Material Histories: Eastern Mediterranean Textiles at Auction

At Cypria Auctions’ Winter 2025 Sale, held on 10 December 2025 at Gallery K in Nicosia, Cyprus, three historic textiles from the Eastern Mediterranean demonstrated the enduring pull of cloth as both material witness and cultural document. Spanning courtly Ottoman luxury and deeply rooted Greek domestic traditions, the group drew strong interest from international collectors, reaffirming the status of historic textiles as works of art in their own right.

Leading the sale was a rare Ottoman brocade kemha panel from late 16th-century Turkey, which achieved €4,840. Woven in silk with metallic threads in tones of crimson, gold and pale blue, the panel represents the central section of an exceptionally scarce textile, once part of a cope and previously published by Patricia Frost. Kemha was among the most prized fabrics produced in Ottoman imperial workshops during the height of courtly textile production, its complexity of weave and architectural clarity of pattern signalling both wealth and power.

Rare Ottoman Silk Brocade Kemha Panel, Late 16th century

The design’s large ogival medallions, intricately decorated within, find close parallels in a 16th-century embroidered satin kerchief published by Walter Denny, pointing to the rich dialogue between weaving and embroidery across the Ottoman world. That a related fragment of the same textile appeared at the Turkophilia exhibition in Paris and later at Sotheby’s only deepens its significance, situating the panel within a well-documented lineage of connoisseurship and scholarship...

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Image Credits:

Lead: Epirus Embroidered Panel (Detail), Epirus, late 18th / early 19th century. Silk on linen.

All further images as credited in photo captions, and courtesy of Cypria K. Auctions Limited.