A Soldier of the Janissaries

The janissaries, the sultan's standing infantry, organised their whole corps around a kitchen. Each regiment's pride was its great copper cauldron, carried at the head of the column on the march. Its commander was called the çorbacı, the soup maker, and other officers took their names from the kitchen too, the head cook among them. When the janissaries turned against a government, they overturned their cauldrons.

This soldier wears the corps' white felt cap, the börk, which hangs down behind in a long flap. The metal ornament rising from its front was called the kaşıklık, the spoon holder, because a janissary once carried his own spoon there, a sign that the men of the corps ate together. On the back of the small canvas a Dutch hand wrote Janitzar oft Deurwachter van den Grooten Heer, a janissary or doorkeeper of the Great Lord, and the number ten gives its place in the set.