Walk down the main street of old Mardin and you will see her several times before lunch: a woman's face and crowned head, her body below the waist a snake, sometimes with more snake heads branching off it. She's painted on the back of glass, hammered into copper trays, printed on tea towels. And in the silver shops she's a bracelet, one made of dozens of small hinged plates that lie over the back of your hand like scales.
Her name is Şahmeran (pronounced shah-meh-RAHN, often written Shahmaran in English). It means roughly "king of snakes", from the Persian shah plus mar, snake. In the story, though, the king is a queen.
The story, or rather the stories
There's no single authoritative version, and anyone who gives you one is picking a favourite. The outline most Turkish tellings share goes something like this.
A young man, usually called Cemşab or Camsap, goes out with friends to collect honey from a cave. They lower him in, find the honey, and leave him down there so they can keep it for themselves. Crawling through the dark, he comes out into an underground world full of snakes, ruled by Şahmeran. She's wise, she knows the secrets of medicine, and she doesn't harm him. He lives with her for a long time. Eventually he wants to go home, and she lets him go on one condition: he must never tell anyone where she is.
Back above ground, the king falls ill, and a vizier announces that only the flesh of Şahmeran can cure him. People who have been near her supposedly carry a mark on the skin, so the men of the city are sent to the bathhouse to be inspected. Cemşab is found out and forced to lead them to her. Before she dies, Şahmeran tells him what to do with her body. In many versions one part gives knowledge and another part kills, the scheming vizier takes the wrong one, and Cemşab is left with the healing knowledge she left him. Some tellings connect him to Lokman Hekim, the legendary physician of Anatolian folklore.
The details change depending on who's telling it. Where the cave is. Whether Şahmeran has children. Whether she curses the betrayal or forgives it. Kurdish, Arabic, Persian and Turkish versions all exist in the region. A closely related tale, the Queen of the Serpents, appears in One Thousand and One Nights. Nobody can honestly say where the story started. It belongs to a wide stretch of Upper Mesopotamia and southern Anatolia, and it has been retold too many times across too many languages to trace back to one source.
Two places claim her most loudly. Tarsus, on the Mediterranean coast, has a bathhouse locals call the Şahmeran Hamamı and says the bathhouse scene happened there. Mardin in the southeast has made her its visual emblem. The painted-glass Şahmeran panels hung in Mardin houses are the best-known images of her, and a lot of people there treat her as a guardian figure, as a blessing for the household, fertility and protection. We'd call that living folk practice. It isn't documented doctrine, and it varies from family to family.
Why the jewellery looks the way it does
The Şahmeran bracelet comes out of Mardin's silver tradition, and the design shows it. A classic piece has a small crowned face or bust at the centre of the back of the hand. From it, a body of overlapping plates fans out toward the wrist. The plates are her scales, and each one hinges on the next, so the whole thing flexes. Chains run from the figure to one or more finger rings, and the whole thing is anchored by a band at the wrist.
Turkish sellers have a few names for this, and it helps to know them when you read the listings:
- Eldiven — "glove". A hand harness that covers the back of the hand.
- Yüzüklü bileklik — "bracelet with ring". Same idea, often lighter.
- Pullu — "with scales". Tells you the body is built from separate plates.
- Sıralı — "in rows". Several tiers of plates.
In the pieces we index, that's by far the dominant form. Of 125 product titles in our catalogue that mention Şahmeran, 117 are filed as bracelets, 6 as necklaces and 2 as earrings (one of those is really a ring, earring and necklace set). The necklaces are usually a single pendant figure, the Şahmeran bust with a short scaled tail. A few rings are misfiled as bracelets, which is the catalogue's fault and not the jewellers'. Sultan Telkari's Telkâri İşçilikli Şahmeran Model is a ring, for one.
Where the pieces come from
Those 125 listings come from 22 jewellers, and the spread is uneven in an interesting way.
The Midyat and Mardin workshops are where the motif is at home. Artuklu Telkari in Mardin has 16 Şahmeran pieces, mostly eldiven. Sümer Telkari in Midyat has 17, many of them hasır örgü (woven) or rose-toned yüzüklü bileklik. Aykat, Midyat Kılıç Gümüş, Telkari Sarayı and Sultan Telkari, all in Midyat, have a handful each. If you've read our piece on telkâri filigree, these are the same benches. Several of them fill the Şahmeran plates with wire filigree instead of casting them flat, and that's the version worth looking for.
But the largest single seller in our index isn't in the southeast at all. Gümüş Takıcım has 38 Şahmeran listings, mostly small and inexpensive silver pieces with names like Suyolu, Tek Göz, Anka Kuşu. Istanbul's Diriliş Kuyumculuk has 12, all gold. The motif has left Mardin, which is good for its survival and means you need to look more carefully at what you're buying.
What they cost
Prices below are as we last read them from the jewellers' sites. Silver and gold move constantly, so the jeweller's own page is the only price that counts.
The range is wide. At the bottom there's one gold-plated piece listed at 59.90 lira. We would not read it as silver. After that, most of the small silver bracelets from Gümüş Takıcım and Besen Gümüş sit between roughly 900 and 1,600 lira. The Midyat telkâri pieces run from about 1,850 lira for Sultan Telkari's filigree ring to a little over 4,000 for Sümer's woven bracelets. Artuklu's eldiven start at 5,100 and climb to 18,000 lira for a three-row starred piece.
Solid gold is a different market. Sixteen titles state a karat, mostly 14-karat. Diriliş's pieces run from about 16,500 to 26,450 lira. The highest Şahmeran price we have is Tufanlar Kuyumculuk's Cabaret Karo Şahmeran at roughly 60,570 lira. Bilezikci's 22-karat bracelet set with a çeyrek, the small Turkish gold coin, comes in just under that at about 59,830.
What to check before you buy
Look at how the plates move. The whole point of a Şahmeran is that it drapes. Good pieces are built from separately hinged links. Cheap ones are a single stamped plate made to look segmented, and they sit stiff and flat on the hand. If the listing has a video or a photo of the piece being worn, the difference is obvious.
Filigree or cast. "Telkari" in the title should mean the plates are built from wire. Zoom in. Real filigree has open lace between the wires. A cast imitation has the pattern pressed into a solid surface. Both are fine objects, but only one should be priced like handwork.
Sizing the hand pieces. An eldiven has to fit three things: your wrist, the width of your hand and the finger the ring goes on. Ask whether the ring is adjustable and whether the chains can be shortened. A harness that's too long slides around and catches on things.
"Gold" on a silver listing. On many of the cheaper bracelets, (Gold) or altın kaplama means gold-plated silver, sometimes just the colour option. Solid gold pieces state a karat, 14 or 22 ayar. If there's no karat, assume plating.
Weight. A multi-row eldiven in solid silver is heavy, and it should be. If the seller lists grams, compare them. A very light piece at a telkâri price usually means hollow or thin plate.
If you want one piece to start with, we'd skip both the novelty variants and the most expensive gold. Pick a mid-range filigree eldiven from a Mardin or Midyat bench. Her face should be small, the scales should move and the ring should fit. That's how the object looks in the old glass paintings. You can browse more Mardin and Midyat work in the telkâri collection.
