Istanbul's carpets:
lands and dreams
Harmonie Toros
Sip your tea and listen. •You are looking at a handmade, natural-dyed kilim from eastern Anatolia," says Suleyman Ozcan, letting the thin, flat-woven mg slowly drop to the floor revealing a design o f intense burgundy, indigo and dark green. “But most o f all, you are looking at the work and dreams o f a ybung girl."She wove two eagle heads - the balance between power and fertility, man and woman. She wove an hourglass - the symbol o f eternal love.
And that's just one dream, one mg.
In the vaulted lanes o f Istanbul's centuries-old Grand Bazaar, listening to carpet tales will take you from Bulgaria to China, from the 15th century to today. Carpet shopping, a key part o f most tourists' visits to Istanbul, becom es a voyage o f discovery.
"There are so many human stories that are part o f the ritual of buying a carpet - our stories, the stories o f the dealers, the stories of the makers," Gary Dunning, manager o f the Big Apple Circus in New York, says while sitting amid piles o f carpets, kilims, sumaks and cidm s after buying three hand- woven kilims.
The ritual begins with its most unpleasant part: the hassling, as salesmen call to tourists and try to entice them into one o f Istanbul's hundreds o f carpet shops inside or outside the bazaar.
"It's scary. You feel you are in a game w here you are going to be the loser," says Jacqueline Billiard, a tourist from Rouen, France.
Standing on the doorstep o f a stall looking skeptically at a merchant showing her som e newly made floral rags, she adds: "You feel that if you accept that cup o f tea, you then have to buy something."
Alice Komhauser, an Internet
heavy to carry. The two halves are never identical.
Dunning remembers buying a carpet and in the excitement forgetting to ask w here it was made. "If I knew what village or what family made it, it would b e so much m ore meaningful." As the value o f the mgs increase, the stories that accompany each piece becom e more and m ore important.
"You have to be prepared to answer any questions that the customer might have," says Erol Kazanci, who mainly sells to collectors and international dealers.
Kazanci pulls out an 1870s Moghan carpet from Azerbaijan, its pile so soft it feels like fur. He can not only tell you all you would ever want to know about the carpet itself, he can also recount the migration o f the family that owned it - a family from Azerbaijan that moved to the Turkish city o f Trabzon on the Black Sea in 1891.
He says he had been after the piece for years and finally persuaded the family to sell it to him for dlrs 9,000 last March. Carpets are mostly traded in U.S. dollars.
At Kazanci's level, sellers know little more than the shoppers, many o f them collectors.
Franco Ragazzi, an engineer wlto represents the Italian Buck company Iveco in Turkey, has spent just about every Saturday morning in the bazaar over the past 13 years sifting through piles o f carpets.
One o f his first days in the bazaar, Ragazzi says a piece h e was interested in jumped from dlrs 4,000
to dlrs 9,000 as dealers learned of
his interest and traded it among themselves. Since, he has made an art o f carpet buying, first building a collection and then selling it to be able to start again.
"You forget the outside world, the worries, and relax and accept a tea. Then, the real adventure begins."
tanbuf - TIM Anodm tm J P n a
In the vaulted lanes o f Istanbul's centuries-old Grand Bazaar, listening to carpet tales
will take you from Bulgaria to China, from the 15th century to today. Carpet-shopping, a
key part o f most tourists' visits to Istanbul, becomes a voyage o f discovery
consultant from New York visiting the bazaar, says most tourists are anxious about being cajoled to check a shop because they don't realize what awaits inside.
"The next thing that happens is that you are invited in, as if som eone is inviting you into their living room to see their holiday pictures. It becom es very intimate," she says.
First comes the tea - the strong Turkish tea served in a small glass or apple tea, a sweet mix invented for tourists.
With the drink com es a lesson in mgs: the difference between a carpet, knotted wool or silk mg with pile, and a kilim, a flat weave without pile. There are also bright- colored sumaks - embroidered mgs, often in silk with representations o f animals - and dcim s (pronounced ji-jim), a flat-woven kilim with smail
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symbols embroidered on it. Then there's the question of quality: Is the wool hand-spun or machine spun, the carpet hand- knotted or machine-made? Are the dyes chemical or natural, extracted, for example, from eggplants? In m gs at least 100 years old, there can be dyes from ladybugs, which give an intense blood red nearly impossible to find in commercial chemical-dyed mgs.
"We try to educate people, inform them," says Feti Tekes, joint- owner o f two stores in the bazaar.
O f course, dealers are mainly there to sell, and they admit that most foreigners who enter their dusty shops are more interested in buying a carpet the right color and size for their living room or bedroom, and at a price that fits their budget.
But it's while sifting through the
hundreds o f types, qualities and styles that the stories emerge.
Designs can tell stories. The tree o f life - an often long, thin trunk with short symmetrical branches - is thought by som e to be a shamanic or totemic design, while others say it symbolizes the link between the paradise above and the world down below.
Rugs also tell the tale o f the weaver, often a woman. Mothers looking for wives for their sons in rural Turkey always asked to see the handicraft o f potential brides. G ood weaving meant a woman was meticulous and would probably m ake a good wife.
There's also the history o f a region o r a people. Kilim made by Kurds are often "double-winged," with two symmetrical halves sewn together, because the Kurds are nomads and large looms are too
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