When I arrived in Kutahya in 1985, the masters told me there were twenty-three ateliers in the city. In 1997, I was told that no one knew the number, maybe it was two hundred. A year later the estimate had risen by fifty. Most of the shops are tiny operations: a man or woman working alone beneath a bulb in the kitchen, decorating plates purchased from a large atelier, and then signing them with the name of a firm that might last for only a few months. But the masters tell me that thirty of the workshops are solid and the market for their ware is strong. Turks have money and love to shop, tourists are coming in steadily increasing numbers, and the potters have participated in Turkey's rapid rise to prosperity. A third of the city's population is involved in the production and sale of ware that is painted underglaze on a composite white body.

The chief products are two. They make tiles to revet the walls of the concrete mosques being built throughout the nation as signs of faith and local pride. They make plates, domestic in scale and form, that are hung on the wall to do in the home what tiles do in the mosque, bringing brightness through their materials and meaning through their decoration.

Tile or plate, flower vase or water jar, the ware is called cini. The word is cognate with china. It designates a ceramic type, like stoneware or porcelain. The ware was developed in response to the stunning wonder of Chinese porcelain. But cini is compositionally unlike porcelain. It can be fired at a lower temperature so that the rich color can be applied under the glaze, rather than enameled over the glaze in the East Asian manner, which requires sequential firings, risking loss in the kiln.

The word cini also names the firms that produce the ware. Susler Cini, an atelier of the middle size, was founded in 1950 by Ali Ozker. (I like these dates and names, for they remind us that traditional pottery is not the spawn of superorganic forces, but the creation of real individuals at work in time.) When I showed up in Kutahya, Ihsan Erdeyer, the master at Susler, welcomed me into understanding of his craft. In a city that its workers call the city of jealousy as well as the city of cini, where some of the masters protect generally known facts as though they were deep secrets, Ihsan is famed for his generosity. I watched the work while Ihsan explained how six natural materials -kaolin, sand, chalk for whiteness, quartz for brightness, and two clays for plasticity -were mixed, milled, dampened, and strained through silk to make the refined white substance (they call it mud) that was thrown on the wheel for hollow ware, jiggered on the wheel for plates, and patted into molds for tiles.

Susler Cini was a rambling half-timbered building enclosing a courtyard. In the dusty dark, Ihsan Erdeyer managed a team of workers who jumped at his every quiet word. Ihsan directed the shaping of forms, then he recentered them on the wheel and shaved them to clarity before slipping them with a whiter, brighter coating of clay. Fired, then painted in two stages by young women and men, the ware was glazed by the master in a fritted lead solution, and then fired again.

At the old Susler, the master stacked the ware into delicate, dangerous columns within a domed and cylindrical kiln, sunken in the floor. Then one of Ihsan's workers went down and shoved dry pine into the firing chamber, while the heat rose slowly and held steady at a point above eight hundred and sixty and below nine hundred degrees centigrade. They judged the fire solely by eye, peeping through glassed spy holes, maintaining the heat at the perfect pitch for ten or twelve hours, and then letting the kiln cool slowly. If the heat is too low, the glaze will not convert, the ware will not shine. If the heat gets too high, the colors run, smudging the design. If the kiln cools too quickly, the glaze will crackle and craze. In some traditions -the Raku of Japan providing a fine instance -the masters invite accidental effects in firing, but not in Kutahya. The wish is for total control over natural forces -earth and air, water and fire -a control that is materialized in a pure white body and sharply defined forms, spread with a sheet of transparent glaze.

The aesthetic has not changed, but the work has gotten easier. In an effort to banish smoke from the sky, the municipal government has decreed electric kilns to be obligatory in new workshops. The temperature in the electric kiln is easier to regulate, and the hard labor of stoking the kiln has ended. Some old masters decry a decline in quality they miss a depth in brilliance that came from wood-firing, but they have to be pleased by a decrease in the number of pieces lost in each kiln. When Susler Cini was torn down in 1991, making way for a high-rise apartment building, Ihsan Erdeyer moved his operation into his old home, rebuilding it into a workshop, where two electric kilns stand on the ground floor, and the decorators work upstairs. The shop's effort coalesces in pieces of cini that appear to the eye like gemstones set on snow beneath a clean mountain stream.

Overseeing his squad, the master works to assure the material richness upon which the beauty of cini is based. Should you ask whether the ware is art or not, the potters in Kutahya, like those in Acoma, would exemplify the rule that quality must be distinguished within kind. They would tell you that some is art, some is not. Most cini is only factory work, the city's stock in trade, the basis of its economy, but some is special work, unquestionably art -the Turkish word is sanat.

Art in Kutahya depends upon a small number of great masters who both design and paint the ware, and who are obliged to teach as well as create. The greatest was Ahmet Sahin, the twentieth century's grand master of Islamic ceramics.

Ahmet Sahin became a hero to his city in 1927, when he was only twenty. At the beginning of the twentieth century, half of Kutahya's workers were Armenians. They left to repair the tiles on the Dome of the Rock, never to return, and today their descendants make a variety of Kutahya cini in Jerusalem. During the Turkish War of Independence, in the violent aftermath of the First World War, Mehmet Emin, the city's leading master, was killed. The Armenians were gone, the old master was dead, and in the early days of the Turkish Republic, Kutahya’s tradition seemed at an end. Then Ahmet Sahin formed a partnership with Hakki Cinicioglu, Mehmet Emin's son, and they made a few gigantic, intricately painted vases that inspired the city and brought the workers back to work. Since that time, while quality has waxed and waned, the cini industry has provided steady employment to Kutahya’s people. In 1927, there were two young men in the trade. Now it supplies the income for something like forty-five thousand people.

The partners parted. Hakki Cinicioglu established a firm to produce the city's normal ware. Ahmet Sahin, they say today, was tek adam -the one man in the past who was dedicated to quality. He became Kutahya’s great designer, drawing patterns on paper that were pricked into stencils in the workshops to pounce designs onto the slipped, biscuit surface for painting. Drawn in black, filled with color, Ahmet Sahin’s designs were transferred to seventy percent of Kutahya’s tiles and plates, and his taste diffused through commerce to become general in Turkey. He designed for the ateliers, and he painted his own designs with manly firmness to challenge the city as a whole, to keep the standards high.

His art, Ahmet Sahin told me, is the greatest of all. The painter buys paint and brushes, paints his picture, and he is done. Easy. But Ahmet Sahin ground his own paint. He made his own brushes out of the bone from a goose's wing and the hair from a donkey's mane. He painted his picture, and then submitted it to the judgment of the flame. Standing back while God decided, Ahmet Sahin waited anxiously for the kiln to be opened. He was downcast by every failure and exhilarated by every blessed success. Cini, he said, is a rose picked from the fire.

Ahmet Sahin wanted no other work, and when he was working, he said, he never knew fatigue or melancholy. At eighty-four, he still sat by the window of his home on the hillside, painting beautifully, and he told me to tell them to put a brush, some paint, and a few raw pieces in his coffin, so he could keep working on his journey to the other land. When I came in 1993, he wrapped me in a hug and emitted an old man's wail. His eyesight was gone. He could not work. The Ahmet Sahin who was his nation's greatest master had vanished. I was able to arrange a belated award for him from the Turkish government, but the days that remained were filled only with waiting.

He told me he was satisfied, for he had left his art in good hands. When Ahmet Sahin died at the end of 1996, a new generation had risen around him. His son Faruk, scholar and artist, brought a fresh delicacy to Kutahya’s painting. Along with Hakki Ermumcu, who worked in quiet isolation, Faruk excited the city's new masters, Ibrahim Erdeyer and Mehmet Gursoy, inspiring them to take responsibility for the art his father protected in its moment of peril. Ahmet Sahin's son Zafer, though drawn to the abstract art of modern Europe, trained his son, Ahmet Hurriyet, and Ahmet's wife, Nurten, in his father's ceramic tradition.

At first, Ahmet and Nurten worked in their apartment. Then in 1989, a businessman set them up as the managers of a new atelier, Isli Cini, where they used Ahmet Sahin's old designs and led a team of young workers in the production of factory ware of the highest quality. Soon their partner in business double-crossed them, leaving them with a huge debt that they worked off slowly. Nurten would get her son off to school, and then, smoking too much, she would lose herself in delicious creative concentration. Next to her husband and son, she said, she loved her work the most. After the publication of my book on Turkish art with Nurten's portrait on the cover, a big businessman in Istanbul, fantasizing a global market for cini, opened a massive modern workshop in Kutahya, Dogus Cini, in 1996. Ahmet was named master of the works. Nurten was charged to teach her style to a studio full of young women and men. The businessman could only think of their creations as commodities, as so many potatoes or radios to sell. He pressed them to expand production and slight the art, but there is no room in Nurten for compromise on standards. When profits rose too slowly, he abruptly dissolved their partnership in the summer of 1998. Betrayed again by their capitalist, Ahmet and Nurten returned to their apartment with debts to pay and plates to paint. Despite it all, in times of hope and heartbreak, Nurten Sahin has kept her head, and her work has steadily improved, coming closer and closer to that sweet spot in design where complexity and clarity meet.

In the study of a traditional art like pottery, it is no fitful struggle to bring both women and men into the story, and it has gotten easier., for a softening of gendered distinctions is one aspect of contemporary art. Men are now potters at Acoma. Women have long worked as decorators in Kutahya, but now they are gaining names. Nurten Sahin is first. It is hard, she says, to be an artist in the modern world, impossible to be a female artist, but she is one of three who lead the city's art today, who brought satisfaction to Ahmet Sahin at the end of his life. The others are Ibrahim Erdeyer and Mehmet Gursoy.

When I met Ibrahim and Mehmet in 1985, they were painting plates in the Susler Cini outlet on Kutahya’s main street. Since then, both of them have gone from success to success, artistically and financially. In 1997, we zipped around Kutahya in Ibrahim’s new van and Mehmet's white Mercedes.

Ibrahim Erdeyer was raised in the potteries. He mixed the mud in boyhood and fired the kiln as a teenager, learning the whole trade from his father, Ihsan, the master of Susler Cini. Understanding his desire and recognizing his skills, Ihsan freed Ibrahim to paint and put him in charge of commerce. A man of great charm, in whom, Nurten Sahin says, there is no badness at all, Ibrahim surrenders his summers to the hard job of selling, traveling the road and expanding the business. In the quiet of winter, when the soft snow falls, he wields the brush with consummate artistry.

In 1987, Mehmet Gursoy formed a new partnership called Iznik Cini. His intention was to recreate the excellence of the cini of the sixteenth century that is named today for the town of Iznik, though it was made in its own day in both Iznik and Kutahya. Partnerships are volatile, fragile things in Kutahya. His four original partners and many of his students have left him, carrying the Iznik Cini aesthetic into other shops, and Mehmet is the master of an atelier where he teaches bright young women, three of whom, he says, have surpassed him as painters of cini. Mehmet is a great teacher.

Mehmet Gursoy endured criticism for naming his shop after another city, and for focusing so tightly on the works of the masters he calls his teachers: the dead potters of the sixteenth century. But their palette of six colors featuring a luscious red, and their harmonious floral designs, have become his own. Mehmet's goal, he said when he began, was not freedom or novelty, but excellence. Willingly accepting the restraints of tradition in order to learn, Mehmet narrowed his vision to force progress. By 1991, the works in his atelier were approaching the past in material quality, and by trading the loose handling of the old works for modern Kutahya’s impeccable precision, Mehmet believed they had outstripped the past in painting. Another five years and the revival was complete. Basing his concept on the masterpieces of the sixteenth century, Mehmet first added flourishes that he called aesthetic in the last degree, and then he exploded the old patterns across the surface of his plates. His dazzling, energetic works refer to the past but emphatically belong to the present, suiting the opulent decor of the Turkish middle-class home. Meanwhile, Ibrahim Erdeyer has continued on his widening course, and Nurten Sahin has turned to the chests filled with Ahmet Sahin’s old drawings. She has rededicated herself to the revival of Kutahya’s designs of the earlier twentieth century, though she recombines them freely, renders them in the palette of the sixteenth century, and lifts their execution to dizzying new heights of exactitude.

Their styles are distinct. Going through a stack of plates from Kutahya, I do not have to look for signatures. As James Joyce said, the whole work of art is a signature. Ibrahim Erdeyer paints in a solid, robust manner, like Ahmet Sahin's. Mehmet Gursoy's plates dance with dainty detail. Nurten Sahin's works seem supernatural in precision, while remaining clean in overall look. Though he came late to the trade, a fourth artist has joined the others at the pinnacle of modern achievement. Kerim Kececigil learned in Mehmet Gursoy’s atelier, but his designs and handling are more like Nurten's.

Ahmet and Nurten, Ibrahim, Mehmet, and Kerim form a circle of collegial exchange and contention at the heart of the art of Kutahya. And then there is Sitki Olcar. He is the most famous. Shows of his creations have been mounted from Japan, through Turkey and Europe, to New York City. Sitki keeps Kutahya’s options open, going beyond old cini in the search for inspiration. Early in the 1980s, he refashioned designs from the freely-drawn earthenware of Canakkale. In a moment of high excitement in the 1990s, he incorporated ideas from William De Morgan, painting plates with tumbling fish and preening peacocks. It was a witty act of reclamation, for De Morgan, the potter in the circle of William Morris at the end of the nineteenth century in England, had taken his inspiration from the masterworks of Turkey and Iran. As I write, Sitki is decorating cini plates with designs lifted from Byzantine mosaics.

Self-taught and ebulliently independent, Sitki Olcar works in his day as Zafer Sahin did in his. Zafer, one son of the great Ahmet, kept his work free and fresh through constant change. He tried new things while the others tightened their effort to refine the received tradition.

Whether the goal is novelty or replication, when the masters of Kutahya concentrate on the work that must be done, the result -in their minds and mine -is certainly art.

Turkish artisans describe works of art as devices created in devotion and designed to lead the viewer, step by step, to higher understanding. First, the work pleases the body. Through the aesthetic, it appeals to the eye. Attracted into the work, the eye draws the mind behind it, and the work is revealed to be meaningful. Informed, instructed, the mind knows the world and arouses the soul to its beauty. The soul lifts in bliss and fills with love for God.

God is beautiful, the potters say, and God's beauty collects beauty. The first beauty of the cini plate lies in its material excellence -the smooth white body and gleaming clear glaze. These are the gifts of the master of the works, men like Ihsan Erdeyer at Susler Cini. The second beauty is the gift of the painter who draws the outlines in suave sweeps and fills them with deep color.

Painters learn to read the design, to unlock its logic, while painting. After a couple of repetitions, the design has been mastered, and the artist is free to forget everything except the point at the end of the brush. Time stops. Creation is all. They call the emotion of that moment ask -devotion, passion, love. Calm and intense in concentration, they give themselves in love to their work, and the work of art is, by definition, the object that contains the love of its creator.

The Western critic seems unable to see the passion in things unless they fuss for attention through innovative abandon and exhibitionistic deviance. But artists in Kutahya feel passion as an inner force that lifts them out of the common place and allows them to drive through meticulous craft toward a transcendent perfection. In Kutahya, the foundation of art is laid in a repetitive, ritualized state of meditative creation that brings natural substances through love into beauty.

The aesthetic quality of Kutahya’s ceramics abides in technical mastery, in radiant materials and fastidious painting. Then, pulled through the eye by beauty, the mind is engaged by historical reference. In acts of revitalization, bringing the excellence of thirteenth-century Konya, fifteenth-century Bursa, sixteenth-century Kutahya and Iznik, and twentieth-century Kutahya, into fresh being, the potters celebrate the tradition that was given, Mehmet Gursoy says, as a special gift from God to the Turkish nation. In association with works from the past, modern Kutahya cini  becomes a symbol for its creators and their patrons of the place they share: this city, this region, this grand country. The masterpieces of the sixteenth-century, so dominant in the thinking of the potters, carry them back not only to a time of artistic excellence, but as well to a time of Turkish greatness, when the Ottoman Empire stretched from Morocco to Iran, from the Sudan to the gates of Vienna, and Turkish power was founded upon Islamic precept.

The wish for perfection, displayed in technical mastery, is part of the desire to unify with unity itself, the perfect order of the universe. The quest for perfection leads modern artists into connection with those artists from the past who received God's gift and bequeathed models of excellence to the future. Taking inspiration from old models, the artists make historical references in their own, but their vision lifts beyond history. Old works of art are, like the things of nature, like the cow of the Holy Koran, signs to guide life, and built upon personal passion, retrieving history, the artful ceramics of Kutahya achieve their highest significance in the sacred.

Modern works cluster into three main classes of design. One is calligraphic. Writing God's word in the Arabic script, the artist draws a prayer. The most usual text is the opening formula of the Holy Koran: In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. It is called the Besmele, and tradition says that the one who writes the Besmele beautifully will be blessed. The Besmele is a prayer for beginnings. It launches action with an appeal to God's mercy. Plates and tiles bearing the Besmele are commonly hung above the door to be the last thing seen, the last words spoken before entering the turmoil of the day.

In Ahmet Sahin’s youth, Turks used the Arabic script, and he was able to create original calligraphic designs. Today's Turks use the Latin alphabet. The Arabic script, purified in sacred con¬ notation, has become the possession of professional calligraphers in Istanbul. Understanding the complexities of the calligrapher's art, potters in Kutahya restrict their effort to making faithful copies of the works of great masters, both living and dead.

Nurten Sahin gained her first fame, and attracted many imitators, by creating two new designs for calligraphic plates. She took the general idea from Kutahya’s recent tradition, refining it graphically while arranging a frame of arabesques around a rendition of the Besmele that was given shape by Ahmet Sahin. Her work is a prayer. At once it repeats the word of God and offers an homage to her husband's grandfather, her city's own master.

The second class of design is geometric. Wondrously diverse in detail, but one in structure, geometric designs are radially symmetrical. From a point at the center, the design expands in all directions, enfolding and controlling multiplicity in a single pattern -inscribed in a circle or pulsing toward infinity -that represents abstractly the totalizing, unifying power of the universe. While lecturing on Turkish art, I have found that Westerners generally believe that the Koran prohibits representation. Their own art leads them to feel that it is natural to make pictures of things, of the human form in particular, and only a restrictive ideology could have produced the aniconic qualities of Islamic art. But representation is not prohibited in the Holy Koran, and Islamic art is rich in representation.

They paint pictures of people in Kutahya. For Turks, they paint plates with portraits drawn from photographs. For foreign tourists, obsessed with the pictorial and charmed by the oriental, they fill busy plates with men on horseback, lifted from old miniature paintings. No hard rule prevents them from making pictures of people, but the masters consider them unimportant and consign them to the less talented decorators. Their sale supports the whole atelier, freeing the best artists to concentrate on the most important works. Those works are also representational. Calligraphic plates represent the word of God. Geometric plates represent the encompassing will of God. Theological presuppositions orient artistic actions differently. The Christian God made man in His image and appeared on the earth in human form, and the Western artistic tradition continues to fixate on the bodily. The God of the Muslim is without form. God's presence is imaged in words, in patterns, in signs.

The flower is a sign. The cycles of seed and blossom, blossom and seed, display, like the geometric design on the plate, the deep order of the universe. The bright flower on the dull landscape, like the star in the night sky, like the word revealed in the Holy Koran, attests to God's presence. It is a sign of the world's inherent beauty, of grace abounding.

Kutahya's third main class of design is floral. Calligraphic and geometric designs owe little to the magnificent cini of the sixteenth-century. They are based on Kutahya's twentieth-century tradition, though they can also reach deeply into time. Written designs repeat the creations of the great calligraphers of the past, especially the sixteenth-century master Ahmet Karahisari. Geometric designs often overlap the Ottomans to remember the Seljuks of Konya, who shaped the first Turkish state in Anatolia during the thirteenth century. But today's floral designs are founded upon the masterpieces of sixteenth-century cini, and they make clear reference to nature.

The flower ornaments nature, as art ornaments the human environment. With amazing frequency, the world's artists match their art to nature's by choosing the beautiful, useless flower when they turn to decoration. Flowers accompany the statues of the deities on the altars of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Catholicism. Where no icon is worshiped, in Muslim, Jewish, and Protestant contexts, flowers still bloom on the face of art. The picture of a flower evinces an affection for nature, and flowers provide a worldly foretoken of the garden of paradise. Those ideas are raised by floral imagery, but the artists of Kutahya deepen meaning in subtle interpretation.

Mehmet Gursoy tells us first to note that the flower is not realistic. Some are fantastic, dream flowers, but even when they are tulips and roses and carnations, they are solid and supernaturally perfect. The flowers on the plate are not the blossoms that wither and die on the hillside. They are not renditions of the transitory surface, shadowed in time, but revelations of eternal essences they are to flowers as the soul is to the body. Made abstract to be symbolic, the flowers on the plate, Mehmet says, stand for human beings, not for their mortal bodies, but for their immortal souls.

Then note, Mehmet says, that all the flowers, though they are of different varieties, spring from one root. A clump of grass or a dot of red, that root, he says, is a symbol of God's will, like the point at the center of the geometric design. We are not in the realm of mere botany. From one root, different kinds of flowers grow: some are tulips and some are roses, some are large and some are small, some are red and some are blue. And from the will of God, different kinds of people grow: some are women and others men, some are tall and others short, some are black and others white. Only God is one. Nature is diverse and imperfect. People are different at birth, and they are further differentiated by conditions. Some live long lives, others die young, and all are blown by the winds of chance. Mehmet's plate pictures the inner reality of existence. Beautiful forms lift from one root. They rise and sway and break in the wind, but together they shape a balanced composition within a perfect circle.

Balance, Mehmet says, is the key to the aesthetics of design. Accomplished most easily in symmetry, as it is on the geometric plate, balance is more challenging to the artist and livelier to the eye in asymmetrical configurations. On the floral plate, asymmetry signals worldly conditions, the winds that whip the garden, while the prevailing balance reveals the harmony that can be achieved when people live in accord with the deep rule of the universe.

Mehmet Gursoy’s floral plate exposes the inner order of life, the genetic and circumstantial differences among people, and it mounts a rhetoric for peace. Our differences are owed to God's will. Our lives unfold only within the compass of God's design. As different flowers form a balanced pattern, so should we, the people of the earth, cooperate in the creation of a beautiful whole. Mehmet's plate comes from love, and it asks us to love God by loving the others with whom we live, braving the storms of the moment in the circle of God's eternal love.
For Mehmet Gursoy, work is devotion, and the work of art is a prayer -just as it is for Haripada Pal. Their religions seem complete in their difference. Islam is rigorously monotheistic and aniconic in its art. Hinduism is polymorphous and iconic in the extreme. Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi, the great mystic of Seljuk Konya and a hero to the potters of Kutahya, teaches in one of his parables that different people -he specifically mentions Hindus, their tradition being so strange to the Muslim -have developed different styles of worship, but God understands the unity of love that lies beyond the difference of communal custom.

The Muslim potter of Turkey and the Hindu potter of Bangladesh both materialize their deep idea of the sacred in shaped and painted clay. The aesthetic is not incidental to their effort. It is essential both Muslim and Hindu potters bring the formless into form through beauty, and beauty serves society. The smooth, bright object attracts the eye and draws the soul in love toward God, and the soul commands the body to righteous social conduct.

Through common work, the potter of Kutahya comes into connection at the nexus of value, bringing material, aesthetic, social, and religious forces into union. Work eventuates in rich, shimmering objects and in lives that are happy enough -happy enough because daily labor brings personal integration (when physical, emotional, and intellectual capacities fuse in concentration) and social integration (when the artist works in a team to produce things that others actually want) and spiritual integration (when the creation accomplishes and portrays the self in the cosmos). Work brings the worker pride and power.

At the age of sixteen, Fevziye Yesildere fills with worth because the works of her hands exhibit her skill, because they connect her to her teacher, Mehmet Gursoy, and to her place, a city where elegant ceramics have been made for five hundred years. Even if scholars simplify their study and banish Muslim artistry to a dead past by attributing the finest old cini to another city Iznik, where the tradition died in the eighteenth century -her city's art, the kind she can make, has attained global recognition as one of the artistic treasures of humankind. Fevziye will not pursue the potter's trade when she marries and moves to Germany, but she will not lose the strength she gained in her apprenticeship. She will become a woman of the modern world, but she will remain free of the debilitating anxieties that bedevil people who have never known creation in their own hands.

That is one purpose of art. It brings confidence to its creators. Those who make things know who they are. They have been tested and found competent. Then art exhibits value. The artist's creations act in the world, embodying the complexities of culture and shaping relations among people, between people and the environment, between people and the forces that rule creation.

The way that the potter's art contains value -and so communicative potential-came home to me clearly when I took Mehmet Gursoy and Ibrahim Erdeyer to New Mexico, where they attended the opening of an exhibition that I arranged of Turkish art and demonstrated their skills at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. They were shocked at first by the high prices that sentimental people seemed willing to pay for Native American pottery that struck them as mediocre. Then we went to Acoma, to meet Wanda Aragon and Lilly Salvador, and their disappointment ended. They were thrilled by what they saw and excited to speak, through my translation, with their American colleagues.

The first thing they appreciated in the Acoma pottery was its material quality. The thin and even walls, as delicate as shells, demonstrated control over natural substances and technological procedures. Next they admired the brushwork. Like the Kutahya plate, the Acoma pot displays fine, smooth lines and a dense, unmottled fill of color. Lilly said she liked the bright colors of the Turkish plates, and she would like such a blue for her pottery, but she said she was obliged by religious stricture to use only natural materials. She had to content herself with gray and shades of buff and brown. Mehmet said he understood, but he was no heretic. He, too, ground minerals down and mixed them with slip for his paint. They agreed on materials, they agreed on fineness of body and brushwork, and they agreed on design.

The Turks took the Acoma designs to be signs of sacred unity. Native Americans, they believed, were true Muslims. They had received the word in the days of the beginning and had held to the right path through time, though they did not know the Holy Koran. Acoma's pottery was not ornamented with trivial images from the transitory surface of things, with depictions of mere bodies. It displayed geometric designs that rotated endlessly to symbolize the unity of universal order. If the designs reflected the world through imagery, the figures were abstract, not naturalistic, and they were restricted in topic to flowers and birds. The Acoma pot might show a parrot, the bringer of water -a visualization of the potter's prayer for dampness. On the Kutahya plate, a fabulous bird -the flower of the air -often blends into the floral designs, symbolizing the artist who could fly free, disrupting harmony, but who chooses the moral option, melding into the social order and contributing to the world's need for loving and balanced behavior.
Wanda Aragon and Lilly Salvador, Mehmet Gursoy and Ibrahim Erdeyer: all practice the potter's art by selecting the best from the past and holding to old forms and techniques, by adjusting to their times with electric kilns, and by creating the future in traditional designs painted with an exactitude and innovative panache that surpasses their historic models. They come from places far apart and radically different in development. The Americans are women, the Turks are men. Their pottery is different in appearance but alike in its engagement with nature, its commitment to technical mastery, its respect for the past, its geometric and floral designs, its decorative presence, its commercial utility, and its submission to sacred power.

The potter's art brings us, through value, toward human unity as well as cultural difference.