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CULTURE

Dresden opens chamber of Turkish delights

Saxon kings both feared and admired the Ottoman Empire. Andrew Curry heads to Dresden to explore Germany’s long fascination with Turkish art, culture and military prowess.

Published: 5 March 2010 16:06 CET
Dresden opens chamber of Turkish delights
Photo: DPA

Teutonic interest in Turkish delights started long before the tasty döner kebab came to German street corners everywhere.

This Sunday, Dresden’s Royal Palace will open the Türckische Cammer, or Turkish Chamber, as part of ongoing renovations of the city’s historic quarter overlooking the Elbe River.

The chamber is a permanent space devoted to Ottoman weaponry, textiles, horse trappings and armour collected by the rulers of Saxony beginning in the early 1500s. Over 600 objects – from tents and pennants to helmets, swords and elaborate folding leather cups – are on display in a 750-square metre space.

Click here for a photo gallery of the exhibition.

Closely controlling the lighting, temperature and humidity makes it possible to display centuries-old textiles in the open. At the centre of the exhibition is a massive tent, 20 metres long and six metres high. Elaborately embroidered in deep red, gold and blue on the inside, the tent is a pale blue on the outside. It was acquired by the most powerful ruler of Saxony, Augustus the Strong, in 1729, and used at official events including royal weddings and military parades.

“The tent looks like it did 300 years ago,” says exhibition curator Holger Schuckelt. “It’s not just a display, but a trip to the past.”

Visitors can walk under and through the massive tent, which survived centuries in the state vaults and was nearly lost in 2002, when severe flooding filled the storerooms of Dresden’s museums with water. Restorers spent more than a decade carefully cleaning and preserving the tent’s fabric.

Many of the original Turkish Chamber’s treasures weren’t so lucky. Wood horses used for centuries to display the jewel-encrusted riding equipment (themselves based on live Arabians given as gifts to the Saxon royalty) were burned in World War II, and had to be re-created by a master woodcarver for the exhibit. “They cost about as much as a real horse,” says Saxon State Museum Collections official Dirk Syndram. “But they last a lot longer and they don’t cost anything to feed.”

In addition to gold and silver horse trappings, highlights of the exhibition include swords encrusted with sapphires, lapis lazuli and opals and engraved in Arabic, elaborately inlaid rifles and embroidered velvet pennants.

Some of the items on display date back nearly five centuries. Beginning in the 1500s, the ruling classes in some parts of Europe were obsessed with Turkish culture and art. According to curator Schuckelt, European rulers were deeply impressed by the Ottoman Empire’s military prowess and a little bit jealous of the sultan’s unbridled power. “The Saxon electors had a mixture of fascination and fear when it came to the Orient and Turkey,” Schuckelt says.

As Turkish armies defeated western European forces in battle after battle throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, the fascination grew into an obsession. Captured weapons and tents were proudly displayed and copied; rulers dressed their elite soldiers in uniforms inspired by the Turks.

A climactic clash outside of Vienna in 1683 – ending in a resounding defeat for the Ottoman forces – did nothing to diminish the phenomenon. Gradually “the Orient” became synonymous with luxury, sophistication and decadence. European craftsmen were inspired by Turkish design and architecture. Nobles had their portraits painted wearing caftans and curved Ottoman-style swords. The fanciest parties of the year were masquerade balls where everyone came in Turkish costumes.

As a result, most of the art and weaponry on display was bought at great cost by the Saxon kings or given as gifts by ambassadors or Polish and Saxon aristocrats, Schuckelt says. Only a small percentage was actually seized in battle – and there have been no calls to return any of it to Turkey.

Museum officials hope the exhibition, which opens to the public on Sunday, can help teach visitors about the long history of German-Turkish relations. It’s also a way to engage the many people of Turkish descent who live in Germany. “In a time of xenophobia, when Dresden is too often in the news for negative reasons, it’s great to have an opening like this,” says Martin Roth, director of Saxony’s state museums. “This is a cultural corridor that may help bring many Germans of Turkish background to Dresden for the first time.”

Organisers have reached out to nearly 3,000 Turkish cultural groups and foundations to spread the word. And the museum arranged for nation-wide advertising on a modern example of German-Turkish fusion: Over the next few months, 4.5 million specially printed döner kebab wrappers will serve as mini-billboards for Dresden’s latest Turkish delight.

Türckische Cammer in the Residenzschloss

10 am to 6 pm, closed Tuesdays

Tel: +49 (0)3 51 / 4 91 42 000

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DISCOVER GERMANY

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

With thousands of years of history in Germany to explore, you’re never going to run out of museums to scratch the itch to learn about and fully experience the world of the past.

Published: 5 April 2024 10:46 CEST
Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

Here are eight of our favourite museums across Germany’s 16 states for you to discover for yourself. 

Arche Nebra

Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt

One day, around 1600 BCE, local Bronze Age peoples buried one of their most precious objects – the Nebra Sky Disk, a copper, gold, and bronze disk that acted as a calendar to help them plant crops. This was a matter of life and death at the time. 

Over three thousand years later, in 1999, it was uncovered by black market treasure hunters, becoming Germany’s most significant archaeological find. 

While the Sky Disk itself is kept in the (really very good)  State Museum of Pre- and Early History in nearby Halle, the site of the discovery is marked by the Arche Nebra, a museum explaining prehistoric astronomy and the cultural practices of the people who made it. 

Kids will love the planetarium, explaining how the disk was used. 

Atomkeller Museum

Halgerloch, Baden-Württemberg

From the distant to the very recent past – in this case, the Nazi atomic weapons programme. Even as defeat loomed, Nazi scientists such as Werner Heisenberg were trying to develop a nuclear bomb. 

While this mainly took place in Berlin, an old beer cellar under the town of Halgerloch, south of Stuttgart, was commandeered as the site of a prototype fission reactor. 

A squad of American soldiers captured and dismantled the reactor as the war ended. Still, the site was later turned into a museum documenting German efforts to create a working reactor – one that they could use to develop a bomb.

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be a physicist to understand what they were trying to do here, as the explanatory materials describe the scientist’s efforts in a manner that is easy to understand. 

German National Museum

Nuremberg, Bavaria

Remember that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, where an unnamed government official wheels the Ark of the Covenant into an anonymous government warehouse? This could possibly be the German equivalent – albeit far better presented. 

The German National Museum was created in 1852 as a repository for the cultural history of the German nation – even before the country’s founding. In the intervening 170 years, it’s grown to swallow an entire city block of Nuremberg, covering 60,000 years of history and hundreds of thousands of objects. 

If it relates to the history of Germany since prehistoric times, you’re likely to find it here.

Highlights include several original paintings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, the mysterious Bronze Age ‘Gold Hats’, one of Europe’s most significant collections of costuming and musical instruments, and a vast display of weapons, armour and firearms. 

European Hansemuseum

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein

In the late Middle Ages, the political and economic centre of the world was focused on the North Sea and the Baltic German coasts. 

This was the domain of the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful trading alliances in human history. Centuries before the Dutch and British East India Companies, they made in-roads to far-flung corners.

The European Hansemuseum in the former Hanseatic city of Lübeck tells the story of the league’s rise and eventual fall, its day-to-day operations, and its enduring legacy.

This museum is fascinating for adults and kids. It uses original artefacts and high-tech interactive elements to tell tales of maritime adventure. Younger visitors will also be enchanted by the museum’s augmented reality phone app that asks them to help solve mysteries. 

Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum

Augsburg, Germany

The Hanseatic League was not the only economic power in the late Middle Ages. The Fugger and Welser families of Augsburg may have been the richest in the world until the 20th century.

From humble beginnings, both families grew to become incredibly powerful moneylenders, funding many of the wars of the 16th century and the conquest of the New World.

The Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum not only explains the rise of both patrician families but also the practices that led to their inconceivable wealth—including, sadly, the start of the Transatlantic slave trade. 

The museum also documents the short-lived Welser colony in Venezuela, which, if it had survived, could have resulted in a very different world history.

This museum has many high tech displays, making it a very exciting experience for moguls of any age.

Teutoburg Forest Museum

Kalkriese, Lower Saxony

Every German child learns this story at some point: One day at the end of summer 9 AD, three legions of the Roman army marched into the Teutoburg forest… and never came out. 

Soldiers sent after the vanished legions discovered that they had been slaughtered to a man.

Arminius, a German who had been raised as a Roman commander, had betrayed the three legions to local Germanic tribes, who ambushed them while marching through the forest. 

Today, the probable site of the battle – we can’t entirely be sure – is marked by a museum called the Varusschlacht Museum (Literally ‘Varus Battle Museum’, named after the loyal Roman commander). 

The highlights here are the finds – made all the more eerie by the knowledge that they were looted and discarded from the legionaries in the hours following the ambush. 

German Romanticism Museum

Frankfurt, Hesse

The Romantic era of art, music and literature is one of Germany’s greatest cultural gifts to the world, encompassing the work of poets such as Goethe and Schiller, composers like Beethoven and artists in the vein of Caspar David Friedrich.

Established in 2021 next to the house where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, the German Romanticism Museum is the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Romantic movement. 

In addition to artefacts from some of the greatest names in German romanticism, in 2024, you’ll find a major exhibition exploring Goethe’s controversial 1774 novel, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, and another on the forest as depicted as dark and dramatic in the art of the period. 

Gutenberg Castle

Haßmersheim, Baden-Württemberg

Sometimes being a smaller castle is a good thing. The relatively small size and location of Guttenburg Castle, above the River Neckar near Heilbronn, protected it from war and damage over eight hundred years – it’s now the best preserved Staufer-era castle in the country.

While the castle is still occupied by the Barons of Gemmingen-Guttenberg, the castle now also contains a museum, that uses the remarkably well-preserved castle interiors to explore centuries of its history – and the individuals that passed through it.

After you’ve explored the museum—and the current exhibition that uses Lego to document life in the Middle Ages —it’s also possible to eat at the castle’s tavern and stay overnight!

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