The mention of a Turkey rug automatically summons up an image of the predominantly scarlet, green and blur richly patterned rugs that were mass-produced for the West at the end of the nineteenth century. But this is to do Turkey a great injustice, as it has a long tradition of weaving since the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Sophisticated rugs were produced for the Ottoman court in the sixteenth century in the urban court workshop environments. Although there was a tradition of large rugs in Turkey from the thirteenth century onwards, equally important is the production from thousands of villages all over this huge country. Turkey has been traversed by numerous different nomadic tribes over the centuries, many of whom have settled relatively recently in village communities. They weave their own distinctive, boldly colored, usually geometric patterns peculiar to their region or tribe. Confusingly in the rug trade, Turkish rugs are often referred to as Anatolian. Anatolia is more or less the area covered by modern Turkey and is a geographical term for the land mass of Asia Minor. The age-old tradition of donating rugs to mosques to celebrate family events meant that it used to be possible to follow the history of Turkish rug weaving. Sadly, the increased demand for rare early rugs has led to many mysterious disappearances or rugs from mosques, with the result that only a handful of rugs remain in the mosques to which they were given. Today nearly all the old rugs in mosques are being replaced by modern machine-made and chemically dyed rugs.
As anyone who has examined the rugs for sale in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul will have discovered, there is still a great number of chemically dyed crudely woven rugs being touted. Every merchant will boast that his rugs are dyed with natural vegetable dyes, but this will frequently prove not to be the case. Take care. The poor quality of the lighting in the Grand Bazaar makes a torch an essential prerequisite if one is to examine the rugs carefully. One or two enlightened shopkeepers in the Grand Bazaar do stock rugs which are produced with natural vegetable dyed wool, but this is the exception rather than the rule.
The recent revival of rug weaving in Turkey specifically for the western market was led by the DOBAG project, which begun in 1981, which commissions dyers and weavers skilled in traditional methods to produce top-quality traditional Turkish rugs.
Geometric Turkish Rug Designs
Is your home looking a bit plain? Spice it up with a bold turkish rug design
Bergama
Known as Pergamon in ancient and modern times, Bergama on the Aegean coast is believed to have been the location where Holbein rugs were made in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Today the few surviving examples can be seen in museum collections. More accessible are the village-woven pile rugs which are rarely larger than 1.5 x 2.1 (5’ x 7’). Deep madder red dyes dominate the typical palette, but several other colors are used in smaller quantities, and some nineteenth-century examples are found with deep kilim flatweave skirts in plain red with yellow and black finishing stripes at either end. They are quite coarsely woven with fairly thick pile and are rather floppy.
Melas
Just north of Bodrun on the south-west Turkish coast, Melas is best known for its unusual prayer rugs, with their distinctive waisted prayer arch in a head-and-shoulders shape. Madder red is the main color, along with a brightly hued yellow, as well as oranges, tans and small amounts of dark tones, usually with a shade of deep purple. The characteristic size of a Melas rug is around 2.1 x 1.5m (7’ x 5’).
Konya
Konya has the oldest tradition of weaving in Anatolia. Konya rugs typically display powerful simple designs, often in a trellis design, where each compartment is filled with step-hooked polygons. The use of warm yellow is a very strong feature. They are quite coarsely woven, but the weave suits the style of design. The rugs have a strong visual impact, rather in the way Caucasian rugs do.
Mudjur
The settled nomads of Mudjur in central Turkey are best known for their prayer rugs which were woven in prodigious numbers. They are easily recognized by their wide main border which is made of repeating squares containing a floral diamond medallion. The deep madder red mihrab is very common, as are strong yellows and warm lime greens.
Megri
Located in the southernmost tip of western Anatolia, Megri (Makri) rugs are easily recognized by their double-column designs, curiously sometimes known as ‘Rhodes’. The most frequently found are split into two halves, making double columns with different designs on each panel, one of them always containing a toothed lozenge repeating down a central spine. Yellow predominates, as do strong blues and greens.
Yuruk
The Yuruk are unique in that they are the only settled nomads in eastern Anatolia. The rugs are woven with a very good quality wool using a long shaggy pile. The vividly hued colors include violet, yellow ochre, umber, sienna and the more traditional red, blue and green. The designs are based on different renditions of hexagons, medallions, diamonds, and hooked or stepped lozenges, as well as zigzag patterning in both the border and the field.
DOBAG
The DOBAG project (an acronym deriving from the Turkish words for research and development into natural dyes) is largely vision of the textile department of Marmara University in Istanbul. They have been responsible for reintroducing the traditional dyeing and weaving techniques to villages on the Aegean coast in western Turkey since 1981.
All the rugs made under this project are based on antique designs. The colors are produced from natural dyes, and can seem surprisingly bright to eyes used to faded antique naturally dyed rugs or chemically bleached, synthetically dyed rugs, but they are testimony to the great skill of the dyers, as it is difficult to produce colors that are both natural and vibrant. The rugs quickly acquire a lovely patina and so improve with use and age.
The superb DOBAG rugs will still be cherished and enjoyed in a hundred years’ time, and with correct care will remain in excellent condition, because the lanolin produced naturally from the hand-spun wool has not been removed, as occurs when wool is machine spun, as it is with many inferior modern rugs. The lanolin prevents the wool from becoming brittle and thus damaged.
Floral Turkish Rug Designs
Ushak
Ushak, which is in west central Turkey, is an ancient commercial carpet-weaving centre, most famous for its ‘star’ and ‘medallion’ patterned rugs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Ushak today produces little of merit, but rugs from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tend to be of very good quality and are highly sough after. The red-ground Ushak displays excellent detailing, both in its endless field design and in the green border, and is highly sophisticated. Designs of heavily stylized linked geometric leaves are frequently found in Ushak rugs.
Jean Lynn
