Smal Carpets, Big Effort

Since yesterday, they’re telling at the news on television that snowy winter is on its way. I consider myself lucky for this sunny day, and what I have on my mind is my interview with the girls who weave the silken rugs. Am I perhaps going to a great workshop or a factory? If it is a big workshop, then the girls might not have much time to spare talking to me. I think of stepping quietly close while they are working fervently and directing my ight there. I get the information from my fellow passenger that it is a small rug-house with 5-6 people working in it, and I feel relieved for not having to face anything like cold machinery or a factory. ‘Are they all you have for workers?’ I ask. ‘No,’ is the answer. ‘There are those that have their houses far away, or some who are married and with children, and

they prefer to do the weaving at their homes. The ones that come to the workshop have their homes nearby and are happy to have a good time among companions…’ announcements about where they were from:

Ladik, Isparta, Hereke. We would gather around this new item when we heard about the names of Ladik, Isparta, Hereke, for it would have brought Turkey itself right in the middle of our house. With these rugs came the colors and longings of places that we never visited or knew; they were like verdant dream gardens, or sometimes like scarlet flowing rivers...

The love of rugs…

This hobby of my dad continued until every corner of our house was filled up with hand-woven giants. My mom would air these heavy and valuable objects under the sun every summer to keep them free of hungry moths, reproachful under the steady burden. Today I place silk next to these memories. Having had my childhood pass in Bursa I knew well about silken clothes, silken fabrics, kerchiefs, the touch of silk, the indescribable softness... And I had seen the silken rugs exhibited in a highly prestigious display inside the glass panels of Sultanahmet’s chic shop windows. Even from that far enough distance I felt their softness without touching them, watched their colors gleam in their own intensity. Today I am chasing the silken rugs, not the large ones but those with the size of a hand, each of which is a tiny work of art.

While thinking about these I realized that we were almost there: we were in Derince. I learned later that rug-houses like this could be found everywhere around ‹zmit, but the primary bazaar for rugs was assembled in Hereke where the last preparations before display, including washing, repairs, ironings, and adding fringes, were performed. After we parked the car, we found

ourselves in a bazaar as quiet as the neighborhood itself. I thought of the usual tumult caused by the touts in every bazaar I had been to until then, and I was positively stunned. We entered a store in the first street. People inside gave a break as soon as we entered and greeted us: After all we were expected today. I inspected the looms and I saw that they looked light enough to be carried around easily by one person. My hand wandered over the tiny rugs created on these looms, some half-complete, some just newly started, some nearly finished, and I thought that I would not be able to start the interview before I felt the silk. Tea was ready, a glass of it was brought for me, and the girls were gathering around me one by one. ‘What kind of patterns do you weave?’ I asked. The pages of the thick notebook of motifs on the table were turned one by one. Old ‹stanbul sceneries and portraits of nature right out of heaven looked at me from inside borders decorated with flowers and flying birds... I looked for the silk that created these motifs and saw the threads of several colors hanging down from the head of the loom towards its back. I caressed these skeins of thread and pulled them forward. Silken threads of the yellow of chicks, dark red of dried roses, pink of wine, the color of camel’s fur, lilac, pink, light pink, beady blue, salmon, mauve, and many other colours were woven together to form the depictions of Sultanahmet under a heavily clouded sky, the fountains of ancient ‹stanbul, the stone-pavements, the young ladies with white headkerchiefs, pink-skinned beauties taking baths, blue eyed horses, pheasants... The total count of looms in here was higher than that of the girls; they returned to their weavings while answering my questions, so I felt more at ease. I wanted to watch them perform, anyway. First I sat next to Sabiha. While tying the knot, Sabiha kept checking out the card erected before her. Their motifs were given numbers and plotted upon cards. They took to their looms whichever part of the overall motif they were to process. They started to weave the rug from the point where the pattern ended, forming the fabric in reverse. Apparently this type of weaving yielded a rug with a livelier upper surface. Sabiha was 24 years old and I’m sure she was having a hard time weaving pigeons the size of pen tips, ships the size of fingernails. It was not easy to judge the pecuniary value of their efforts. I turned to the direction where the “kirkit” clickings came from. Selma and ‹pek were sitting shoulder to shoulder weaving their rug. Theirs was the largest rug in the shop: It was just a little larger than a computer’s monitor! The little men they were creating jumped about in a craze and the pattern was just nearly finished. Selma was 37 years old. Her little boy, Ege, huddled close while we were speaking, but disappeared afterwards. Selma and her sister had been working on this rug for 4 months and they were going to finish it by next week. Selma had given up rug weaving when she got married, but she had restarted after having raised three children. To ‹pek who was handicapped, I asked: ‘Is it difficult?’ ‘Delicate job,’ she answered. ‘Despite the fluorescent light, it gets difficult to tell the wires apart after a while.’

In the workshop…

There were some unoperated looms with newly started rugs upon them... I bent over to see if there was any indication of whoever was working on them. I saw the pattern names and the figures indicating the number of knots and rows written in pencil over the consoles of these looms as well. There was an additional name, one of a village, written on one of them: Erecek village of Bursa. Just before I gave up, I found what I was looking for: There was a respectable number of hearts drawn upon the surface in a corner of the console. These had been left over from the former weavers.

I saw an unoccupied loom upon which a beauty watching herself in the mirror was depicted, and another empty seated loom stood next to it with quite a progressed pattern in process... When I inquired about their operators, I found out that the weavers of these rugs were a couple of sisters. Next Sunday was the wedding day of the elder sister. Her name was ‘Elvide’, and she had left her rug unfinished to complete the preparations of her wedding. She was going to return a month after the wedding and take the process over from where she left. Fatma hanim who was responsible for the girls explained: ‘I could have handed it over to someone else so that it could be completed, but Elvide wanted it this way, and her rug is going to wait for her.’ The little sister had also given a break to help her elder out; but she had forgotten her blue-stoned ring hooked on the nail at an edge of the console, and that, too, was waiting for her next to the beauty with the mirror. 

Many of the people who wove for this shop came in for a visit on their way from the mall before they went home. This is how I came to know Hatice, the bee-like weaver of the rug made out of the finest threads around, the ‘32 knots’ rug that she explained to have been weaving with ‘hair-thin threads’.

When we became crowded we gathered around the table and started to examine the 27 x 35 cm rug that Emriye hanim had finished and attached long fringes to, and the other rugs on the paper sheet. The passages between colors and the change from one pattern to another were called “sekinti” (a word with a meaning close to that of a “jump”), and those who had woven the likes of them before came to mutual agreement that the sekinti involved here was a difficult one indeed. That was when I heard phrases like ‘Make a background, keep it easy’, or ‘white and dry, fill up with number 15’. Each of those sweet colors had a number in their jargon and they used these numbers to point out at the colors. The backgrounds were the easiest to weave as they were single colored, but picturing pink skins needed as much effort as doing shadows. The motif of ‘Hasbahçe’ (=best of gardens) was called by them as ‘dertbahçesi’ (=garden of trouble); they pointed out at the most troublesome corners and body depictions with deep sighs. Circles meant a literal strain of bellies, especially if they had to be concentric. The numbers of 10 (milk white), 9 (aerial), and 18 (cream) were too close shades to tell apart even when they were illuminated by soft fluorescent tubes overhead, so the best solution was to place these threads away from each other and to memorize their locations.  

While we were busy with the motifs, Necla hanim entered with a loud announcement laced with her laughters: ‘Water melons, I’m here for the water melons.’ Necla hanim had been working on her rug for 8 months, and the water melons were the last motifs of her rug depicting a summer day. The rug would be completed in a month. She, too, had come to the shop to work on her rug until the month of Ramadan, and then had taken the loom home because she held to the worship of fasting like everybody else in the neighborhood. Having been through with the hard times, she would be coming back to the shop in a few days. Hatice, to her own astonishment as well as everybody else’s, had passed from ‘20 knots’ to ‘32 knots’ which was considered as a thick order for silken threads, and she could tie 32 knots in 1 cm. ‘I was able to complete 6 rows a day, but then I drew the evil eye,” she explained. “I will never boast about it again.”

I had entered this workshop under the yellowest rays of sun, but I emerged into a moonlit night. On my way home I thought over and over about everything that I had heard today. At home our lovebird got out of its open cage, walking with its appealing colors over my father’s famous Ladik rug spread on the floor of the guest room, and right at that moment a photograph that I hadn’t taken flashed before my eyes: I could visualize the lovebird strolling over the hand-sized rugs woven by the girls. The lilac stains at the sides of its beak and the green, blue, yellow feathers blended complementarily into the lovely colors of the rug. Sabiha came to my mind, the girl who was crazily curious about where the rugs that she had woven were taken to decorate, and in whose home and country they just landed... And now I knew the answer to the question I regretted having forgotten to ask her.

- Sabiha, would you recognize the rugs that you made if you saw them in a faraway country?

- Sure, I would not miss even a single ‘knot’.