The Timelessness of a Good Tale
Canvassing Jewelry History with Melise Ozkardesler
For the occasion of NYC Jewelry Week, I’ve employed the theme of Wonder and Wander as an excuse to investigate one of my own recent fascinations, Ancient History Jewelry Stories. First an Instagram account created by New York-based jeweler, Melise Ozkardesler, this playful romp through history crosses time and space, seemingly according to no plan, using examples of jewelry masterpieces as a guide. Alongside her historically inspired brand Moon Honey Jewelry, Melise has quickly conjured her own fascination for jewelry, archaeology and the narrative twist into a podcast and video series offering some of the most informative and entertaining anecdotes on jewelry you can find in pop culture today. Nothing is off the table as she covers colonial misdeeds, looted grave goods and misplaced provenance, as well the mind boggling wealth required to own the pieces popular in antiquity– all in a stunning collection of vintage dresses that are completely unrelated but punctuate the series with her own humor and style.
What follows is an excerpt of our conversation in Summer 2024.
Margaret Munchheimer: Melise, I’m very curious about your own media influences: the things that you like, consume, and other formats you find interesting. But first, maybe you could tell me a little bit about how you came to jewelry and where you see yourself in the jewelry landscape?
MO: Well, Turkish culture is a culture of adornment. So things start off fairly ornamented; baby girls get their ears pierced in the hospital before they go home. That’s a point of contention for some people, but I think it’s true of a lot of Mediterranean cultures. You start your life with gold already, wearing earrings and bracelets and maybe even a little ring if there’s a family member who adores you enough. Jewelry, I think, is just an integral part of not just a Turkish woman, but a Turkish person’s life.
I come from a family that has always encouraged craftiness in every capacity. My grandmother taught me how to sew, very young. My mother was a wardrobe stylist for the majority of my life; my dad’s a photographer. I was always encouraged to get weird with it and explore whatever medium made sense to me at the time. I really pivoted into goldsmithing in 2016.
I got into a terrible accident the day before my wedding, in Costa Rica, where my parents live. I broke my leg in a major way, got airlifted to a hospital and underwent major surgery. So I chose to use the time that I needed to spend recovering to learn metalsmithing. I went to school here in Manhattan to get my basic metalsmithing education, to a really cool school called Studio Jewelers. They’re fantastic; a lot of what I would consider well known boutique jewelers have come out of that school.
Therefore I spent a year doing that curriculum piece by piece, since I couldn’t be on my feet for too long, and that’s eight years ago now. I continued my education by learning ancient goldsmithing techniques, and that is what really dovetails with the whole media series. I got a minor gemology degree from GIA because during lockdown, they were giving people access to the courses for free. I did a lot of courses online.
And honestly, I feel like if you understand the basics of safe bench work, you can really learn a lot on YouTube. It really is a lot of people sharing info that you wouldn’t have had access to even 15 years ago. So the continuing stuff was a lot of older books that I pulled out of my local library. Google has an online archive of books that are in the public domain, and the Internet Archive does too, so you can actually find a lot of really interesting material out there, if you’re willing to dig for it. Self study is awesome, I think.
MM: So it was just a personal interest that led you down the path?
MO: I have always wanted to be just completely covered in gold, just wear as much jewelry as humanly possible. And in my 20s, it became clear to me that the best way to have access to the jewelry I really wanted was to make it myself. I worked in jewelry retail for two years, at a beautiful five story department store in Soho called ABC carpet. They were known as the place for celebrities to go and buy interesting things, and the ground floor had a jewelry department. And I was consistently disappointed with the price point versus the quality of what you buy in marketable jewelry– there really isn’t a lot to back up the price tag. So I realized it’s either going to be antique and vintage jewelry for me, which I do love and collect, or I’m going to have to make it myself.
MM: As a jeweler myself, I think a lot about the tension between working completely by yourself, and finding whatever else you can do to break out of your studio. Are you finding that the making and your media channel help to complement each other in that way?
MO: Well, first and foremost, I have a really hard time talking about my own work. So the videos have been really interesting, because I have no issue communicating the splendor, the beauty, the joy of a piece of jewelry that someone else has made. And I have a very hard time communicating that about my own work, even if I feel it to be true. I think plenty of creatives feel a sense of shame or guilt, or that maybe we’re being too egotistical when we talk highly about our own work, although I always find it very compelling when someone who creates is able to confidently say, ‘Hey, you should like what I do. I like what I do.’
The videos came about January 1, completely by chance.
I would say I was doing pretty well on Instagram in 2019, 2020, 2021, and then something shifted, and I was no longer getting any engagement for my actual jewelry work. I decided to quit a retail job last year, it’s been one year now, and say goodbye to my retail life forever, which was slowly killing me on the inside. I’d spent six months kind of mired in my own feelings about why things weren’t working, and it got to a point where I thought, ‘I’m going to stop treating social media like it’s a requirement for my business. I’m going to stop treating social media like there’s even anyone on the other side of this who gives a shit about it, besides myself.’
I sat down on January 1 after having a very frustrating day; I just set my camera up on my bench, and while I was working on something, I decided to recount my favorite jewelry story about the cultural connection between an ancient Egyptian queen (Nefertari) and an Anatolian Princess, (Puduheba), which fascinates me as someone who comes from Turkey…I hadn’t really considered that there must be this cultural dialogue between Egypt and Turkey, because they’re separated by just a small body of water. So I just decided to tell this neat little story that I really like about how a princess from Anatolia sent some silver earrings to an Egyptian queen, and they had a lovely pen pal relationship, and if you look at frescoes from [the tomb of] this queen, Nefertari, she’s wearing the earrings that were gifted to her by Puduheba from the Hittite. You know, it gives me goosebumps, and to me, really illustrates what adornment is; what it even means. It’s a cultural statement. It’s a symbol of affection. It’s so many things, and it’s just a simple pair of earrings, but she treasured them enough to wear them so often that she was featured in frescoes in her funerary tomb wearing the things. And that video got, I don’t know, maybe like, 400-500 likes, and that was way more than I’d been getting on my posts.
I thought, ‘Oh, okay, that’s cool. So let me go back and tell another story.’ And the second day, I posted something about how the Hope Diamond was just sent through the regular mail when it was sent to The Smithsonian. And that one got a little traction, too. And then the next day I decided, ‘well, I’m gonna do this for a week and see what happens.’ And that third video blew up in a way that I hadn’t anticipated, and I was suddenly starting to get 500-600 followers a day. I knew something had really happened when I woke up and the top of my notifications was that Patricia Arquette, (one of my favorite actresses of all time) had started following the videos.
Then I decided to really have fun with it, because I wasn’t doing enough jewelry work to keep me super busy at the bench, I was disillusioned with social media, and I hadn’t seen anyone making content like this.
MM: Do you feel that there are spaces out there in the digital landscape that are under serviced or underutilized?
MO: Even though [jewelry] is a very visual field, it’s history. There’s so much behind it that needs to be discussed to really understand the context. I think it warrants a longer discussion, because it’s not just about the piece in front of you.
And I intend to cover as many cultures as I can find information for, so that it’s outside of the scope of what I know best, because I have a very Greco Roman bent. So when I’m going outside of my comfort zone, which can be things like Mesoamerican and Andean cultures, I get reamed by the internet for using the term ‘Aztec’, which I did not know was the incorrect way to refer to that group of people. They are ‘the Mexica’.
So some people gave me very nice feedback. Some people chewed me up. That video is my most viewed video of all time, and I’m unfortunately not capable of creating that outrage on purpose. If I were, I think I’d have a more robust following.
MM: But you know, if you weren’t doing that research, it might take years to learn that.
MO: Yeah. It’s an educational process. I’m always trying to acquire info, and it’s good for me to have this tighter focus. And it’s essentially building a community, which is not something that I expected to come out of this. I don’t think anyone expected that they would be so into the ancient jewelry or ancient history aspect unless they already had a foundation in that.
I’ve got a lot of people watching my stuff who told me that they previously did not care in either direction, a lot of men watching my stuff too, which I think is wonderful.
And I have a lot of really wonderful feedback from people. I’ve got people asking me if I’d ever consider doing jewelry consultations to find jewelry of their culture or their heritage for special occasions or weddings, which is something that I think would be tremendously interesting.
I am not formally educated in history, archeology, art history. I don’t have a college degree. I think that’s a uniquely American roadblock to come up against, where people take you seriously, and then when they ask for credentials and you don’t have them, all of a sudden they don’t believe a word you say anymore. So I’ve thought about what this can become in the future, and honestly, I would ideally just love to continue doing what I’m doing, which is a combination of making the jewelry that I want to make, which is inspired very much by ancient history, and working one on one with clients to make custom pieces that are in that wheelhouse. I have someone right now who’s requested a ring in a Georgian style, (because it’s not really great to wear an 1830’s ring every day). So I like having a dialogue with someone who has an idea, and I wouldn’t want to cut that out of my life, the making part.
But I have also started doing podcast episodes, and I really like it.
MM: Do you consume a lot of podcasts? Do you have favorites?
MO: I consume a lot of podcasts, because when I’m on the bench, I love having things on in the background. You know, I just, I’m an information person; I like to intellectualize things. I love learning, and I have people who I really respect and look up to as podcasters, who I see as my benchmark for what good factual podcasting is in a world where there is a lot of fluff..
There was a period where I was getting dozens of messages every day of ‘cover this, cover that. I need you to do this, I want to show my students a video on that.’ So there’s been a few times where I’ve had to post videos saying, like, ‘Hey, I have no access to special resources. I’m using the same internet that everyone else is using. Also, don’t rely on me to filter all information for you. Remember, there are biases working.
You know, it’s my effort to make people more conscious of the information they’re consuming, but also to get them off my back and not treat me like I’m an AI who can answer their questions on a whim.
MM: I did see one of those videos, and I thought it was great that you openly set a boundary.
MO: Yeah, I have really grown a backbone. I’m a recovering people pleaser, and getting out of retail, that was a big thing for me. So I started blocking people for a few things: You’re gonna get blocked for insisting I’m pronouncing jewelry wrong. You’re gonna get blocked if you’re a Conquistador apologist, because they always come out of the woodwork when I talk about Spain. (I have never seen such a staunch refusal to accept that what happened is not okay. I’ve even started printing tote bags in my merch that say ‘that asshole Christopher Columbus’. This isn’t even us judging him by our modern standards, even the Spanish crown arrested Columbus when he came back because he was so out of pocket.)
That’s one of the weird side effects of this, it was not intentional. This decolonization of our understanding of jewelry history, that’s not something I intended to do – I think I was just raised right.
MM: That’s something I find really compelling, because jewelry is kind of its own world, and it can occasionally bring you into conversations with people who have mindsets that feel 100 years old as well..
MO: So much patriarchal thinking about it too! Jewelry: historically, kind of a realm of women’s life, but very patriarchal mindsets around a form of adornment that in many cultures, has been the bastion of women.
I’m also not scared to address the fact that a lot of this stuff comes from looted tombs or was sold privately under dubious circumstances. I think that’s an intriguing part of the conversation, actually. I’m going to the Louvre soon, and I can’t wait to cover everything Napoleon stole – because it is part of the conversation. We can condemn it, we can talk about it, but it’s part of it. And I think it’s an interesting part of it.
I prefer to see pieces in person when I can, and I am so fortunate to have two cultural institutions essentially in my backyard, The Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We also have the Museum of Natural History here, which has a sensational gemstone collection… But I think the Met Museum has one of the top collections of ancient Greek and Roman jewelry in the world, which opens up the conversation of, why are they there? They don’t belong there. How did they acquire that?
MM: I think it’s really exciting that you are finding some space here to reopen some of the old questions and old assumptions about jewelry. Any other ideas for the podcast, if it could go wherever you wanted it to go?
MO: Hopefully in the future I will have other people to talk to about these things. I think once there’s enough episodes under my belt, I have a little more legitimacy to reach out to people and say, ‘Hey, you’re really knowledgeable in this field. Would you like to have a chat with me?’
I’m getting a little braver about who I can reach out to in order to involve them in the conversation, because my perspective is just my perspective.
There are so many other people out there.
Margaret Munchheimer is an American writer and jeweler based in Lisbon, a frequent contributor to Current Obsession Magazine and editor of the Munich Jewellery Week Paper. She holds a BA from Alchimia in Florence, and an MA from the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam.
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