Finest Turkish Carpets Come With a Story to Tell

Sip your tea and listen.

“You are looking at a handmade, natural-dyed kilim from eastern Anatolia,” says Suleyman Ozcan, letting the thin, flat-woven rug slowly drop to the floor revealing a design of intense burgundy, indigo and dark green. “But most of all, you are looking at the work and dreams of a young girl.”

The girl wove two eagle heads--the balance between power and fertility, man and woman. She wove an hourglass--the symbol of eternal love.

And that’s just one dream, one rug.

In the vaulted lanes of Istanbul’s centuries-old Grand Bazaar, listening to carpet tales will take you from Bulgaria to China, from the 15th century to today. Carpet-shopping, a key part of most tourists’ visits to Istanbul, becomes a voyage of discovery.

“There are so many human stories that are part of the ritual of buying a carpet--our stories, the stories of the dealers, the stories of the makers,” says Gary Dunning, the manager of the Big Apple Circus in New York. Sitting amid piles of carpets, kilims, sumaks and cicims, Dunning has bought three hand-woven kilims.

The ritual begins with its most unpleasant part: the hassling, as salesmen call to tourists and try to entice them into one of Istanbul’s hundreds of carpet shops inside or outside the bazaar.

“It’s scary. You feel you are in a game where you are going to be the loser,” says Jacqueline Billiard, a tourist from Rouen, France.

Standing on the doorstep of a stall looking skeptically at a merchant showing her some newly made floral rugs, she adds: “You feel that if you accept that cup of tea, you then have to buy something.”

Alice Kornhauser, an Internet consultant from New York visiting the bazaar, says most tourists are anxious about being cajoled to check a shop because they don’t realize what awaits inside.

“The next thing that happens is that you are invited in, as if someone is inviting you into their living room to see their holiday pictures. It becomes very intimate,” she says.

First comes the tea--the strong Turkish tea served in a small glass, or apple tea, a sweet mix invented for tourists.

With the drink comes a lesson in rugs: the difference between a carpet, knotted wool or silk rug with pile, and a kilim, a flat weave without pile. There are also bright-colored sumaks--embroidered rugs, often in silk with representations of animals--and cicims (pronounced ji-jims), flat-woven kilims with small symbols embroidered on them.

Then there’s the question of quality: Is the wool hand-spun or machine spun, the carpet hand-knotted or machine-made? Are the dyes chemical or natural--extracted, for example, from eggplants? In rugs at least 100 years old, there can be dyes from ladybugs, which give an intense blood red nearly impossible to find in commercial chemical-dyed rugs.

“We try to educate people, inform them,” says Feti Tekes, joint owner of two stores in the bazaar.

Of course, dealers are mainly there to sell, and they acknowledge that most foreigners who enter their dusty shops are more interested in buying a carpet the right color and size for their living room or bedroom, and at a price that fits their budget.

But it’s while sifting through the hundreds of types, qualities and styles that the stories emerge.

Designs can tell stories. The tree of life--an often long, thin trunk with short symmetrical branches--is thought by some to be a shamanic or totemic design, while others say it symbolizes the link between the paradise above and the world down below.

Rugs also tell the tale of the weaver, often a woman. Mothers looking for wives for their sons in rural Turkey always asked to see the handicraft of potential brides. Good weaving meant a woman was meticulous and would probably make a good wife.

There’s also the history of a region or a people. Kilims made by Kurds are often “double-winged,” with two symmetrical halves sewn together, because the Kurds are nomads and large looms are too heavy to carry. The two halves are never identical.

Dunning remembers buying a carpet and in the excitement forgetting to ask where it was made. “If I knew what village or what family made it, it would be so much more meaningful.”

As the value of the rugs increase, the stories that accompany each piece become more and more important.

“You have to be prepared to answer any questions that the customer might have,” says Erol Kazanci, who mainly sells to collectors and international dealers.

Kazanci pulls out an 1870s Moghan carpet from Azerbaijan, its pile so soft it feels like fur. Not only can he tell you everything you would ever want to know about the carpet itself, he can also recount the migration of the family that owned it--a family from Azerbaijan that moved to the Turkish city of Trabzon on the Black Sea in 1891.

He says he had been after the piece for years and finally persuaded the family to sell it to him for $9,000 last March.

At Kazanci’s level, sellers know little more than the shoppers, many of them collectors.

Franco Ragazzi, an engineer who represents the Italian truck company Iveco in Turkey, has spent just about every Saturday morning in the bazaar over the past 13 years sifting through piles of carpets.

One of his first days in the bazaar, Ragazzi says a piece he was interested in jumped from $4,000 to $9,000 as dealers learned of his interest and traded it among themselves.

Since, he has made an art of carpet buying, first building a collection and then selling it to be able to start again.

“You forget the outside world, the worries, and relax and accept a tea. Then, the real adventure begins.”