What is Iznik?

Iznik is a small town in north-west Anatolia that gave its name to the finest ceramics the Ottoman world produced. It is remembered for its flowers - tulips, carnations, saz leaves - and for a red no other kiln could fire. Under the flowers, holding the wall together, is geometry. This is where Zakhraf begins with Iznik.

A town, a kiln, a blue

Iznik sits on a lake east of the Sea of Marmara, on the site of ancient Nicaea. From the late fifteenth century its kilns became the source of the Ottoman court's best pottery and, more lastingly, its architectural tile. The body is a hard white fritware, painted under a clear glaze, and the first great wares are blue-and-white: cobalt on a white slip, in open conversation with the Chinese porcelain that reached Istanbul by trade and tribute. That first register is the one in FIG. 1 - blue on white, and nothing else yet.

The four glazes

Over the sixteenth century the palette opened. Turquoise came in, then a sage green and, for a time, a manganese purple. The turning point was a red. Around 1560 the Iznik potters mastered a thick iron-rich red, often called Armenian bole or sealing-wax red, laid on so heavily that it stands slightly proud of the surface and catches the light. The classic four-colour Iznik, roughly 1560 to 1600 - cobalt and turquoise, that bole red and a green on a white ground - is the palette most people picture when they think of the name.

Famous for flowers, built on geometry

Iznik's fame is floral. The tiled interiors people travel to see - the Rustem Pasha Mosque of 1563, the later Sultan Ahmed - are gardens of painted blossom. But a wall of flowers still has to be built, and the building is geometric. Iznik tiles were set in a geometric order: hexagonal tiles that lock edge to edge, star-and-cross panels, and running geometric borders that frame the floral fields and turn the corners. Go back a little, to the earlier Ottoman tilework of Bursa, and the geometry is more openly the whole point.

That geometric register is what this studio draws. The engine constructs the star fields, the cut-tile mosaics and the borders of Ottoman ceramic, each glazed in the Iznik palette by the same rule a cutter follows - faces grouped by congruence class, no two neighbours sharing a colour. What it does not do is paint the tulips. That is the honest line of the whole project: derived, not generated holds for the geometry, and the flowers are somebody else's brush.

What the studio makes from it

The Iznik set in the studio is that geometry in that palette: the blue-and-white star field of the early kilns, the four-glaze quartet of the high period, the hook-cut and bowtie tiles of the cut-tile tradition, and the bordered panels where a frieze frames a field. Each is constructed from scratch in the browser, recoloured by class, and exported as print-ready SVG, a seamless repeat tile or a fabrication file. The blue is seven hundred years old; the drawing of it is happening as you load the page.