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Havva DökmeciTezhip · Hüsn-i hat · Geometry

The practice

Tezhip

On illumination and the hatayi motif

comes from the Arabic root zeheb, gold. In practice the word means to ornament, to gild, to lighten a page: gold laid over pigment so that a sacred text is framed by something that catches light. The forms it uses are ornamental rather than figurative. Five-petal florals called , leaves, buds, and the compound blossom known as the .

Hatayi motifs were refined through the Ottoman period in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though their origins run much further back, to the Timurid workshops of Herat and Tabriz, and earlier still to Persia and China. Each shape has a name, an era, and a lineage of hands that changed it.

What draws me to it is proportion. I am pulled toward flowers the way a bee is, I photograph them constantly, and the more closely I look, the more the same ratios keep surfacing: in a blossom, in a shell, in the arm of a galaxy. The golden ratio is not a decoration laid over nature; it is how nature is put together. The traditional compositions know this. They are built on the same correspondence.

So the work moves between two poles that turn out to be one: the floral vocabulary of illumination, and the that holds it in place.

Disciplines

01

Tezhip

Manuscript illumination: and motifs in pigment and gold, framed by borders and opened by a at the center.

02

Hüsn-i hat

Arabic calligraphy with reed and brush, studied through a weekly cohort. The letter is drawn first; the illumination answers it.

03

Islamic geometry

Compass-and-rule constructions, drawn to sit under the floral work. Every rosette begins as a circle divided.

Lineage

Where the line has traveled

The motifs on these pages did not begin in Istanbul, and they did not end there. A short history of the road they took.

  1. Early Persia · 9th to 12th c.

    Gold enters the page

    Baghdad, Shiraz, Isfahan

    The earliest illumination appears around copies of the Qur'an, where gold and pigment frame the sacred text rather than illustrate it. Frontispieces are built from pure geometry, circles and stars laid out with compass and rule. The script is kufic, angular and monumental. Here the basic vocabulary is set: gold on paper, ornament in service of the word, pattern built from measured proportion rather than drawn freehand.

  2. Seljuk · 11th to 13th c.

    The pattern reaches Anatolia

    Konya, Anatolia

    As Seljuk rule reaches Anatolia, the same geometry and the rumi split-leaf motif travel with it, carried in books and in the hands of craftsmen. Here the patterns leave the page. Stone portals, carved wood minbars and glazed tile all carry the same interlace, the same split leaf turning back on itself. The land itself takes the name Rûm, the Roman lands, and the region's later style keeps that word.

  3. Timurid · 14th to 15th c.

    A new blossom arrives

    Herat, Tabriz, Samarkand

    Trade routes east bring Chinese lotus and peony forms into the Timurid courts, where they are reworked into the hatayi, a compound blossom shown in cross-section. The royal book workshop, the kitabhane, gathers calligraphers, painters and illuminators under one roof to produce a single manuscript together. Here illumination reaches a particularly refined balance of gold, lapis and floral pigment, a standard later workshops keep returning to.

  4. Ottoman · 15th to 19th c.

    The classical synthesis

    Istanbul

    In Istanbul the palace workshop, the nakkaşhane, brings hatayi, rumi and geometry together into a settled classical style. In the sixteenth century the court illuminator Kara Memi adds naturalistic flowers, tulip, carnation and rose, drawn from observation rather than convention, and the vocabulary widens. The same forms spread across mediums: İznik tile on mosque walls, gold leaf on manuscript pages, paint under a dome.

  5. Revival · 20th c.

    Passed from hand to hand

    Istanbul

    By the twentieth century the manuscript age has ended, and illumination has no obvious place left to live. It survives instead through a small number of masters of the early Republic, who take on students directly and pass the craft on hand to hand rather than through institutions. The format changes with it. Illumination moves off the book page and onto the framed panel, made to be hung rather than bound and read.

  6. Now · 2026

    The line continues

    Greenville, South Carolina

    The same motifs are drawn today on paper in the American South: hatayi and penç laid out in gold and pigment, geometry ruled underneath in compass lines. Teaching still passes from person to person, now across distance rather than inside one studio. In Greenville, South Carolina, most people meeting this work encounter it for the first time, an old tradition practiced in an unfamiliar place, still made by hand, one petal at a time.

Where it comes from

Istanbul and Bursa, in summer

Turkish art is rich in forms most people in the American South have never encountered: İznik ceramics, water marbling, architecture of extraordinary density, and manuscript illumination. All of it is the imprint of an empire that reached across regions, and all of it was left on walls, paper and pottery.

My reference is childhood: the mosques of Istanbul and Bursa in summer, Rüstem Paşa, Çamlıca, the Grand Mosque of Bursa, where tilework, lettering, and the call to prayer five times a day arrived as one impression rather than three. The current work returns there: my own photographs of those interiors, the calligraphy particular to each, the illumination that opens across a dome.

Glossary

A short vocabulary

The words used across this site, with the script they came from.

  • Tezhip

    تذهيب

    from Arabic zeheb (dhahab), gold

    Manuscript illumination: gold and pigment ornament framing a text. The word also names the wider Ottoman decorative art built from that ornament, applied to book pages, panels and bindings alike.

  • Hatayi

    ختايى

    "of Cathay," Chinese-derived

    A stylized compound blossom shown in cross-section, developed from Chinese lotus and peony forms as they passed through Timurid Herat and Tabriz. It is the core floral vocabulary of Ottoman illumination, the shape most other motifs are drawn around.

  • Penç

    پنج

    Persian panj, five

    A five-petaled flower seen from above, the simplest floral unit in the vocabulary. It often sits at the center of a composition, with hatayi and rumi forms built out around it.

  • Şemse

    شمسه

    from Arabic shams, sun

    The sun-form medallion at the center of a book cover or opening page, usually lobed. It is often finished with tığ finials above and below, pointing the composition outward along a single axis.

  • Rumi

    رومى

    "of Rûm," the Seljuk lands of Anatolia

    The split-leaf scrolling motif, abstracted from animal forms, that interlaces through and around floral work. Its origin is often traced to Central Asian animal art carried west into Seljuk Anatolia, then folded into the Ottoman decorative language.

  • Tığ

    تيغ

    needle, crochet hook

    The slender pointed finials that grow outward from the edges of a headpiece or medallion into the empty margin. They carry the eye past the filled composition and give it a direction of travel.

  • Hüsn-i hat

    حسن خط

    "beautiful writing"

    Islamic calligraphy as practiced in the Ottoman tradition, written with a reed pen (kalem) in scripts such as thuluth, naskh and ta'liq. Havva's own practice draws on this tradition using brush and reed together.

  • Ebru

    ابرو

    Persian abru, cloud, or ab-ru, water-face

    Paper marbling: pigments floated on a thickened bath and combed into patterns, then lifted onto paper. It developed as a companion art to illumination, often used as a ground for a calligraphy panel or a book cover.

  • Islamic geometry

    هندسة

    compass and straightedge

    Interlaced star-and-polygon patterns constructed from circle grids. This geometry is the framework under floral work in tile, wood and paper, setting the proportions that the hatayi and penç motifs then fill.

  • Zencerek

    زنجيرك

    little chain

    The narrow interlaced chain border that frames an illuminated page, running along all four edges. It marks the edge of the composition, holding the floral and geometric work inside a fixed boundary.

  • Halkâr

    حلكار

    "gold work"

    Illumination drawn in diluted gold alone, shaded in gold, without solid pigment. It is quieter than full-color tezhip and is often used for margins and the spaces around a main composition.