Yatagan or ??

[Atlantia]

Originally Posted by Battara

There are large straight yats I have seen.........

Hi Battara,

I always thought the occasional Yats with straight blades were just semi-atypical anomalies.
What would make this knife/dagger specifically a Yataghan, and not something else?
I'm not disagreeing with you, just curious and wanting to extend my own knowledge

Best
Gene

[TVV]

Originally Posted by Atlantia

Hi Battara,

I always thought the occasional Yats with straight blades were just semi-atypical anomalies.
What would make this knife/dagger specifically a Yataghan, and not something else?
I'm not disagreeing with you, just curious and wanting to extend my own knowledge

Best
Gene

As to what makes a yataghan, that is a good question and hard to answer, precisely because of the variety of hilts and blade shapes. Also, there are swords with recurved blades (say, from Southern India), which are not yataghans, just like not every dagger with a flamboyant blade is a keris (and there are straight keris as well).

That being said, there are plenty of straight yataghans, which appear to have been popular in the North-Western Balkans, judging on the abundance of such specimens in the Croatian History Museum catalogue, as opposed to the Askeri Museum catalogue, where there are only two.

It would appear that just like with keris, the blade and mountings of yataghans were dictated by regional preferences. However, the yataghan never really had the same cultural significance as the keris, and therefore there are not any features that need to be present on a dagger to qualify it is a yataghan. As a result pretty much any eared pommel dagger of Balkan and/or Turkish origins of significant proportion could be classified as a yataghan.

If you feel this is not very helpful and quite confusing, you would be correct - welcome to my world.

Regards,
Teodor

[Battara]

I will say that most yats have a recurved blade. Most have some kind of "ears" whether large (often Balkan) or small (often Turkish).

[Emanuel]

Would it be safer to define the object based on a general range of typological features and geographic characteristics?
So instead of "a recurved blade with eared pommel", we might define it as a "short sword or long knife with slab hilt construction and lobed pommel, generally produced and found in areas of Ottoman influence". This would cover Turkey proper, the Balkans, as well as the Maghreb and the Caucasus.

Apparently with all ethnographic weapons we have a fairly broad range of features to consider, with legitimalte examples at the extremes as well as the centre. The example in this thread may not represent the standard yataghan, but its features still fall in the range commonly defined as a yataghan.

Just my thoughts.
Emanuel