The World of
Islamic Tiles

Iznik tiles take their name from the lakeside town of Iznik in north-western Anatolia, which became the principal ceramic centre of the Ottoman Empire from the late fifteenth century. Production reached its peak between 1560 and 1600, during the reigns of Suleyman the Magnificent and his successors, and its output covered the walls of imperial mosques, royal pavilions and harem chambers.

What makes Iznik distinctive is its true fritware body: quartz, fine clay and ground glass frit fired to a brilliant white, far harder and purer than the red earthenware used elsewhere. Over this body the potters painted directly onto a white slip, then sealed everything under a transparent glaze. The colours, cobalt blue, turquoise, emerald green and the famous raised tomato-red introduced around 1555, read with exceptional clarity against the white ground.

The design vocabulary is largely floral and rhythmic: saz leaves, tulips, carnations, hyacinths, roses and pomegranates interwoven with arabesques and cloud-band scrolls. The Rustem Pasha Mosque in Istanbul, built by the architect Sinan, is the most lavishly tiled interior in the Ottoman world. Today high-quality revival pieces are made both in Iznik and in Kutahya, which remains the largest contemporary source.

Zellige is the hand-cut, hand-laid geometric tile mosaic of Morocco. Although the tradition is shared with Islamic Spain, it survived in unbroken form in the medieval cities of Fez, Meknes and Marrakesh, where it is still made by hand today. The process begins with squares of natural clay, typically the grey clay of Fez, glazed in a single colour and fired. A master craftsman then chips each tile by hand with a sharp hammer into precisely shaped geometric pieces, which are laid face down, backed with mortar, and lifted as a finished panel.

The defining quality of authentic zellige is irregularity: every piece is slightly different in size, the glaze pools and pits, and no two panels are identical. The historical palette began with white, then expanded to honey-yellow, blue, green and a deep manganese black-brown. The Alhambra in Granada, the Madrasa Bou Inania in Fez and the Bahia Palace in Marrakesh are the great monuments of the tradition.

Customers should know that the term zellige is now used loosely. True zellige is hand-cut. Machine-cut tiles in geometric patterns are sometimes sold under the same name but lack the surface variation that is the essence of the style.

Kutahya in western Anatolia took over from Iznik as the principal Ottoman tile centre after about 1700 and has produced continuously ever since. Kutahya work in its great period tends to be lighter, more open in design and slightly more pastel than Iznik, and Armenian potters there developed a distinct repertoire of Christian liturgical tiles alongside Islamic patterns.

Today Kutahya is the largest producer of Iznik-style tiles on the world market, and most contemporary Turkish tiles a South African buyer is likely to encounter will originate there. Quality varies widely, from machine-printed transfers to serious hand-painted studio work: the markers of quality are the same as for historical Iznik, a true white body, clean glaze and brushwork that shows the hand.

Tile traditions developed in Muslim Spain run in parallel with those of Morocco. The Alhambra in Granada is the supreme surviving example of Nasrid zellige. After 1492, Christian Spain inherited and adapted the techniques, producing two specifically Spanish refinements: cuerda seca, the dry-line technique in which a manganese-and-grease line prevents coloured glazes from running, and cuenca, in which the tile is pressed in a mould so that low ridges separate colour fields, producing a slightly three-dimensional surface that catches the light.

Hispano-Moresque lustreware from Manises and Valencia continued the Persian lustre tradition into the Renaissance and exported across Europe. Today Seville and Granada remain active centres for cuenca and cuerda seca production, and their output is among the most architecturally authentic available for traditional interiors.

Cairo and Damascus were major Islamic ceramic centres in the Mamluk and early Ottoman periods. Damascus tiles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are often confused with Iznik because the technique is the same: fritware, underglaze painting, transparent glaze. The distinction lies in the palette and the drawing. Damascus work favours cobalt, turquoise and a soft sage green or aubergine purple, and crucially lacks the raised tomato-red of Iznik. The motifs tend toward architectural compositions: ogival lattices, large cypresses, measured arabesques rather than the exuberant naturalism of Iznik floral work.

In the Indus valley, the towns of Multan and Hala have produced a distinctive blue and turquoise glazed tilework since the medieval period, used to clad the great Sufi shrines of Sindh and southern Punjab. The palette is narrower than the Ottoman tradition, essentially cobalt, turquoise and white, but the patterns are bold and the surfaces unusually deep in colour. Seldom seen on the Western market, they are worth knowing about for buyers with a regional or spiritual interest in South Asian Islamic architecture.