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MUSKETEERS, RICHELIEU, BLACK SEA COSSACKS AND TULIP PATTERNS IN UKRAINIAN EMBROIDERY AND BOOK ORNAMENTATION by HELENE TURKEWICZ-SANKO Tulips, which are closely associated with the Netherlands (Holland), are not indigenous to this country but to the steppes of Western and Central Asia, primarily Armenia, Persia and the Caucasus. From these lands, the tulip spread into areas along the Black Sea. They were loved by the Persians and Ottoman Turks so much that even today in modem Turkey, the tulip remains the national flower. The legendary Tale of the Tulip recounts the story of a Persian youth (Farhad) deeply in love with a fair maiden (Shirin). Gripped by unbearable grief at the news that his beloved has been killed, Farhad mounts his horse and gallops over a cliff to his death. It is a false rumor, but the youth does not die in vain. From his numerous wounds, droplets of blood turn into scarlet tulips, a symbol of perfect love. Tulips were particularly popular in the court of Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1520 to 1566, when it stretched from Tripoli to the Persian Gulf to Hungary. Some called it the "Ottoman's Tulip Age". One of the oldest definitions and descriptions of the tulip can be found in the Eighteenth Century French Encyclopedia or Dictionnaire Raisonm des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers (also known as Denis Diderot's encyclopedia) which was published between 1750 and 1772 and which is supposed to contain all the knowledge accumulated by man until that century. For the entry of the French word "Tulipe" one finds a description of the bulb itself and of the tulip bloom. The definition points to a similarity between the tulip's reproductive system and the female reproductive system because the virtual bloom is already present in the bulb itself. Historically speaking, tulips were unknown in Western Europe until 1590. From the encyclopedia, we learn that it was Ogier Ghislan de Busbecq, Ambassador of Austrian (Hapsburg) Emperor Ferdinand I to the Ottoman Empire, who saw tulips growing and blooming in the gardens of Constantinople and who wrote about them in letters sent back to Vienna. We also learn that the Turks bartered for these tulips with merchants from the Crimean Peninsula. The Turkish name for the tulip was "tulibent" but the Austrian Ambassador called the flower "tulipan", probably because it looked like a "dulban" or "turban". In Vienna, the tulip seeds and bulbs were planted in the Imperial Medicinal Garden, under the supervision of a certain Carolus Clusius who in 1593, left Vienna to work in Leiden, Holland, and took the bulbs with him. Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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