Scimitar - a kind of cold piercing and cutting weapons with a curved blade. According to legend, the Turkish Janissaries invented it to circumvent the law of the Sultan. The Sultan forbade wearing sabers in peacetime, and instead the Janissaries began to wear shorter combat knives - scimitars.
Turks and residents of the Near and Middle Eastern countries: Syrians, Persians, etc., actively used Yatagan. In the east, it began to be used in the 16th century, and by the middle of the 17th century it was already quite widespread. Initially, this knife is a descendant of the ancient Egyptian sword. Scimitars decorated with carvings, notches and engravings were worn like daggers behind a belt in wooden sheaths, lined with metal or covered with leather.
The scimitar has a long blade with a double bend, the concave side is sharpened at the blade, like many other types of piercing and cutting weapons. However, unlike them, the scimitar blade has the same width along almost the entire length, and does not expand toward the tip.
Since the weapon weighs only about 800 g and has a long blade of about 65 cm, it allows you to apply both piercing-cutting and chopping serial hits. At the same time, the shape of the handle prevents the weapon from escaping from the hand. The handle covers almost the entire lower part of the palm, and sometimes has an emphasis perpendicular to the straight part of the blade. Thus, this is a fairly serious weapon.
The convex side and blade were used to protect and repel blows. The enemy’s attacks were sometimes blocked using the other side of the blade. The construction of the scimitar made it possible to hold the enemy blade relatively reliably, but made it impossible to deliver counterattacks with lightning speed. In addition, it was not easy to break through armor with a scimitar because of its features and low weight.
The most effective was the use of a scimitar in close combat. There are also versions that the weapon was used as a missile at short distances (up to 5 meters). This was possible due to the specific shape of the handle and blade.
