Keep It The Way You Keep Your Heart
It’s been teenager girls and women that have been
weaving carpets and kilims in Anatolia for
centuries. Men do not happen to operate any looms.
The carpets and kilims that used to be woven
inside nomadic tents are today produced on the
looms in a chamber of the houses or in totally
modern workshops by young women working in groups.
As this tradition lives on, a teenager female must
also prepare her “dowry” until the age for
marriage. The “dowry” is then to be transferred
with the wedding procession to the house that she
will live in with her spouse from then on. Inside
that trunk where she has packed her dowry there
are also the carpets and kilims that she had woven
herself, right next to the pinkings, embroideries,
and clothes... This trunk and some of its contents
are to be items of decoration and clothing
material for people at home while some are to be
passed from generation to generation.
These trunks of dowry stand in a corner of every
house in the towns and villages of Anatolia.
Inside them lie embroidered kerchiefs, silk
shirts, string-pleatings of silver,
hundred-year-old “bindalli” gowns, headkerchiefs,
rugs for worship, shawls, and many many memories.
When the trunk is wide open…
One of these trunks was in the house of the
Anlitan family, in the Mudurnu county of Bolu.
When their mother Mukaddes Hanim passed away at 76
years of age, this trunk that had descended to her
from her mother’s mother was left unopened for
four years to avoid a painful stirring of
memories. When it was at last opened, beholders
were showered with a multitude of handiworks.
Emroidered headkerchiefs, “yaglik” pieces,
waistbands, shirts, string-plaitings upon linen
were spread all over the place. In the face of
such painstaking effort, the finery was an appeal
to the eye and a source of pride for the heart.
This is how it is with the trunks of dowry in
Anatolia, standing in a corner of every home of
every village and every town.
As years go by, also accumulate in these trunks
the yearnings and the following sighs. And also
all those secrets and memories to come by...
Then one day the teenager girl of the house falls
in love with a boy. This time it’s not at all the
way the dashing poet of Turkish poetry, Can
Yücel, tells: “This I had heard from the headman
of the Hasanoglan village. The girl likes the boy,
the boy likes her back... The family won’t give
the girl to him. That’s when it becomes love
between them!”
In our case the prospective parents-in-law go to
ask for the hand of the girl. Respectable elders
of the family have also come along. The expected
words come out while sipping cups of Turkish
coffee: “With God’s blessing and the prophet’s
permission…” The agreement’s concluded, the rings
are worn, the excitement of betrothal is on its
way. The hearts of the girl and the boy beat in
their ears...
The voice of the heart…
They do not get weddings over with in a single day
in Anatolia, but neither do they go on for forty
days and nights on end any more, the way it is
told in fairy tales. Today the bride arrives in
the groom’s house not on a horse but by a car of
the latest model, but still, women wear themselves
out with oriental dancing the night before which
is the “night of henna”. While the women are
having a merry time among themselves, the friends
of the young bride sing songs and jingles in her
name. Beads are attached to avert the evil eye and
folk songs resound.
The bride-to-be goes to the trunk’s chamber before
the “night of henna”.
“You know what the scent of unworn clothes is
like, / In the chambers where the trunks do lie,”
starts Orhan Veli, a poet who praises ‹stanbul, in
his poem named “Kapaliçarťi” (=”The Grand
Bazaar”). That is the very scent to greet the
young bride-to-be when she opens the dowry trunk
of her mother.
The clothes that come out of the trunk have been
actually put there about a hundred and fifty years
ago. “Mülver” jobs of silk threads embroidered
upon silk, string-pleatings with purple designs,
tablecloths, bed linens... Her mother, too, had
sniffed the same scent while checking everything
inside the trunk once in a year, the dowry that
descended to her from granny’s granny.
On the day when she’s putting her daily clothes
off and wearing something out of the trunk for the
night of henna, it’s as if she hears the voice of
her grandmother resounding from a childhood
memory: “My beautiful child, these are all
intricate and eye-straining handiworks.
Embroidered dreams, love as flowers, hope in
colours. Don’t leave them to the mercy of time,
keep them the way you keep your heart…”
Among all embroideries, the string-pleated cover
makes itself noticed right away with its silver
gleam. It’s not at all less shiny than the fish in
the river of Bartin, and it’s haughty, too, for it
hefts heavier in your hand than you’d expect from
any string, as it is no less than true silver
thread.
Snow and rose…
It is known that string-pleating has taken start
in Bartin, on the shore of the Western Black Sea
region, in the 17th century. At those times, the
people of Bartin used to weave all fabrics for
their clothes and covers on the manually operated
looms in their homes. Of course they also
cultivated and processed the flax that they
produced the thread from. And then linen fabric
came together with silver-over-copper string,
hand-made needle made in Bartin and used for this
sole purpose, and the masterful hands to do the
job.
Among the motifs, the ‘Plate of Cream’ shows a
star while the ‘Drunken Street’ walks swaying this
way and that, quite a demanding and complicated
motif for the embroiderer. The ‘Arch Bridge’ takes
its name from the famous bridge of Bartin.
According to what the grannies tell, once snow
fell on Bartin in August nearly a century ago.
String-pleated flakes like snow were then placed
among the large rose motifs normally decorating
the four corners of the spread of cloth, and that
was how the motif of ‘Snow upon the Rose’ was
born. There are several such string-pleating
motifs, their names hardly known, all taken from
the scenes of nature and given shape with the
power of imagination. The girls and women of
Bartin had the silver threads touch their hearts
while weaving them into the fabric of linen.
Suppose that the beautiful handiworks made by the
teenager girl of the house never came into the
open, nobody saw them and said well done, good
work.. Then the girl expresses her resentment with
ancient letters on a corner of the bed sheet she’s
working on, saying that ‘this sheet is such a
beautiful sheet here’.
While Anatolian women bring together wool with the
root dye and thread with the shuttle, loom, and
the tip of their fingers, the hands of the old
masters of handicrafts also keep coming together
with the fabrics, clothes, dye, wood, stone,
nacre, copper, iron, glass, and leather. They have
grown scarce; in fact some have become the last
representatives of their craft. But they believe
that their existence depends on the tradition kept
alive and refuse to abandon their workshops until
they pass away.
The beauty on the door…
The last master craftsmen are struggling to keep
their lives and jobs going on in their
single-chambered wooden shops. In a world where
the rules of morality, the sense of sharing and
united efforts gradually disappear, at the cost of
being left without apprentices, they process
copper with their whitening hair and beards, press
the felt with their chests, give shapes to the
embers of iron in furnaces, produce blue beads
against the evil eye despite the danger of
becoming blind. When the craftsmen that are the
last stars of their jobs shoot out of the sky of
time, what they leave behind will be an unfilled
void. There are foundations that transform the
vacancy left by the departing craftmasters into
some kind of scientific production, like it is
done with the traditional art of “tiling” in the
town of ‹znik.
When I visited the Mahalle Evi (=District House)
in Kastamonu, I had seen skillful hands traveling
over fabrics spread upon the tables set in front
of the gates. The hands belonged to Cemil
Kizilkaya, a master of stone printing that brought
fabric and dye together. When he started stone
printing in 1973, Master Cemil was 24 years old.
All of the 135 masters performing this craft at
that time had houses with their own courtyards.
The printings were done under the sun that bathed
these courtyards. Then the fabrics would be washed
inside the Karaçomak stream and spread all over
the roadsides to dry. In 1979-80, failing to find
financial support and to supply the imported dyes,
the masters one by one abandoned the craft. The
situation got worse as factory productions grew in
quantitiy as well as in variety and cost less. One
machine printed approximately 150 tablecloths a
day while the most efficient craftsman was able to
produce a maximum of 25 tablecloths a day. Cemil
Usta keeps on with his stone printings with the
help of his wife, stuck with slow production but
nevertheless adamant. While visiting Kastamonu you
should also see the gate of the mosque of Kasaba,
for it is a good example of how wood craftsmanship
turns into an art.
On the Southeast of Anatolia…
If you go to Urfa, Mardin, Diyarbakir or Gaziantep,
you will witness that the master craftsmen of the
East still resist to collapse. In Antep, nacre
processing and the resultant woodware are still in
demand. Such a livid craftsmanship out of material
from seashells in a city that is so far away from
the sea is altogether a curious fact in itself.
The most acceptable mother-of-pearl comes from the
Red Sea, but the high price and problems of
importing has made the craftmasters of Antep lean
towards the fresh water shells. The
mother-of-pearl from the sea mussels is scarcely
used due to its fragility. One of the basic
materials for this art is the wood of walnut
trees. Applied on many articles from gun butts to
frames, from jewellery boxes to ashtrays,
nacre-processing is kept alive by craftsmen with
cats named “Karaoglan” (=the name of a famous
Turkish comic book hero created by Suat Yalaz in
1960) sleeping upon the next chair. The sound of
hammers pounding on copper, the whisper of satin
at the shops of blanket-seamers, and the rumbling
of the weaving looms, on the other hand, keep
dwindling from day to day.
Red peppers-for-stuffing, white squashes, hairy
cucumbers, aubergines, and okras are like enormous
strings of necklaces upon the counters in the
Antep bazaar. Activity in the bazaar of apple
sellers increases in the afternoons. Those who
seek cures for sickness and spices for meals knock
at the same doors. In Direkçi Marketplace and
Kürekçi Bazaar, harnesses, beads, dried
hollyhocks, rose leaves are also presented for
sale. And the number of master craftsmen in the
Antep bazaar is going down one by one. The craft
of yemeni-making is nearly lost. Yemeni is a kind
of shoe with soles of leather from water-buffalos
and insteps made of goat skin.
They used to be the most luxurious shoes in the
1920s. The leather used to be tanned with sumach
leaves at those times, but today it is done with
certain chemicals. The last master of this craft
explains his customer to whom he has offered tea
while keeping on with his work: “Life today is
like a shoe that hurts. Everybody walks a
contorted path because of that.”
Simultaneously, the cane-makers in Devrek,
Zonguldak, the meerschaum carvers in Eskiťehir,
and the blacksmiths in Safranbolu, Karabük, sip
their teas and remember the good old days
altogether…
Fire and horseshoe…
In Mudurnu, in that ancient Ottoman town of Bolu,
I had inscribed my feelings about a blacksmith
into my diary with these lines:
“Axes cut heads off, and the chains, the tongs,
doorknobs, hooks and hangers…
I stand in front of a blacksmith’s shop in Mudurnu.
He goes about doing his welding job inside,
oblivious to my presence.
Fire is his companion.
His own masters tested him with fire.
With fire he shaped the ore, the metal, the home,
and the face of the earth...
With fire he conversed, with fire he was
entertained.
He is now performing his last works in a
stone-paved street where the neighing horses are
seldom heard any more.
When the last horseshoe he’s hung on the wire is
sold, the fire in his forge is going to die.
By the way, say, who was it that claimed
horseshoes pointed to good omen?”
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DONT MISS !