The Vakiflar Carpet Museum is housed in the Sultan's Suite, or Kiosk, of the Sultanahmet, or Blue Mosque, an excellent location but a building in itself too small and not easily adaptable to museum purposes. Consequently, only a portion of the collections can be shown at a time, albeit those the most noteworthy. Carpets found in a variety of places in Turkey, usually in mosques, had gradually been brought together in depots over the course of some years before Belkis Balpinar, carpet curator of the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art in Istanbul, was chosen by the Vakiflar's General Directorate to amplify and prepare the collection for the opening as a museum in the Kiosk at Sultanahmet in 1979. Interesting rugs, some of them very unusual, went on display and then in 1982 there came a major influx when the carpets of Divrigi, many of which had been stolen from the Ulu Cami and eventually recovered within that city, arrived in Istanbul.
Walter and I had planned a major article on the Divrigi carpets, one of those many schemes which never come to fruition, but the rugs received intensive coverage, including a number of color plates, in Belkis's contribution to the volume, Divrigi Ulu Camii ve Darussifasi of 1978 (Ankara), otherwlse in large part a reprint of articles on the mosque from various sources, probably not highly accessible in the West. Incorporated into the Vakiflar Museum's collection, the Divrigi rugs provide 50 of the 83 plates, 60 percent of the subjects in the book under review.
These are for the most part Turkish rugs, with others perhaps from Syria and a group from Caucasia. The most remarkable pieces are the carpet with Para-Mamluk appearance but coarse construction, Plate 1, and the wheel rug with intricate Kufesque border, Plate 2, for both of which more conservative dating might well be in order; the exceptional dragon rug, Plate 74, and the novel Damascus designs, Plates 58 and 59. Most of the rest represent Central or East Anatolian patterns which may seem new to us, or are local variations on forms seen from other sources, as the text explains. An Ushak medallion carpet or two which we did not see in Divrigi in 1972 must have emerged from the depths of the carpet pile out on the mosque floor, which we had no time to rummage.
Among the rugs previously in the Vakiflar's depot, the most distinctive is that with two octagonal panels in which prance confronted beasts, conjuring up memories of the Marby rug in Stockholm and the dragon and phoenix rug in East Berlin. It is Plate 7. Belkis rejects the prevalent chicken theory in identifying the beasts provisionally as fallow deer, due to the antlers and despite the saddle-covers. For some time, I myself have wondered how long, among semi-nomadic peoples, the notion persisted of dressing up a riding horse or battle steed with an elaborate headgear, as was found at Pazyryk from a far earlier era. If we might assume that the animal was a war horse, perhaps the slanted forms that rise behind the saddle- cover here, in the rug at Konya, and in the Jaime Huguet painting referred to in the text are tenacious memories of the tree to which it was tethered.
Perhaps the other real star is the very fine Kerman vase carpet, Plate 72. This is not a particularly early example, and it has been shortened somewhat and rejoined. Its highly remarkable feature is the presence of vases placed diagonally along vines as well as on the usual vertical axes of the pattern. Then too there is a series of star Ushaks of different breeds and two more dragon rugs, one on blue ground comparable to a number in western collections. I had been informed it was from a mosque in Ankara; now it is motherless, so to speak!
All and all, the rugs in this book provide an excellent overview of what was obtainable in the carpet line in Central Anatolia some generations ago, with the occasional piece brought back from the Balkans (Plate 54, possibly Plate 69). As to Syria, if Plate 60 or 61 are allotted there, they do not have the same construction and family "feel" as 58, 59, and the several fragments in the Museum of Turkish Art. Their border stripe, too, is a Central Anatolian one.
Beginning with Plates 1 and 2, it seemed that the color plates would be too dark and a bit smaller on the page than need be. (My own recent experience has spoiled me in that regard.) Nevertheless, considering the condition in which many of these rugs have been, and are, and the problems that we had years ago in getting satisfactory slides of some of the most badly worn ones, I should not be too critical. Most seem excellent. Still, the vase carpet and the Divrigi dragon rug are much handsomer than the plates make them.
I have not gone through the book's analyses with a fine- tooth comb looking for problems. I have simply checked these two examples as more complex than the Turkish rugs. Analysts should be observant if they are to enshrine their work in print!
The text offers many interesting comparisons, together with a flexible, perhaps at times imaginative scheme of dating a number of the pieces. The small black-and-white cuts seem very useful as reminders of the color plates which lie far behind them in the book, but the comparative items presented at the same scale, especially the photographs, often seem too small to meet their specific functions.
I would suggest that with Plates 18-21, a certain amount of undue confusion regarding the "keyhole" and "reentrant" designs (page 74) seems to have entered the picture. To my best knowledge, these have been synonymous terms, dealing with projections into the field from one or both ends. Neither has applied normally to rugs such as Plates 18-21, which in my opinion stem from an entirely different design tradition, introduced from East Central Asia. The pattern was earlier marked by an arch at each end, presumably with protective qualities for the person sitting on the rug. In examples from Chinese Turkestan, these arches survived in bracketed forms. Here we have the horseshoe arch gone geometric and disproportioned. The basic scheme, with a central medallion for the owner's seat, remained much the same, whether it was understood or not by the weavers of any country. On the other hand, I would say that Plate 23 shows a "keyhole," "Bellini," or "reentrant" design; Plate 22 shows a much cruder version of the same, such as we get in many Caucasian prayer rugs; Plate 67 probably represents a different degeneration of the motive.
As the authors indicate, many of the rugs which this book illustrates represent design types with which rug scholars and fans have not been familiar in the past. They offer a series of new opportunities for comparisons in our efforts to straighten out a bit our knowledge of the past history of carpets. And so we have somewhat more than a mere handsome portrayal of the carpet holdings of one of the world's newer museums, a carpet museum specifically. The book is a very worthwhile acquisition for the shelf and for use.
Carpets of the Vakiflar Museum Istanbul by Belkis Balpinar and Udo Hirsch contains 83 color plates, 151 pages of introduction and descriptive text illustrated with black-and-white reproductions of all of the color plates as well as comparative examples in rugs and other art forms, structural analyses, listing of illustrations, and a bibliography. Written bilingually in English and German, the book was published in 1988 by Uta Hulsey of Postfach 34, D-4230 Wesel, West Germany. $138.
