A CHRISTIAN LITURGICAL BOWL Armenia or Ottoman Balkans, 19th century  Of circular shape, resting on a flared foot, expanding to a wide flat rim worked in repoussé with twelve niches filled with the Apostles, each holding an attribute, interspersed with volute-shaped stylised vegetal sprays, 22cm diam.  Possibly used during baptisms, this bowl seems to be connected to the Christian ritual of the blessing of the water. The iconography of the Twelve Apostles links it to the 17th - 19th-century Armenian tradition, in which liturgical purification played a crucial part. A liturgical bucket (aspersorium), part of the Sevgi Gönül Collection, is decorated in the same fashion and with the same iconography (Brigitte Pitarakis and Christos Merantzas, A Treasured Memory: Ecclesiastical Silver from Late Ottoman Istanbul in the Sevgi Gönül Collection, Turkey, 2006, pp. 57 - 58, fig. 43).