The Red That Disappeared: İznik Tiles, Ottoman Ceramics, and the Lost Art of Coral Red

Stand inside the Rüstem Pasha Mosque in Istanbul and one colour finds you before the others do.

It is not the cobalt blue, though there is plenty of that. It is a red, dense and slightly raised from the surface, running through the tulip petals from floor to ceiling. Today, the Turkish name for it is mercan kırmızısı. Coral red. It appeared on İznik tiles in the middle of the sixteenth century and looked like nothing else in the ceramic world.

Then the workshops that made it closed, the production method passed out of memory, and for roughly three hundred years no one could replicate it.

The tiles stayed on the walls. The knowledge of how to make them did not.

A Town and Its Clay

İznik had been making pottery long before the Ottoman court took notice.

By the late fifteenth century, potters in İznik were making simple earthenware decorated with cobalt blue beneath a clear lead glaze. Some of the patterns already looked familiar across the Ottoman world. Others echoed the blue-and-white porcelain arriving from China. That was no coincidence. The Ottoman court admired Chinese porcelain and wanted something equally refined. İznik's workshops answered that demand. From that point on, the town was no longer making pottery only for local use. It was shaping the visual language of an empire.

The material they worked with was not ordinary clay. İznik tiles are made with a high-quartz stonepaste called fritware, with quartz making up as much as 85 percent of the body. This is what gives them their brightness. Most tiles absorb light. İznik tiles hold it differently.

Through the sixteenth century, the palette expanded. Turquoise came first, combined with the dark cobalt blue. Then sage green, pale purple. In the middle of the century, coral red appeared, thick and luminous, unlike anything that had been produced before.

The motifs of that period are easy to recognize now: tulips, carnations, saz leaves, hyacinths, and the cloud bands borrowed from Chinese textiles. The designs were drawn in the royal workshops in Istanbul, then sent to İznik to be executed on tile. The court painters and the tile painters worked in parallel.

The Mosques That Needed Them

The peak of İznik production runs almost exactly alongside the career of Mimar Sinan.

Sinan was chief imperial architect from 1539 to 1588. He designed more than three hundred structures across the empire, and he used İznik tiles not as ornament but as architecture. In the Rüstem Pasha Mosque, finished around 1563, tile covers almost every interior surface. The effect is total. The Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, considered his masterpiece, shows the full maturity of the sixteenth-century palette.

The last major imperial commission was the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, the Blue Mosque, completed in 1616. It contains 21,043 handmade İznik tiles. By the time the mosque was finished, the quality of the tiles being delivered had already begun to fall. Sultan Ahmed I had issued an imperial order in 1613 preventing İznik tile makers from taking other work until his commission was complete. The potters worked under pressure, underpaid, unable to turn down other income. The Blue Mosque still contains one of the greatest collections of İznik tiles ever made. Yet specialists often point to subtle differences in the coral red. It no longer has quite the same raised, glowing quality seen in masterpieces such as the Rüstem Pasha Mosque, suggesting that the workshops were already struggling to maintain their highest standards.

Why the Workshops Closed

The decline did not come from a single cause.

The Ottoman economy contracted in the seventeenth century. Court patronage thinned. Private clients in Europe began placing orders, but they wanted cheaper work, faster. The potters stretched their materials and cut corners they could not afford to cut. Fires destroyed parts of the potters' quarter in İznik. Silica dust and lead vapors from the glazes took their toll on the craftsmen who breathed them over a lifetime. The town sits in the basin of a lake, and malaria was endemic in the lowlands.

By the early eighteenth century, tile production in İznik had stopped. Kütahya, further inland and less affected by the same pressures, continued producing ceramics, but the fritware technique and the production method for coral red had already gone quiet.

The tiles remained on the walls they had been fired for. The knowledge of how to make them did not.

Getting the Red Back

In 1993, an economics professor in Istanbul learned that archaeologists had been excavating the old kiln sites in İznik.

Although she was an economics professor, Işıl Akbaygil had long been interested in Ottoman art. When archaeologists began excavating İznik's old tile kilns, she decided to help revive the tradition. She organised an international exhibition around the excavation findings. The catalogue grew into a book, still cited as the most comprehensive reference on İznik tiles in the world. After the exhibition, she founded the İznik Foundation for Training and Education.

The foundation's first task was to reconstruct the production process. The raw materials were not the mystery. It was how they were combined: the firing temperatures, the method of applying the slip to achieve the raised coral red. The foundation worked with experts from Istanbul Technical University, MIT, and Princeton. It took almost two years of trial and error.

Each tile now takes about seventy days from start to finish. The foundation uses sixteenth-century techniques throughout, with electric kilns replacing the original wood-and-brick versions. The body is still the high-quartz fritware. The coral red is still applied thick and slow.

The foundation has produced tiles for more than fifty monuments worldwide. Its work belongs to the same long İznik story: local clay, inherited forms, lost knowledge, and a modern process that still takes about seventy days to make one tile. İznik has other things that disappeared and returned as well. The submerged basilica rose back into view as the lake receded, and the Good Shepherd fresco emerged from an underground tomb after seventeen centuries.

The Turkish in the Tile

The word for tile in Turkish is çini. It means, literally, Chinese. The word came with the art.

Ottoman craftsmen were working in conscious dialogue with Chinese porcelain, which the court collected and valued. The word çini stuck even after İznik tiles became entirely their own thing.

Mercan means coral. Mercan kırmızısı is the compound: coral-red. Kırmızı is red. The name links the color to something found at the bottom of the sea.

Sır means glaze, from Arabic. Fırın means kiln or oven, the same word used for a baker's oven. The tile and the bread came from the same kind of fire.

Nakış means pattern or embroidery. It can refer to the painted surface of a tile and also to thread worked into cloth. In the sixteenth century, Ottoman textile design and tile design shared the same visual world. Floral forms moved easily between silk and quartz.

Motif in Turkish is motif, borrowed from French via Italian.

The Same Town

All three pieces of this İznik story happen in the same place.

The Good Shepherd fresco was painted underground in the third century. The first version of the Nicene Creed was adopted here in 325. The basilica on the shore sank in 740 and came back up through the falling water of the lake. The tile workshops peaked in the sixteenth century, stopped in the eighteenth, and the production process was revived in the late twentieth.

İznik holds more than it looks like it holds.

If you stand in the Rüstem Pasha Mosque and look at the coral red tulips, you are

looking at something made by craftsmen who breathed silica dust, who worked under imperial orders, who were underpaid at the end and knew it. The tiles outlasted the workshops and the empire. They almost outlasted the knowledge of how to make them.

The lake is still there. The walls are still there. The clay in the hills around İznik still has the quartz in it.

Vocabulary

çini – tile; from the Turkish word for Chinese, reflecting the Chinese porcelain that influenced early Ottoman ceramic work

mercan kırmızısı – coral red; the raised slip colour that defined sixteenth-century İznik tiles at their peak

sır – glaze, from Arabic

fırın – kiln, oven; the same word for a baker's oven and a tile-maker's kiln

nakış – pattern, embroidery; used for both woven textile patterns and painted tile surfaces

motif – pattern, motif; borrowed from French, which borrowed from Italian, which borrowed from Latin

çömlek – earthenware pot; the general word for simple fired clay before the specialized fritware technique developed

ham madde – raw material; ham means raw or uncooked, the same word used for unripe fruit

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: What makes İznik tiles different from other tiles?

A: The body of an İznik tile is made from a high-quartz stonepaste called fritware, with quartz making up as much as 85 percent of the material. This gives the tile a bright white body and a surface that reflects light differently from ordinary clay. The glazes are transparent, and the painted decoration goes under the glaze before firing. The coral red, characteristic of the peak sixteenth-century period, was applied as a thick slip on top, slightly raised above the surface.

Q: Where can you see İznik tiles today?

A: The Rüstem Pasha Mosque in Istanbul is the most tile-dense interior from the peak production period. The Sultan Ahmed Mosque (Blue Mosque), also in Istanbul, contains more than 21,000 İznik tiles. Outside Turkey, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris hold significant collections. The İznik Foundation in İznik itself has a workshop and showroom where the production process can be seen.

Q: What happened to İznik tile production?

A: Production declined through the seventeenth century and stopped in the early eighteenth. The causes included the contraction of Ottoman court patronage, pressure from European clients who wanted cheaper work faster, fires in the potters' quarter, the health effects of silica dust and lead vapors on the craftsmen, and the malaria endemic to İznik's lake basin. The production method for coral red passed out of use and was eventually lost.

Q: How was the tradition revived?

A: Prof. Dr. Işıl Akbaygil founded the İznik Foundation for Training and Education in 1993, following archaeological excavations of the old kiln sites in İznik. The foundation worked with experts from Istanbul Technical University, MIT, and Princeton to reconstruct the historical production process, spending almost two years on trial and error before getting the high-quartz body and the coral red right. Each tile takes about seventy days to produce. The foundation has completed tile commissions for more than fifty monuments worldwide.

Q: How does çini relate to Chinese porcelain?

A: The Turkish word çini means "Chinese" and refers to the Chinese blue-and-white porcelain that the Ottoman court collected and valued. When Ottoman craftsmen in İznik began producing high-quality ceramics in the late fifteenth century, they were working in direct response to the court's interest in Chinese ware. The name stayed even after İznik tiles became something entirely different.

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Sources

İznik Foundation for Training and Education, About the Foundation. https://www.ktb.gov.tr/EN-99949/the-objective-of-the-foundation.html

Hurriyet Daily News, "Rediscovering İznik's lost art of vibrant Ottoman tilemaking," November 2025. https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/rediscovering-izniks-lost-art-of-vibrant-ottoman-tilemaking-215967

Hurriyet Daily News, "Foundation promotes İznik tiles worldwide," June 2021. https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/foundation-promotes-iznik-tiles-worldwide-165500

İznik Mavi Çini, "What Is İznik Ceramic? History, Technique and Features." https://iznikmavicini.com/en/blogs/blogarticles/what-is-iznik-ceramic

İznik Çini, "History of İznik Tiles." https://www.iznikcini.com/pages/history-of-iznik-tiles

University of Kansas, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, "İznik." https://crees.ku.edu/iznik

AFAR Magazine, "The Story of Turkey's İznik Tiles and Where to Find Them," April 2024. https://www.afar.com/magazine/not-just-a-souvenir-the-untold-story-of-turkeys-iznik-tiles

Denny, Walter B., Iznik: The Artistry of Ottoman Ceramics, Thames and Hudson, 2004. (Cited in University of Kansas source above.)

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