I can't speak for the great history of the Oriental rug, its tumultuous tale of rise and decline. And I can't pretend to understand a literature of footnotes, a hall of mirrors, called "rug studies," although I admire the illustrations of good catalogs. Caught in the midst of various rug productions, I'm in the wrong mood to argue the old dichotomy of antique versus new, of pure versus purely commercial, terms better suited to conversation in elevators than the light of day. In relation to the opposite - but perilously close - poles of the rug world, those who declare great weaving a thing of the past and those who strive to perfect a product through "programming" in countries like China and India, I may as well be on the moon, waving slow, sad farewells to the dead and the dying. [Editor's Note: "Programming",or "Continuity", is a more recent rug trade practice. It is the production of a given design in a range of colors and sizes, allowing the sale of a wide range of rugs through a narrow range of samples, usually supported by a comprehensive catalog.]
To make rugs really means to organize. To finance. To stay on top of things. My involvement is a culmination of nine years of dealing in, at first, all manner of antique rugs and then, with the revival of natural dyeing in Çannakkale, new rugs. I like the equalizing way Turks describe it, dealing in mal, general material. The message is clear: it's all work. The analogy that fits best for me, recalling the seasonal quality of rug production, is farming. Rug farming. Like the farmer who is involved in the many tasks that define his singular endeavor, from the purchase of seeds to the marketing of his crops, you're always on call. One's farm is transformed, however, into a vast field that stretches between Philadelphia and Diyarbakir, filled with dark ocean, airports, warehouses full of wool and drying yarn, endless paperwork and formalities, muddy villages in midwinter, ateliers brimming with many looms. To make inventory of the activity, to list its needs and assets, is really to put it into a kind of perspective.
From this side, the American side, the starting point is the old: samples of old rugs, fragments, pictures of old rugs, old design ideas with which we are so familiar, they define the way we think about Oriental rugs. Like the Heriz carpet which, in its clunkiest (primitive) form, epitomizes the Oriental rug. It becomes a Serapi. Magic. An American tradition. But the Heriz is only a beginning, and a very modest one. In the world of free thought, no book or magazine is safe from scissors: borders are transplanted, flowers enlarged, colors rearranged, details added and taken away. A process of cross-fertilization takes root, informed by a world of similarities, between Thracian and ancient Peruvian textile designs, between Anatolian kilim motifs and the graffiti-like modernism of Kuban weavings. The westerner, bulging with publications like so much baklava, has options, either to limp from the weight of his desk, in which the Serapi is a secure crutch, or to rummage, shift, combine, and invent. This latter view, however, confected out of a working library of diverse traditions and built from fragments, is in itself fragmentary. It risks falling apart; it risks losing meaning. To the extent that it moves away from the known, by rearranging it, it comes dangerously close to being a purely modern endeavor: the art of one -- singular, unique, rootless, suspended in its own realm.
An idea for a new rug design begins as casually as a stroll. A bit of grass grows through the herringbone pattern of brick on Camac Street in Philadelphia. The brick is beautifully weathered, chipped in places, cracked, but holding together. I suppose it makes a kind of statement. What I like is its overall pattern of inconsistency, the way in which a thing as regular as brick becomes so irregular. The forces of nature have broken it down and given brick a peculiarly human face. Beneath the baked surface, its pure color is like broken yams, or like ground madder root. The connections multiply: brick and weed; birds that feed at the green borders of brick; Thracian birds picking Peruvian worms out of the rain; windswept maple leaves and urban dandelions. A piece of Americana in Pirot! The abstract beauty of an old brick sidewalk reminds me of the criss-crossing patterns in the corners of old Bijars.
But no one should begin with a design. Designs are ideas that spring from wool: the way wool looks when it is knotted. This is something that has taken a while to learn. It is a story about conflict and cooperation, and about the differences between village and workshop weaving, of rugs from Ayvaçik and rugs from eastern Turkey named Azeri.
I think of the people who call themselves Turkmen, in northwest Turkey, who centuries ago settled next to the sea. They have almost no relation to the sea: they don't fish in it; they don't swim in it; they don't even look at it very much. The sea is a disappointment because it's where the land ends, an end to potential. The irony is heightened by the proximity of the Greek Isles, where culture is tied to the water. The rejection of the Aegean by people living so close to it is testimony to a deeply landlocked culture. I don't wish to offer a profound explanation, but merely to point this out as one of the salient features of Anatolia's most traditional weavers.
Foreign designs, carried by hand from Istanbul to a village in Çannakkale, are filtered through a local design tradition. Gradually, knot by knot, an erasure (or replacement) of detail occurs, dashing the dealer's hopes for a convincing copy of an eagle Kazak. A photo says it's a Kazak, but close inspection reveals it for what it is: a Bergama rug with a strange design. But something significant is at work. As the village weaver integrates design elements outside her tradition, she brings them into the fold, altering them, mutilating them, until she feels comfortable with the result. The greatest compliment to a foreign design is for it to be incorporated, whole or in part, into a weaver's çeyik, or dowry; as part of the dowry, it becomes a model for future carpets. I recall a weaver refusing to sell a rug I had commissioned from her on the grounds that it was destined for her betrothal, but insisting that I could have another one "exactly like this one." Its pattern was an older version of one she knew well, called turnali, something like cranes flying. She had improved on the border by changing it from a leaf and chalice to a border of rosettes, with each flower uniquely colored. Bound to tradition, the village rug permits inter-marriage so long as it is conducted on its own ground, in control of its own destiny. Its credentials are paternal, and yet the true protectors of this paternalism are the women who weave.
When I say weave, I most vividly mean the back of the rug, along with the selvedges and kilim ends. These are, I think, the most sensual parts of the body of the rug. They express, through a combination of materials and craft, the genuine signature of an anonymous art. Traditional patterning is secondary to the nuance of wefting; end braiding, the ribbon on the package, is a lovely expression of a girl's wish to be seen. The back of a rug is a better, more inclusive map of its making than its face, precisely because it expresses the work of many hands, busy in the many stages of production. Weave breaks the anonymous surface of tradition into a million pieces, and nothing is more traditional than weave.
The permanence of weave is obscured by the fickleness of palette. In 1982 I saw a few rugs enter the Istanbul market with colors unlike colors in any new rugs I had ever seen: good colors. They appeared to be natural. The designs were traditional Bergama patterns. By following the vendor back to the source, I became familiar with the DOBAG project and the revival of natural dyeing that was spreading throughout the villages that surround Ayvaçik, a small town in the vilayes of Çannakkale. Something akin to a gold rush swept through Ayvaçik; a market returned to life. No amount of praise can do justice to the benefits brought by DOBAG, particularly those it had no control over: the free dissemination of natural dyeing skills to a much greater weaving public.
What was astounding then, as it is now, was how the people of these villages never stopped weaving, never ceased filling dowries, albeit with synthetically dyed yarns, what they call deli boya, Crazy dye. Compared to today, weaving in 1980 was low key. As if describing a deeply felt recession - or worse - people think of the 1970s as a bad period, when demand for their rugs reached a low point. Weaving with few exceptions became an almost entirely non-commercial activity. This was also the period when pickers began arriving from far and near to buy old rugs in any condition: grain bags, saddle bags, cicims, and pile carpets.
The demand for tribal rugs in Europe and America created a market for them in Turkey. The world-famous "Bergama" weavers, from Ezine in the north to Manisa in the south, without knowing they were world famous, began selling their old weavings instead of their new weavings. There is no real understanding among the people I have discussed it with that an antique rug should be more valuable than a new rug, especially since the old rug may be full of holes and without any real utility. There is nothing priceless about a rug that cannot be used. That someone, somewhere, should find a use for a worn-out rug merely reaffirmed the difference between them and us. Jokes were reciprocal: each side got the better of the other. Merchant and peasant were in harmony, as the peasant felt little remorse but merely held out for the best price as long as he could. Rugs that had previously been ignored, with names like Yuncu or Karakcili, became the rage among foreign buyers. Imagine the shock to the peasant who hears of prices being paid for an old rug that could buy a good house in his village, with a plot of land.
By 1982, the collectibles had nearly vanished. Those few pieces that occasionally surfaced brought prices that astounded those who were paying them, the Istanbul dealers. The marketing of these fragmented textiles created a massive service industry for their washing and repair. It's interesting to note that the migration of old rugs to Istanbul corresponded to the migration of peasants from countryside to city, and that many of the peasants who were selling their rugs found themselves soon in a position to master their restoration. This is particularly true of the Kurds of Malatya, who form a major part of the Istanbul carpet bazaar.
I have been having the same conversation for six years in the Ayvaçik villages. It is a conversation that begins in the morning, when I enter the first house that is weaving a rug I have commissioned, and continues throughout the day, house by house, village by village. Its repetition is a kind of comic relief against the seriousness I try to convey. After greetings, I check the yarn. I'm looking at color. The balls of yarn are usually in a basket or strewn on the floor just behind the weaving bench. The rug itself is only partly exposed because it is constantly being rolled as each section is completed. Only the weaver has a sense of where the rug is going. I focus on red and yellow, which tie for being the most problematic color. Madder, or kök boya , makes red, and in combination with other dye sources, it also makes yellow. But madder takes money out of the pocket of the weaver. We may be talking about pennies of difference between a deep russet and a light orange, but to the weaver this is a place to save. I lobby for the richest reds, knowing that the ground color of only about a third of all the rugs will satisfy me on this point.
Where I can exercise a degree of control is in the matter of payment. For all parties involved, the simplest and fairest method is paying by the knot, as opposed to a formula based on standard çeyrek (5'x3'), seccade (7'x4'), and kele (9'x6') sizes, a method that puts buyer and seller at odds and also limits the variety of sizes. Buying rugs by the square meter is counter-productive when there is no standard weave; its effect is to cheapen quality by underpaying good work and overpaying bad work. This is not always understood by the dealer accustomed to buying new rugs by the square foot, who enjoys the stability of a standard. And speaking of stability, I should add that few agreements with weavers are absolutely final, even when a rug has been commissioned in advance. It is not uncommon for dealers and pickers to scour the villages, eavesdropping on the "productions" of others, practicing a kind of commercial guerilla warfare. A slightly higher offer too often buys the rug.
My ambivalence about Ayvaçik is tempered, however, by the attempts I have made to circumvent the difficulties there. I think of the tiny victories: projects to dye wool, to expand into long runner sizes, to add bits and pieces to the puzzle of a Bergama design tradition, to keep handspun wool not only in the pile of the carpet but in the warp and weft as well. The presence of a foreign dealer is practical and symbolic: tomorrow I will be gone; in six weeks I will return. The real work happens in my absence, as a middleman supplies the masculine link between a house in a remote village and a warehouse in Istanbul. Failure and frustration lead to other alternatives. One must take from the Ayvaçik weaver what she does best: her own art. She neither rejects nor condones what you bring her. Her response is appropriate. This is the only conclusion. Your failure is not hers.
Rescuing the workshop carpet from this fate means realigning the means of production with the aesthetics of the carpet. In a time of no options, when only hand spinning and natural dyeing existed, a competitive solution might have been to improve the selection of wool and the range of colors, within boundaries set by nature. But with the advent of modern technology came the logic of mass marketing. And yet, of all major weaving countries, only Turkey has failed to develop the continuity lines so favored by the modern Oriental rug dealer. Why?
The answer is both complex and simple. I will opt here for the simple answer. If I ask, as I often do, one of the major importers in New York why, with operations in so many places, he ignores Turkey, his answer is almost always the same. He cites the difficulty of getting the right product at the right time at the right price and on time, and doing so consistently. Continuity has not been achieved because the industry is dominated by small entrepreneurs. A major rug producer in Turkey is tiny by Indian standards, let alone the state-controlled productions of China and Romania.
Production of wool Hereke carpets is a good illustration. Hereke carpets aspire to fineness of weave and perfection of design, to flawless workmanship. For many years, however, Hereke carpets have not been connected to anyplace; the term Hereke is a vestige from Ottoman times, connoting high quality and a high degree of control. But the modern Hereke carpet is as portable as a loom, and what defines it is a set of designs, a guage of warp and weft, an appropriate knot count, and a general quality of wool and color. A father can buy a loom, cartoon, ready yarn, and employ his daughters. He is a carpet producer. If he is motivated, he can create agreements with neighbors and purchase the looms and wool for production of additional carpets. By contracting 50 to 100 looms in his community, he becomes a big producer, developing relations with Istanbul carpet dealers. Information flows back and forth, much as it does in Ayvaçik, by visits to the looms by prospective buyers.
The paradox of this kind of carpet is that it strives for the perfection of a mass product while failing to organize along lines that would make it successful. The result is mediocre, neither easy to market to a large audience nor interesting enough to sell in the boutique atmosphere of an antique Oriental rug gallery. I can only hint at the complex nature of this issue by indicating that most of this weaving occurs at home, a cottage industry in the true sense. Anyone attempting to replicate a Chinese-type rug industry in Turkey will meet with ignoble failure. This is why no one tries.
And yet, Turkey resonates with rug weaving. Whatever it means, it is a rug-weaving culture. It resuscitates the anemic term, authentic. The conditions are right, both economically and culturally, for a revival of weaving the likes of which the 20th century has not seen. It is a revival of good craft, founded on the informal partnership of many parties, from the village girls to the repairman-turned-entrepreneur, and from the fragment dealer to the rug farmer. Taken individually, its projects are on a small scale. Seen as a whole, it represents the single most important contribution to Oriental rug weaving in decades. It may be that I am talking about a small fraction of total production, but that may be enough. The partnership I speak of is like the conversation that swings between the possible and the impossible faster than one's mood can change, with the grey area in between left to God's will. It has nothing to do with one's faith in God. It has to do with habit, the habit of making difficult things impossible because experience taught us so. In this sense, revival means the rejection of rejections.
Rug farming in eastern Turkey has been an orchestrated effort, combining the skills of natural dyeing with the flexibility of young women who weave commercially. As if turning back time, we have devised a system to spin large amounts of wool by hand, employing hundreds of women in work that can be done at home. I call these carpets Azeri, after the Turks of Azerbaijan. It is a whimsical name, meant to recall the beautiful patterns of rugs vaguely called "north west Persian." As an idea, Azeri carpets are about the art of girls making pictures, using drawings and samples merely as a guide in their weaving. The room for interpretation could easily be mistaken as primitive, but nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, an organization has been fashioned around the notion that several weavers sitting on a bench, in a room with many other large looms, can use a hard, lustrous yarn to produce rugs that are as much an individual statement as they are a statement about decoration.
