Faturan

Faturan, in Middle Eastern beadwork, is a material used to make beads, notably in the making of komboloi and misbaha.

Originally, Faturan was a brand of cast thermosetting phenol formaldehyde resin, similar to Bakelite and Catalin, manufactured by Traun & Son of Hamburg., developed in the early 20th century, and produced until the 1940s.

In the bead trade, Faturan is often thought to be a mixture of natural amber shavings with other materials, and is described as having been invented in the Middle East in the 18th or 19th century, however this is not the case.

The first Bakelite arrived mainly to Turkey and the Middle East was in the form of drawer and furniture knobs and handles around 1909/1911. This is the time when the first prayer bead strands were made of Bakelite to appear on the market.

The bead carvers, mainly in Turkey, were swift to understand that Bakelite was a material that could be well carved, had a great appearance and could replace amber. Each master also had his secret "recipe,", even heating in various liquids and oils and making it undergo various physical or chemical processes to obtain the most beautiful aspect.

The original and genuine Faturan beads were mainly red or yellow in all its shades. The last genuine faturan beads were made in 1940 mainly due to the Second World War when the supply of raw material became very scarce. Normally, the last genuine faturan beads date of the late 1940s when the supply of the raw material that was sill left from the prewar stocks was terminated. After the Second World War the production stopped mainly due to the general severe restrictions that prevailed all over the world.

The demand for genuine faturan – often confused for amber - has always been great among prayer bead, tesbih and komboloi collectors. It has increased in the last fifteen years so much that it has attracted a great amount of "fake" faturan on the market. By "fake," collectors mean newly manufactured phenolic resin either purposefully or ignorantly presented as genuine faturan.

The result of this low-quality impostor material is that, today, there exists a very big confusion in the use of the word Faturan as well as about its meaning to the extent that practically any kind of phenolic resin is called unjustly Faturan, even those which are produced nowadays.

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Wikipedia