Swept Off His Feet by a Carpet

Only a few people in the North Carolina auction room paid much attention when bidding started on Lot 57, described sparingly in the catalog as an 18th century Turkish carpet expected to fetch $5,000 to $10,000.

But that changed as the bids moved briskly past $50,000. Auctioneer Robert S. Brunk, surprised by how quickly his estimate had been passed, deftly kept the interested bidders in view, swinging from one to another. The price moved up in $10,000 increments.

At $100,000 the room paused, as if expecting the gavel to fall any second. Then, an elegantly dressed man standing near the back raised his paddle for the first time.

Moshe Tabibnia of Milan, one of Europe’s leading carpet dealers, had seen photos of Lot 57 on the Internet, and thought the carpet’s draftsmanship was exquisite, almost painterly. He suspected it might be something very special. He arrived in Asheville, N.C., two days before the auction and went straight to Brunk’s single-story facility on the edge of town.

When he examined the design and colors, and caressed the wool that felt like cashmere, Tabibnia knew the catalog was wrong. This piece, he was convinced, was 200 years older than estimated, woven in the mid-1500s, in or near the Turkish village of Karapinar.

More significant, he suspected it was the archetype for the carpets that came from the famous looms of Karapinar in the centuries that followed. That would make it almost priceless.

“In this business, you have feelings,” he said later. “I had the feeling that this was an important rug.”

Others had feelings, too. By the morning of the auction on May 31, 2003, a dozen serious bidders of international stature were in Asheville and several others were poised to bid by phone, hoping to snare a huge bargain in the Appalachians.

Asheville, a postcard-pretty city near the Blue Ridge Mountains, was an unlikely setting for a high-priced battle over an ancient masterpiece. The story of the carpet’s journey there from the dusty plateaus of the Ottoman Empire is unlikely as well, an illustration of the worldwide obsession over beautiful and rare Oriental rugs.

Origins of a Masterpiece

Karapinar, which means “black spring,” is a village about an hour’s rough drive east of Konya, the commercial hub of Turkey’s heartland and historic home of the Sufi whirling dervishes.

Standing on the village’s main road, across from the ruins of a once-grand stopover for caravans traversing the Silk Road, it’s hard to imagine that Karapinar was ever the center of anything.

But serious collectors know that some of the finest rugs came from Karapinar, where the women who wove them were said to be both beautiful and gifted, where the sheep were said to produce the finest wool and where the acidic mountain springs produced the most vibrant dyes.

Women in the region’s villages and nomadic encampments usually produced carpets for home use. As a result, few old rugs have survived everyday wear and tear.

Identifying the origin and date of a carpet is art, not science. Rug makers were anonymous, meaning very few carpets have the provenance associated with important old paintings. Still, rugs can be traced to locations and dates by analyzing elements such as design, color, dyes, quality of wool and knots. It’s an arcane language that often leads to disputes among the cognoscenti.

The main characteristic of Karapinar carpets is a series of circular medallions on a central field, surrounded by narrow borders of floral motifs. The corners of the field are often anchored by part of a diamond-shaped medallion. The colors are usually bright, often dominated by reds, ivory, blues and greens.

To most experts, the pedigree of the carpet in the Asheville auction was reinforced by its size. Houses in the Karapinar region were traditionally built around a big rectangular main room, its importance marked by a pair of narrow, long carpets used side by side.

Walking into the auction house, Tabibnia was struck by the carpet’s monumental dimensions: 7 feet by 20 feet. The design, executed in chamomile yellow, rich reds and aqua against a teal field, had made the carpet appear delicate, even small, in the photographs.

As Tabibnia examined the Karapinar, he concluded that the quality and quantity of the wool and fine execution of the design indicated that a lone woman could not have woven it. He suspected it had been commissioned from a master weaver by a wealthy patron and kept in a mosque or other place of honor. Its excellent condition indicated sparing use over the centuries.

His theory fit neatly into the history of Karapinar and the caravan rest stop that once dominated life there.

Z. Hale Tokay of Istanbul’s Mimar Sinan University said the large complex, called a kulliye in Turkish, was constructed in the mid-16th century and consisted of 39 markets, two mills, baths, kitchens to feed the poor, and a place where travelers and their animals could spend the night.

What set Karapinar apart from similar Silk Road stops, however, was its imposing royal mosque, dedicated to Sultan Selim II. The mosque, the only surviving building from the kulliye, was finished between 1563 and 1569, which coincides with Tabibnia’s estimate of the carpet’s age.

The faithful often donated carpets to mosques, and opening a mosque dedicated to royalty would have been an occasion of enormous significance for Karapinar, producing an outpouring of gifts. Displayed in such a prominent place, the rug would have influenced succeeding generations of weavers.

Carpets given to mosques are prized by today’s buyers because worshipers remove their shoes before entering, reducing wear.

Today, cheap machine-made carpets cover the floors of most mosques. Some of the old rugs were stolen by thieves, but many more were sold or traded for shiny new ones. People parted easily with the old pieces partly because they were women’s work, which was never valued highly in the region’s male-dominated culture.

“The women made these rugs and the man of the family did not understand them,” said Abdullah Ari, Karapinar’s deputy mayor and a critic of Turkey’s loss of its textile heritage. “If a carpet dealer offered a good price or was willing to exchange a new one for an old one, they thought they were getting a good deal.”

How the Karapinar rug left the mosque of Selim II, if it was ever there, is one of its mysteries. But at some point, it joined the exodus of carpets that started centuries ago.

Carpets are among the best known of all art forms produced by Turks throughout their long history. Marco Polo, who traveled the region three centuries before the Karapinar was woven, wrote about Turkish carpets in his “Travels”: “They weave the choicest and most beautiful carpets in the world.”

By the Renaissance, every court in Europe was adorned with Turkish carpets, and painters like Vermeer and Hans Holbein captured them in their art. In the late 19th century, huge numbers were shipped to the U.S. by wealthy collectors, including J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller.

An Unexpected Find

The day in February 2003 was cold and sodden, with a thin, wintry light that seemed to leach the color from all it touched. Bob Brunk and his helpers had no idea what to expect when they entered a musty storage building and gazed at more detritus of the late Foy Casper’s peripatetic life.

Casper had been an eccentric and a dabbler. Born in Virginia, he trained as a painting conservator at the Brooklyn Museum of Fine Arts and worked as a private consultant for years in the U.S. and Europe. He developed a friendship with automotive heir Walter Chrysler and helped stock the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., in the early 1970s.

He also was an avid collector. When he died in late 2002, a few days shy of 61, he left thousands of antiques and artworks in residences in London, New York, West Palm Beach, Fla., and Norfolk, where he also had eight storage facilities.

What he did not leave was a will.

Casper’s distant kin hired a Norfolk law firm to sort through his possessions, sell them and disburse the proceeds among them. The lawyers turned to Brunk.

Each of Casper’s sanctuaries was chaotic, crammed floor to ceiling with treasures and trash alike. There were valuable antiques, bronzes, marble architectural fragments and countless paintings. A Robert Scott Duncanson painting of Asheville would later fetch a small fortune.

Brunk and his workers were weeks into the cleanup when they unlocked the door to a storage building a block from the Chrysler Museum that rainy February afternoon.

“My crew was exhausted,” Brunk recalled in a telephone interview. “We were digging. On the floor there were two plastic garbage bags.”

In the first bag, Brunk found a room-size carpet from the Aubusson region of France that was so rotted he left it there. Opening the second, he glimpsed a carpet that appeared more promising.

“It looks great,” he told the workers offhandedly, pushing it toward the truck. “Let’s just take it and look later.”

Once unfolded, the rug glowed with color. Though it was obviously old, no one had the eye to see its potential value.

“We depended on a couple other people and they were out of their league, too,” Brunk said. “You can be in the business for years and not have seen anything like this.”

Brunk was not sure how Casper had acquired the piece. Someone told him Casper had bought it for $200 in an antique shop. Another story was that he had purchased it from the back of a truck passing through Norfolk.

In fact, Casper had bought the rug about 20 years ago from friends who were interior decorators, Anne and Tom Spencer. They can no longer remember exactly how much they charged Casper, but Anne Spencer said, “Foy was a compulsive buyer of good things, although he loved bargains and was not inclined to spend much money.”

The Spencers had purchased the carpet from the late George Hobensack, an antiques dealer from New Hope, Pa. Anne Spencer thought that he had bought it from one of Philadelphia’s old Main Line families.

“Sometimes, when one of those families got to the end, George was the man they’d call to come in and buy out the estate,” she said from Norfolk.

Even without knowing its origin, Brunk was savvy enough to send photos of the carpet to his son, Andrew, who was then a department head at Christie’s auction house in New York, to try to stir some interest.

In early May 2003, a friend at Christie’s mentioned the piece to Karin D. Dobbin, an independent rug consultant in New York. She took a look on the Internet and wasted no time alerting one of her best customers, Moshe Tabibnia.

“It looked fascinating,” Dobbin said. “I called Moshe and told him: ‘You have to see it. You have to be there.’ ”

Sealing the Deal

When Tabibnia and Dobbin walked into Brunk’s auction house on May 29, they bumped into a couple of other early arrivals -- another dealer from Italy and one from Philadelphia, Dennis Dodds.

Tabibnia walked around the items on advance display, trying not to tip his hand. Dobbin watched in amusement as he arranged his path to lead back repeatedly to the Karapinar.

“First, it is amazing as a rug,” Tabibnia said later. “It is fantastic in quality, in drawing, in colors. Second, it is the best Karapinar we know, absolutely the best. Maybe this was the rug that gave to Karapinar the idea of starting to make rugs.”

Tabibnia is one of a handful of dealers and collectors willing to spend whatever it takes to buy what they deem important carpets. Often his mere interest drives up the price.

The day before the auction, various dealers and collectors had called Tabibnia on his Italian cellphone, curious to see whether he was still in Milan. He thought they were trying to figure out whether he had heard about the Karapinar and might make a play for it.

“My strategy is to be the very last buyer, to enter at the very last second,” he said.

So on auction day he waited as the price rose steadily. He did not raise his paddle until $100,000, but then he confidently parried every other bid.

At $160,000, only Tabibnia and an anonymous telephone bidder remained in the fray. Tabibnia suspected his foe was a particular American collector determined to win the carpet.

As the price rose, Tabibnia theorized that Sotheby’s was on the line representing the anonymous bidder. He was more confident that the price was approaching the limit that his competitor had authorized Sotheby’s to bid.

“I thought his price would be $250,000, so when he bid $240,000, I thought I would get it at $250,000,” said Tabibnia.

To his mild surprise, the telephone bidder countered at $260,000. Tabibnia never blinked, nodding again at Brunk -- $270,000.

Going once, twice, three times. Gone. Adding the 10% sales commission, Tabibnia paid $297,000, nearly 30 times the upper estimate.

“Mr. Tabibnia was relentless,” Brunk said later. “He never hesitated, he just held his paddle up and kept nodding his head. He bought several rugs that day, in addition to the Karapinar, and there was no rug on which he bid that he did not buy.”

How high would he have gone? Tabibnia won’t say, but he smiles when $500,000 is mentioned.

“This will sound arrogant perhaps,” he said, “but if I want it, I will get it and, considering the importance of this carpet, it was well worth fighting for.”

In the last two years, Tabibnia has done little more to the rug than clean it and maintain its condition. More than ever, he is convinced that he has bought the model for the Karapinar rugs that came later.

Two museums and a private collector have made offers for the rug and Tabibnia has turned them down, for now. He plans to put the Karapinar up for sale next spring when he reopens his gallery in Milan after a major expansion.

He said his philosophy as a dealer prohibits retaining the rug. “If I keep the best for myself, then I can’t offer the best to my clients,” he said.

“But I always retain the right of first refusal if my client decides to sell again one day. That way I still think of them as mine.”

Collins is a special correspondent in Istanbul for the Chicago Tribune, and Frantz is a correspondent there for The Times.