THE ART OF EBRU

Some thirty years after the first Turkish tulip bulbs, carefully wrapped in gauze, were taken to Europe, the Europeans similarly became acquainted with the art of paper marbling, or 'Ebru' in Turkish. In those years, a German traveler by the name of Reinhold Lubenau, who happened to be in the Ottoman capital Istanbul from 1586 to 1589, saw and admired several examples of such work on sale in a shop. Dubbing it 'Turkish paper', he sent some back to the House of Hapsburg. Since it consists of designs made on paper, 'Turkish Paper', or the art of Ebru, has also been called 'Marbled Paper' or the 'Turkish art of paper marbling'.

Although it is not known with certainty when the art of creating designs on water originated, it does date back as far as the 8th-9th centuries. The Turks took up the art of marbling in Turkestan in the 15th century and brought it with them across Iran to Anatolia via the Silk Road. The word 'ebre' in the Chaghatay language of Turkestan means 'veined or water-marked'. In Persian, the word 'abru' means 'water surface', while 'ebri' has the meaning 'cloudy'. In the dictionary of the Turkish Linguistic Society, the word 'ebru' is defined as “a sort of water paper on which decorators produce designs in a variety of colors.”

The materials used in ebru include the basin that contains the water, the substances used as thickening agents (gum tragacanth, carrageen, sahlep root), ox bile, the dyes, which are oil-based and not water soluble, the brushes, and the needles of varying degrees of thickness