The brilliant blue-green glazes of Jerusalem’s Armenian pottery have become an iconic feature of the Holy City, but the origins of this distinctive art spring from the former Ottoman ceramics center of Kutahya, in northwest Turkey, and are entwined with the upheavals of World War I. Ms. Moughalian’s talk will trace the renewal of Kutahya’s tile tradition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the transfer of this distinctive art to Jerusalem. David Ohannessian (1884-1953), a master ceramicist, led one of Kutahya’s major workshops in the years before the Great War, executing tile commissions for Ottoman governors and European notables, including Sir Mark Sykes. Ohannessian survived deportation to the Syrian desert in 1916-17, and subsequently resettled in Jerusalem in order to create tiles for a planned British restoration of the Dome of the Rock.

David Ohannessian successfully recreated his art in Mandate Palestine, executing major architectural tile installations, recruiting other Kutahya artisans to follow him, and training a generation of Armenian orphans to create colorful, elaborately painted pottery. The Jerusalem tradition he founded in 1919 continues to flourish today.

Sato Moughalian is an award-winning flutist from New York City with more than 30 chamber music recordings to her credit. For the last eight years, she has been researching the life and work of her grandfather, ceramicist David Ohannessian, delving into archives in Turkey, Israel, England, and France, and tracing the history of his monumental tiled installations. Since 2015, she has published articles in Toplumsal Tarih, Stambouline, a Kutahya ceramics exhibition catalogue for the Komitas Museum-Institute in Yerevan, Armenia, a French anthology, A la découverte de la Jérusalem des Arméniens (Paris: Somogy Éditions d’Art, forthcoming), and was interviewed for an episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. She is currently completing a biography of Ohannessian for Redwood Press/Stanford University Press for publication in 2019.