Carpet Studies in Central Anatolia - A Practical Approach

Cemile and Susan, view of Taskale

Approaching the village one remains for a long time within a steppe high plateau which gently rises to the heights of the plateau Toros mountains. At the very last moment one can see the village of Taskale, situated in a canyon that cuts in the calcareous plateau. The village has been built according to the same basic principles as the famous Mesa Verde pueblo village: the winter sun shines directly on the village, while the icy-cold northeastern winds (poyraz) cannot blow down into the canyon. The diverse micro-climate leads to an abundant vegetation in the canyon, in sharp contrast to the vast steppe areas above.

The inhabitants of Taskale are Yomud Turkomans. They claim they came about 300 years ago from Khorasan to escape a severe drought. The village's textile culture, the traditional costumes, differ greatly from that of the surrounding villages. Today Taskale is a middle center (kasaba) with about 8,000 inhabitants. The kasaba earns about 80% of its living from carpet making, obviously a much greater proportion of its income than it can have earned in earlier times. The old textile culture is unusual, diverse, and shows traces of various influences.

But if the people were to use wool exclusively from their own sheep and mohair goats (tiftik), spin it by themselves, and dye it with local resources, such a volume of carpet production would not be possible.

The weavers execute Caucasian motifs, mostly of the Shirvan type, in quite a fine quality (33 v/42 h), of wool on cotton.

The people of Taskale having lost their economic independence, the weaving of carpets today is almost exclusively in the hands of two or three firms from Istanbul. They produce carpets within the commissioned work system; the firm provides the looms, the machine-spun, chemically dyed yarns, and specifies the designs. The weavers execute Caucasian motifs, mostly of the Shirvan type, in quite a fine quality (33 v/42 h), of wool on cotton. One weaver is able to weave around two square meters per month which earns her about 3.4 million Turkish Lira. When big carpets are woven and several weavers work together, the wage increases because the need to synchronize the work makes the weaving is a little bit slower.

Cemile and Susan began to weave carpets at the age of 12, just after finishing primary school. They wove 12-18 carpets per year, resulting in about 220-320 pieces to date. With figures as large as these, of course, a weaver stops keeping score.

With Susan and Cemile representing just two of the many weavers from Taskale, one might expect that the permanent use of Caucasian motifs over many years has resulted in the weaver's loss of her own textile tradition. But why do we assume that the perpetual use of alien motifs must destroy an authentic weaving culture? Isn't a lot of prejudice about weavers hidden in such an assumption?

An opportunity for research would then be to confront weavers with antique artifacts of their own culture, collect what they remember concerning different types of weave, techniques, names of motifs and how certain textiles have been used in the old days. This information would have to be collected now because, at a time not too far from now, all this intelligence will have become extinct.

The way in which a weaver remembers those things is reputed to be encyclopedic, and the description of what she remembers should conform to our expectation with a scientific encyclopedia definition. The more precisely weaver and researcher collaborate in this work, the less terminology trouble textile scholars would have later -- and they would tend to mistake this kind of empirical raw data with knowledge.

But we speak about textile culture. Culture is a living thing, or it is not? In Taskale weaving is a part of the daily life; it is not like in a tourist "carpet village." With weavers like Susan and Cemile having such an enormous weaving biography, we began to look for another approach.

Cegiz kilim (detail). Jasmin Hofmacher contributed the idea that in such a weaving environment, where commercial non-traditional motifs are abundant, the textiles woven for the wedding ceremony (cegiz) would perhaps constitute a constant, a correction, representing a move to adhere to tradition.

Jasmin Hofmacher contributed the idea that in such a weaving environment, where commercial non-traditional motifs are abundant, the textiles woven for the wedding ceremony (cegiz) would perhaps constitute a constant, a correction, representing a move to adhere to tradition. In Susan's cegiz collection, traditional designs dominate, but there are also designs of animals taken from newspaper photographs or from middle-class floral floor cover carpets. Often designs produced for cegiz are continued by the weaver in textiles created for her own use years after the marriage. There is no unwritten law specifying which designs might be used for a cegiz and which may not.

Two modern Cegiz yastiks, chrome dyes

Over time, the habit of weaving textiles bearing cegiz designs keeps the textile tradition of Taskale alive, but not as if for museum conservation, stagnant and inviolable, but rather as part of a "living" historic evolution. Cemile and Susan would be able to execute these established designs without any trouble, that means without any ready-drawn design cartoons or graphs.

As opposed to an encyclopedic approach, we were interested in the operational memory of Susan and Cemile. In the framework of the KÖK project in Karaman, where there is a suburb of people who are descended from Taskale, we work with hand-combed, handspun yarns and saturated natural dyes. We try to apply the results of about 20 years of research on the authentic textile culture of Central Anatolia to produce modern textile art.

In the past Cemile and Susan had worked as weavers employed by the government via Selcuk University Konya, using machine-combed, machine-spun yarns in flat synthetic dyes; the designs they wover were prepared and planned by some carpet teachers. Since April 1994, the two weavers have worked under the auspices of KÖK on the basis of a monthly wage.

To understand our experiment, one should keep in mind that with commercial weavings the weavers are paid on a square meter basis. But, with payment on the basis of a monthly wage, a finer weave or unusual attention to certain details of a weave does not mean less money.

Having learned previously that asking weavers to work from graphs or to copy antique pieces always results in stiff, boring "production" pieces that have no "soul," we confronted Cemile and Susan with just raw, amorphous ideas of a textile that they should weave from a big stock of colored wool. We would wait to see what would surface from their operational memories when they face these new tasks: what ideas about motifs, technical details, color combinations, would emerge, and further comments. The first results were two yastiks. Technically like the best antique Central Anatolian village rugs, they included hand-combed, hand-spun fine warps, a special quality of hand-combed, hand-spun fine wefts, four to eight wefts, and a high pile of two-, four- or even eight-twisted pile yarns.

Yastik No. 1 uses a simple design with a lot of different colors. Special care was taken with the end kilims. Some very fine yarn from Alpaca, the fleece having been imported from Bolivia and spun by Cemile, dyed and undyed, was woven in the end kilim. The main reason for using it was that it is unusual and precious.

Kök tüylü yastik, all dyes derived exclusively from woad. Susan Yalcin

Looking at the back side of this yastik, we realize that Cemile intentionally used a lot of different colors for the wefts. The reason was that weft yarns were available in all colors, so there was additional room for playing with an extra element of the weave. Perhaps this suggests that, in old days, dyers used mainly a weak madder red or brown for the wefts mainly because they wanted to keep the expenses of dyeing lower; with the weft yarns, the madder dye bath was used up. But when saturated colors are available, they are preferred.

Susan wove a yastik whose colors are exclusively made from woad. In contrast to Cemile's work with differently colored wefts, Susan decided to use two alternating colors to make the back side more interesting, a logical consequence.

Kelim - Cicim end of a Kök carpet, Susan Yalcin and Fadimana Cetin

We had never before seen a pile weave where a kilim type of motif is visible only from the back side. The area where the so-called "shaggy Yüncüs" (mixed technique weaves with cicim motifs decipherable from the back side only) are made is quite far removed from Taskale. Again it was a consequent step further after Susan's woad yastik in order to create a more interesting weave.

We have not yet seen an antique carpet with such an unusual end kilim - cicim. The technical details itself we know, but not in this particular composition. It was Susan's and Cemile's final step after studying the cicim parts of an antique Taskale cegiz kilim.

A constant problem for serious scholarship is the need of the "scene" to develop new fashions permanently. This is not only true for the designing of carpets but also for the development of new theories about motifs and their meaning. So first we had the "tribal" kilim, then the "cult" kilim, the birth symbol, and finally the Mother Goddess hypothesis, claiming that the motifs of carpets and kilims arose first in Central Anatolia and that this textile culture is an Anatolian, non-Turkic one. Turks and Turkomans are regarded to be more or less unwanted step-children then. A lot of pictures have been shown to trace the continuation of these motifs from Çatal Hüyük to the Phrygian era, the Greco-Roman classical period, the Christian-Byzantine era to the arrival of the Selcuk Turks. The problem is that even very early artifacts, like those recovered from the tombs of the Egyptian dynasties, show these motifs in an already late, "over-decorative" form. Greco-Roman mosaics need a lot of mental gynastics to yield the impression that they represent carpets in a way. We are still missing a pre-Turkic textile with true carpet or kilim-like motif, not a vague resemblance but the motifs themselves.

Here is such a key "missing link." Not far from Taskale are the Manazan caves, a Christian site with a big cave hall where a lot of well-preserved corpses from the 7th century A.D. have been found. One mummy is covered with a linen shirt that was decorated with a tiny stripe of a very fine wool fabric. This tiny stripe, about 4 cm broad, had been embroidered with dyed silk yarns. It contains one of the most common textile motifs, common not only in Anatolia, a playful variation derived from that motif, and even parts of a motif known first from Hacilar. This little stripe is shown together with the mummy in the Museum of Karaman.

Natural dyed silk embroidered wool fabric. Manazam caves near Taskale, 7th century A.D., Museum of Karaman

When we showed pictures of 15th and 16th century key-hole prayer carpets to Cemile and Susan, they spontaneously stated that all these pieces are "wall carpets." They were not able to give sufficient explanation for the basis upon which they made such an assumption, in terms of definition-orientated carpet scholarship, but their impression was clear and solid: these carpets must have been finely knotted and been cut very short. They have not been used for prayer but for the decoration of the wall. This opinion was reminiscent of a lecture Volkmar Enderlein gave some years ago in Stuttgart, where he mentioned -- in the context of the famous Berlin dragon-and-phoenix rug -- that additional wefts in the form of loops had been hanging out of the back of this rug, maybe in order to fix it at the wall.

After the idea was born to create a "wall carpet" with a field derived exclusively from elements of this pre-Turkic stripe, a creative discussion within the KÖK team started. The most successful idea seemed one of Memduh Kürtül, a specialist in creating natural dyes; the color composition was done by the weavers at work (Susan Yalcin, Fadimana Cetin, her older sister). The border motifs are common in weavings from Kazim Karabekir, a Turkoman village not far from Karaman.

Guided by the experienceof these weavers in our experiment we can summarize: Turkish weavers with a weaving biography as deep as Susan and Cemile have can master nearly all techniques of weaving known from antique pieces. They can immediately learn details new to them and apply these in a creative effort which leads to "modern" results.

Whatever we may find out about the history and the meaning of motifs, Anatolian or Turkic, or some essence common to both of them, there must be a creative mind at work when doing the weaving, today as in the past. Pleasure with the result is a timeless reaction.