Is It the Rug or the 'Other'?
Halyna Kohut
The purpose of this paper is to explore the symbolic meaning of a Turkish prayer rug as an element in the 18th-century iconography of Metropolitan Dmytriy Tuptalo, the Orthodox Christian saint of Ukrainian origin, whose cult emerged in the Russian Empire at that time. Tuptalo`s posthumous representations which hold the middle position between an Icon and a Courtly portrait are laden with symbolic elements. The Saint wearing richly decorated garments stands next to the table at the top of which we see the Rosary, the books with the lives of the saints, and the Crucifixion. All these elements clearly refer to Christianity, yet among them, there is an element from the Islamic religious sphere -- a Turkish prayer rug that covers the Saint’s table. Since Islam was considered by Christian theologians and Tuptalo himself to be a false religion how then can we explain the presence of Islamic prayer rug within the plain of Tuptalo’s icon-portrait? Engaging concepts of postcolonial theory, I argue that this “alien” element was much more than an expression of a popular fashion for Turquerie spread across Europe at that time. Rather related to issues of politics and identities the rug represented a subsumed position of the Muslim “Other” symbolically implying Christian imperial hegemony over Orient in the context of the Russo-Turkish wars.