Mértola Islamic Festival 2025
Trees and their Mediterranean roots: the purpose of the new Mértola Islamic Festival image
The motto for the promotional image presented for the 13th edition of the Mértola Islamic Festival was a vase that came to light during archaeological excavations in the Alcáçova do Castelo de Mértola. It’s a partial, glazed cuerda seca piece, with green and brown decorative elements separated by lines drawn in manganese and dotted inside.
Its distinctive beauty exhibits a clearly organic presence. Two triple-rolled wings that seem to want to rise emerge from a cylindrical neck adjoining a globular body. Are they handles, arms, wings? These are shapes that, without being obvious, award it an anthropomorphic nature. You can feel the material, the pores of a skin drawn with green and earth-coloured geometric shapes, like a call from nature.
It was by sliding our eyes along this composition that the purpose of the image was born: the tree and its Mediterranean roots. Mértola with its charms dawns across paths, hills, plateaus, and the surface, to tell us stories, with history, in the shade of a holm oak tree.
More information at www.festivalislamicodemertola.com
Partial cuerda seca vase
Origin: Mértola/Alcáçova do Castelo/Cryptoporticus
Chronology: 12th century a.D.
Material: Ceramic decorated with partial cuerda seca
Dimensions: height 348 mm; max. width 320 mm
Location: Cláudio Torres Mértola Museum/Islamic Art
Large vase with a slightly introverted bevelled rim, cylindrical neck, globular body and convex base with a diagonal ring foot. A filter boot remains in the area where the neck and body meet. Two ribbed wings with a pinnacle at the top join the neck and body. The decorative motifs are presented in horizontal bands where, from the edge to the base, we find a narrow line with lotus flowers, a frieze of toothed motifs at the base of the neck, a calligraphic palette repeating the word ‘baraka’ (blessing), a pelmet of phytomorphic medallions and, finally, a frieze of palmettes.
(GÓMEZ Martinez, Susana and DELERY, Claire, Mértola Museum – Ceramic in cuerda seca from Mértola, Mértola, Mértola Archaeological Site, 2002, page 77).