Appendices - Strolling Through Istanbul: The Classic Guide to the City - page 486

and of the porch of Çinili Köşk where the most extensive examples
occur.
About 1550 this lovely technique gave place to the no less
beautiful and more famous Iznik style, where the design is painted
on the clay and covered with an absolutely transparent glaze. Here
the predominant colours are on the purest, most unblemished white
ground, deep blue, light blue, shades of green, and above all the
matchless tomato red. This was made with a clay known as Armenian
bole, found near Erzurum in eastern Anatolia. It has to be laid on
very thick so that it protrudes from the surface of the tile like sealing-
wax. The technique of using it successfully is extremety tricky and
was only completely mastered towards 1570 and lost again about
1620, so that the absolutely perfect tiles of this type are confined to
this half century. In tiles before and after this date the bole tends to
be a bit muddy and brownish and lacking in clear outline. But at
their best the Turkish tiles between about 1550 and 1650 are quite
incomparable, and unique.
After this the tiles, like most other things in the Empire, began to
decline. A short revival was made about 1720 when the last of the
Iznik potters were settled at Tekfur Saray in Istanbul, but this hardly
outlasted the first generation. Thereafter inferior European tiles or
even more inferior imitations of them became the vogue. There has
been a considerable and praiseworthy revival of the old style in our
own day, so that really good modern tiles (now made at Kütahya and
Iznik) are sometimes hard to distinguish, at first glance, from the
great ones.
SİNAN'S EXTANT WORKS IN ISTANBUL
The following is, as far as we are aware, the first chronological list
of Sinan's surviving buildings to be attempted. It is intended to be
complete as far as buildings in Istanbul are concerned; but buildings
not in the Tezkeret-ül Ebniye are excluded unless they form parts of
külliyes or other buildings which are in the Tezkere , or unless there is
other unimpeachable documentary evidence for them; also excluded
are a certain number of buildings originally constructed by Sinan,
but so completely reconstructed at a later date as to contain little or