An Armenian Silver Votive Object: Incense, Memory, and Craft in Kayseri

The Walters incense burner (accession number 57.1845), executed in silver in 1791 in Kayseri (Caesarea), embodies the formal and epigraphic conventions of  Armenian liturgical metalwork. The object is conceived as a miniature domed church, its interior partitioned into three compartments for the separate storage of incense resins employed in the Armenian Apostolic Eucharist. The lid is embossed with the Agnus Dei, a Christological emblem rooted in early Christian iconography and retained throughout Armenian manuscript illumination and decorative arts. Engraved in Armenian script, the dedicatory inscription reads:

Յիշատակ է խնկամանս Երգլէթցի Ալմաեան որթիքն կողակցինէրին Սուլթանին, Թէվրիզին; տ(է)ր Մովսեսի, իրիսկինի Սուլթանի ի թուրն Ս(ուր)բ Թորոսի եկեղեցին: [This ark of incense is presented to the Church of Saint Theodore in memory of the Erkilet residents Sultan and Tevriz, spouses of Almean’s sons, and of Father Movses and his wife Sultan].

The four donors, all from the village of Erkilet near Kayseri, directed their gift to the church of Surp Toros, an 18th‑century Armenian sanctuary in the Tavlusun district that ceased functioning in the modern era and has been substantially degraded. The inscription encodes a gendered structure of patronage, with two women listed alongside a priest and his wife, thereby documenting the familial and parochial networks that sustained Armenian ritual practice under Ottoman rule. The object belongs to a well‑documented corpus of liturgical silver produced by Armenian ateliers in Kayseri from the early 17th through the early 19th century. Approximately seventy items—repoussé Gospel covers, reliquaries, chalices, patens, and censers—share technical and stylistic features, including the use of silver‑gilt, filigree, niello, and enamel appliqué; roughly one‑third bear inscribed dedications naming the silversmith, the date, and the place of production, permitting the attribution of uninscribed pieces through technical and stylistic comparison.

Two censers sold at Christie’s, both catalogued as 18th‑century Armenian work, exemplify the more ornate strain within this tradition. A parcel‑gilt enamelled silver filigree censer (lot 5881467, 21.6 cm high) employs a dome‑shaped lid decorated with numerous gilt finials and enamelled tulip heads rising from a low domed foot; two coral beads mounted on coiled springs crown the apex, and the surface is worked with silver filigree in panels of swirling scrolls. The auction catalogue notes a related silver filigree incense burner with silver‑gilt pinnacles and decoration mounted on short springs preserved at Holy Etchmiadzin, dated to the 18th century. A second censer (lot 3061988, 15.8 cm high) deploys a more complex architectural morphology: a rounded body supported on three scrolling silver legs with everted dragon‑head terminals, a lobed circular base with small spreading feet, and a superstructure composed of a ring of filigree turrets with gilt pointed finials alternating with gilt dragon‑heads flanking a central filigree tubular member with conical top, the sides fitted with applied enamel panels. Set against these comparators, the Walters censer is distinguished by a deliberate restraint that amounts to a distinct formal strategy within the Kayseri workshop’s output. Where the Christie’s pieces accumulate ornament—filigree scrollwork, gilded finials, enamel appliqué, dragon‑head terminals, coral beads—to produce a vertical, processional aesthetic that subordinates tectonic clarity to surface enrichment, the Walters piece reduces the church form to a compact, unadorned volume whose silver surfaces are articulated solely by the repoussé Lamb and the inscribed text. The structural vocabulary of the Christie’s censers is additive and centrifugal: the turrets, finials, and dragon‑heads project outward from the core, dispersing visual attention across a multiplicity of decorative incidents. The Walters censer, by contrast, employs a centripetal logic: the domed block concentrates the eye on two focal points—the Agnus Dei on the lid and the epigraphic field on the body—neither of which competes with the other for primacy. This divergence in ornamental density has both a technical and a functional dimension. The filigree and enamel work of the Christie’s censers required the collaboration of specialists—goldsmiths for the gilding, enamellers for the coloured appliqués—and the resulting objects announce the wealth and cosmopolitan connections of their patrons through the sheer accumulation of costly materials and virtuoso techniques. The Walters censer, fabricated in silver alone with repoussé and engraved decoration, could have been produced by a single silversmith working within a more localised economy of patronage. The tripartite interior, a feature common to all three objects, confirms their shared liturgical function: the separate compartments correspond to the ritual requirement for distinct incense types—frankincense, myrrh, and storax—used at different moments of the Divine Liturgy. Yet the Walters piece converts this functional specificity into a commemorative monument through the addition of the dedicatory text, a feature absent from the Christie’s descriptions. The inscription transforms the object from a liturgical utensil into a historical document, preserving the names, gender relations, and pious aspirations of a provincial community that would otherwise have vanished from the archival record.

The comparative field thus reveals a spectrum of practice within the Kayseri Armenian silversmithing tradition. At one pole, represented by the Christie’s lots, stand objects in which technical virtuosity and polychrome richness serve as the primary signifiers of value, their iconographic programmes dispersed across architectural and zoomorphic motifs. At the opposite pole, represented by the Walters censer, stands an object in which epigraphic commemoration and iconographic concentration subordinate material display to textual and symbolic legibility. Both poles, however, issue from the same workshop system and share a common liturgical function, confirming that the Kayseri atelier sustained a range of production capable of meeting the requirements of diverse patrons—from metropolitan donors seeking objects that rivalled Ottoman court production in technical complexity, to provincial parishioners whose priorities were mnemonic and communal rather than ostentatious. The Walters incense burner, now housed in Baltimore as part of the museum’s collection of early modern Armenian metalwork, constitutes the principal material witness to a vanished parochial community, its engraved text preserving the exact terms of a votive act whose original architectural and demographic context has been effaced.