Janissary - Didier Debut 1824-1893

Dimensions Total height: approx. 32.5 cm Terrace: 11 in bronze with medal patina and silver-colored highlights. Old edition font. Composed of several parts, the bronze is complete (the gun is removable) Very good state of conservation.

This theme was rarely treated in 19th century sculpture. Approximately at the same time as that of Didier DEBUT, in the years 1880-1884, Émile Coriolan GUILLEMIN produced a Janissary of Sultan Mahmoud II while Félix ZIEM, on a trip to Constantinople, brought back some evocations of it such as the Kiosk of the Janissaries. If the Ottoman Empire was then in complete decline, the orientalist theme nonetheless evokes a sublimated and dreamed elsewhere, then very fashionable. In a relaxed pose although with a piercing gaze, the hand casually placed on the hip, and the other holding the top of the barrel of his tufeng, a sort of musket adopted by the Janissaries after 1570, to replace the bow, our janissary carries wide baggy pants, the tçalvar, over a cloth shirt open on his torso in a rather unceremonial sloppiness! Wearing a turban, astar, and uskiuf, the felt cap, he wears a large leather belt, plated with metal, into which he has slipped his pistol and the “stick” which he uses during his duties as town sergeant. . In times of war, the police baton is replaced by the yataghân (a small sabre) and the khandjar (a formidably sharp cutlass). The history of the Janissary Corps is astonishing, from its beginnings to its end. It appears around 1330, under the century of Sultan Orhan Gazi. This new militia, Yeniçeri (distorted in French as janissary) had a very specific recruitment, which was not necessarily voluntary. The pencyek system (according to which the 5th of each war booty goes to the sultan), but especially the devchirme (requisition of labor for military (or other) purposes, among the Christians of the Balkans, Rumelia, Anatolia supplied the Corps of Janissaries. Only the youngest children were required. They were then placed, very far from their province of origin, with peasant families. There they learned both the language and the precepts of Islam. After several years, they were admitted to the corps of acemi oglan (literally foreign boys) for a few more years before finally joining the corps of Janissaries. In the middle of the 16th century, the Sublime Porte counted 30,000 Janissaries, under the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the great rival of Francis I.

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