The Benaki Museum of Islamic Art in Athens has a substantial collection of Iznik ceramics (tableware, tiles and sherds). Although well-known to those who visit the museum, this collection has never been fully published. John Carswell first studied the objects in the 1980s and started cataloguing them with a view to publication. The project was revived and guided to fruition by the curator of the museum, Mina Moraitou. She has contributed a chapter on Antonis Benakis and the formation of the Iznik collection as well as working on the catalogue which includes 111 objects, 83 tiles and 143 sherds. All the objects are illustrated in colour, some with line drawings.

John Carswell graduated from the Royal College of Art, London in 1951, and subsequently worked as an archaeological draughtsman at Jericho and throughout the Near East, before joining the American University of Beirut (1956-76), where he became Professor and Chairman of the Department of Fine Arts. He was Visiting Professor at SOAS, London University from 1957–58; Curator of the Oriental Institute Museum and Director of the Smart Museum, University of Chicago, 1978-88; Vice President and Chairman of the Islamic Department, Sotheby’s, London 1988–98. He is now an independent scholar living in Spain; Mina Moraitou completed her studies at SOAS, University of London where she received a Postgraduate Diploma in Asian Art in 1992 and an MA in the History of Islamic Art in 1996. Since 1992, she has been working at the Benaki Museum: she contributed to the creation of the Benaki Museum of Islamic Art in July 2004 and became curator in 2012. She has coordinated and curated several exhibitions: Thomas Hope: Drawings of Ottoman Istanbul (Athens, 2016, Sharjah 2017); Iznik- a Fascination with Ceramics (2017); Islamic Calligraphy: The Art of Iranian Writing (2018) and Roads of Arabia (2019); Melanie Gibson is senior editor of the Gingko Library Art Series.