Description
Handcrafted by İzmir master oud maker Mustafa Gezerdag, this Turkish lavta pairs a striped walnut-and-mahogany bowl with a spruce top — part of a small series built around the same decorative fingerboard and pear-shaped body, distinguished from its siblings by bowl wood alone. A fretted plectrum lute that sits between the Arabic oud and the Anatolian saz, the lavta trades the oud’s fretless slide for a fretted neck that gives it a brighter, more precisely articulated voice.
This model splits the difference between two solid-wood options in the same series: walnut staves alternate with mahogany around the bowl, combining walnut’s dense, well-defined low-mid presence with mahogany’s warmth and longer sustain. Visually it reads as a two-tone stripe — deeper reddish mahogany against warmer tan walnut — closer to the classic walnut-mahogany pairing found across Ottoman lutherie than the maple-mahogany combination used elsewhere in this series.
The soundhole carries the same carved lattice-pattern rosette as the rest of the series, and the black pickguard is finished with the same hand-inlaid bird-and-feather motif in mother of pearl. The fingerboard, too, shares the series’ signature: a continuous scrolling inlay running its full length, more commonly seen on museum-grade instruments than on workshop production.
The top is solid spruce, carved for the stiffness-to-weight ratio that gives a pear-shaped lavta body its projected, articulate tone. The fingerboard is built on pine under the inlay work, and tuning runs on ebony friction pegs, the traditional choice for lavta’s fretted, makam-tuned courses.
| Body | Walnut & mahogany |
|---|---|
| Soundboard | Spruce |
| Fingerboard | Pine, with decorative inlay |
| Pegs | Ebony friction pegs |
| Bowl Length | 44.5 cm |
| Bowl Width | 30.5 cm |
| Body Depth | 15.5 cm |
| String Length (Scale) | 68 cm |
Players who want the balance point of the series — walnut’s clarity without losing mahogany’s warmth and sustain — will find this the most all-round voice on offer. It moves comfortably between grounded fasıl ensemble work and solo taksim passages that call on both definition and sustain, making it a sensible first choice for a player who hasn’t yet settled on a preference between the series’ brighter and warmer options.
Keep the bowl away from direct heat and sudden humidity swings, and check the tied gut or nylon frets periodically, as they can shift slightly with playing and need occasional repositioning for accurate intonation. This model is one of four bowl-wood options built by Mustafa Gezerdag on the same body and fingerboard: see the brighter maple & mahogany model, the warmer solid mahogany model, or the classically-toned solid walnut model. For a case and spare strings, see our accessories collection. Readers curious about the instrument’s place in Ottoman music can find more on the lavta on Wikipedia.
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