Ottoman Lamp Making: Light Through Centuries
The workshop of Mehmet Kaya occupies a space in the Grand Bazaar that his family has held since 1923, though the craft itself stretches back much further. When the Ottoman sultans wanted light, they called upon glass artisans like Mehmet's ancestors. The result was a tradition of lamp-making that turned light itself into art.
"My grandfather used to say that a good lamp doesn't just illuminate a room," Mehmet explains, holding up a piece of cobalt glass against the workshop's single window. "It transforms it. Every piece of glass tells the light where to go."
The Art of Glass
Creating a single mosaic lamp takes Mehmet between three and five days. He begins with a metal frame, hand-bent from brass wire into a traditional shape. Then comes the glass: hundreds of small pieces, each cut by hand from larger sheets. The colors are not painted on but inherent in the glass itself, created by mineral oxides mixed into molten silica.
Red glass gets its color from gold chloride. Blue from cobalt. Green from iron. These are the same recipes used in the great stained glass windows of Istanbul's mosques, and Mehmet guards them as fiercely as any family secret.
A Partnership of Trust
Our partner Elif Yilmaz, herself trained as an architect, was immediately drawn to the mathematical precision of Mehmet's work. "Each lamp follows geometric patterns that are rooted in Islamic mathematical traditions," she explains. "The beauty isn't random. It's calculated."
Light is the cheapest luxury and the most powerful transformer of space. A single lamp can make a room feel like a palace.
When a lamp from Mehmet's workshop arrives at your home, it carries within it five centuries of Ottoman aesthetic philosophy. Switch it on, and watch as your walls come alive with colored light, dancing in patterns that were once reserved for sultans and scholars.
The lamps we carry through Heritage Souk are Mehmet's finest work, each one signed with his personal mark on the base and accompanied by a card explaining the geometric pattern used.
