Drawing of a Turkish café

Drawing in pencil by Arthur Evans of three men in a café, sitting, smoking and tending a stove, identified as a depiction of the interior of a Turkish café in Tešanj, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Artist: Arthur John Evans
Date of drawing: August 1875
Continent: Europe
Geographical area: Southern Europe
Country: Bosnia and Herzegovina
Region/Place: Tešanj
Cultural group: Turkish
Format: Drawing
Size: 82 x 137 mm
Acquisition: Joan Evans. Donated August 1941

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Exhibition caption: ‘One of a selection of drawings and ink sketches made by Arthur Evans while travelling with his brother through Bosnia and Herzegovina in the summer of 1875. They show people and places encountered by the pair on a route south from Agram (modern-day Zagreb) – via Tešanj, Sarajevo and Mostar – to Ragusa (Dubrovnik), which Evans and his wife were later to make their home. The illustrations demonstrate a particular interest in identity and dress, Evans writing, for example, of finding “two Bulgarians hard at work tying up bundles of onions, clad in their dark national costume – the brown tight-sleeved jacket embroidered with black, the dull red sash, the brown trowser-leggings which are equally Turkish and Tartar and on their head the black sheepskin cap which had at first attracted my attention.” As well as being an aide-mémoire, the drawings provided the basis for engravings published in Evans’ account of his journey, Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on Foot during the Insurrection, August and September 1875 (London, 1876). As an eyewitness account of a distant region in turmoil, the book was an immediate success, quoted extensively in Parliament, and it went into a second edition the following year.’ Source: ‘Travels in Finland and Bosnia-Herzegovina: An Ethnographic Collection of Sir Arthur Evans’, exhibition curated by Philip Grover, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 29 April to 1 September 2013.

Primary documentation: ‘[p.588] Dr. JOAN EVANS, from the property of the late SIR ARTHUR EVANS, Youlbury, Boars Hill, Oxford. [List of items follows]’; ‘[p.590] 21 Original pencil sketches, types & scenery. BALKANS’: Pitt Rivers Museum accession records (Donations X, 1937–1941), pp.588, 590.

Research notes: It has been identified by Philip Grover that this original drawing was used as the artwork for a woodcut engraving subsequently published in Arthur J. Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on Foot during the Insurrection, August and September 1875 (London, 1876), p.117, printed with the caption ‘Turkish Café, Tešanj’. Evans recorded in the volume: ‘From here I adjourned to a neighbouring café, discovered by entering another stable and climbing another leaving L--- [Lewis, the author’s brother and travelling companion] to the safe keeping of our Zaptieh, who was snoring on the floor of our room. I found myself amidst a bevy of comfortable Turks, who were alternately sipping their mocha and smoking their long chibouks, - for they belonged to the old school, and were robed in flowing dressing-gowns and surmounted with pompous turbans’: Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on Foot, p.118.