The Battle of Sarikamish

Description

The battle depicted in this image took place from 22 December 1914 to 17 January 1915 as part of the Caucasus Campaign. The outcome was a Russian victory. This picture, like the rest of war lubok pictures, is brightly coloured and very ‘busy’. If we look carefully, we can imagine the battle continuing beyond the picture edges: on the right three horse muzzles are rushing into the view,; and on the left some body parts of killed Turkish soldiers don’t fully fit inside the scene. These pictures were produced by printing from a stone or a metal plate with a smooth surface. This method is called lithography. Images were drawn with oil/fat/wax on the surface of lithographic limestone plate. The rest of the plate then was treated with acid and water, so that only the areas with the drawings would attract ink that was transferred to blank paper by pressing it against the stone. A similar method for making multicolour prints is called chromolithography. During the First World War about 60 printing houses in Moscow, Petrograd, Kiev, Riga and other cities produced several hundreds of war lubok pictures. The Russian State Library in Moscow holds a collection of around 600 of these prints.