Sultan S\u00fcleyman’s penname, and D\u00eev\u00e2n\u0131<\/strong> stands for an ancient Ottoman poetic tradition.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Kara Memi crafted the perfect framework for the Sultan’s love poems, as we can see today by leafing through the facsimile edition of the Muhibb\u00ee D\u00eev\u00e2n\u0131<\/strong>, a manuscript that is regarded as one of the greatest 16th-century Ottoman artworks<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n