Caesarea

Caesarea in Cappadocia, known today as Kayseri, is a city of 1,400,000 inhabitants in central Turkey about 300 km southeast of Ankara.
It was a famous and prosperous hub in the 16th and 17th centuries thanks to its Armenian goldsmiths. They were not as famous as the craftsmen of Augsburg in Bavaria of the same period but they were just as skilled.
They made objects of adornment or prestige as well as liturgical objects showcasing the wealth of their clients. The precious chiselled bindings for covering religious manuscripts, identical to those in the museum's collections, proved the faith of the donor and ensured their salvation and that of their family.
Workshops were owned by the same families and handed down through generations. Recent studies of the names by which the artisans signed their works suggest that some of them were originally from Persia. Without doubt from the “New Julfa”, the city crested from nothing around 1606 next to Isfahan, the capital of the Persian Empire, by the people of Julfa in Nakhchivan who had been displaced by Shah Abbas I, the victorious king of Persia. As the king gradually granted them some autonomy, the citizens of this ""new city"" of the 17th century were allowed to travel to the East and even to the Far East, setting up trading posts as far as the Philippines.