RA unveils its Turkish delights

The Royal Academy today unveils its 2005 blockbuster - Turks: A Journey Of A Thousand Years. The Evening Standard has had the first look at the show, which brings together more than 350 treasures from 11 countries and charts 1,000 years of Turkish culture.

Spanning a period from the year 600 to 1600, the exhibition features textiles, manuscripts, calligraphy, woodwork, metalwork and ceramics. They reveal the development of Turkic peoples as they forged their way from China to the Balkans.

Highlights include the exquisite doors to the personal harem of Ottoman Sultan Murad III. Designed by the great architect Sinan, the 2.5metre-high doors are inlaid with intricately patterned mother-of-pearl, ebony, ivory and tortoiseshell.

The RA has persuaded the world-renowned Topkapi Palace Museum and the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art in Istanbul to lend it highly valuable objects never been seen outside Turkey.

The astonishing wealth of the Turkic peoples can be seen in lavish flasks, jugs, daggers and pen boxes encrusted with stones including emeralds, rubies and jade. The insurance bill alone for the exhibition is about £2 million.

Other artefacts include 15th-century paintings of warriors in battle and a ceremonial helmet of iron, steel, gold and ruby. The Turkish history of conquest is reflected by a display of blood-curdling weaponry, including the steel, crystal and turquoise dagger of Sultan Selim I.

The exhibition, which opens to the public on Saturday, is structured around the rise and fall of empires in Turkey, the Middle East and central Asia, including the Uigurs, Seljuks, Timurids and Ottomans. The Seljuk people, nomadic warriors from central Asia, conquered the Byzantines in battle and established themselves in the Middle East during the 11th century.

Next came the renowned Ottomans, led by Mehmed the Conqueror, who brought an end to the Byzantine Empire when he captured Constantinople in 1453 and renamed it Istanbul. The Ottoman empire thrived and lasted until the 20th century.

Eastwards, during the 14th and 15th centuries, the Timurid people, led by Tamerlane, took control of lands from what is now the eastern side of Turkey to northern India.

Throughout their migrations and conquests, each group of Turkic people overwhelmed and then assimilated the cultures they encountered.