Turkish Textile Arts in Transition: A Sisterhood of Weavers

by Catherine Salter Bayar
Catherine is a regular contributor to Fiber Focus.
Click on her name to see all of her posts on one page.

My mother-in-law, doing a handcraft that she and I share – knitting

Long before I moved to Turkey in 1999, the manufacturing of hand woven rugs had begun to move out of this country to nations farther east, where labor and production costs were cheaper. I’d been familiar with this economic market reality as I traveled the world for the garment industry, which is in constant search of cheaper countries to manufacture clothing. In the same way, Turkish rug wholesalers took their production of hand woven rugs for the tourism trade or export to countries such as Pakistan or China, while mass producing machine-made carpets in Western and Central Turkey for use in the modern Turkish household. The cost of hand weaving in countries to the East is roughly a third of the cost of weaving a rug in Turkey, East or West.

My mother-in-law’s generation used to weave, but she is in her sixties now. She and her sisters had to weave if they wanted functional or decorative textiles for their homes. Weaving was not only utilitarian, but social as well. When girls and women wove for their dowries and households, they would gather together in the afternoons after their farm chores were completed. My mother-in-law wove the kilim, below, on a narrow, easily transportable loom, in four long strips of 17” (42 cm) wide cloth, embroidered together with wool yarn.

This entirely wool piece would have taken her at least 6 months of afternoons to complete. She used the natural dyes of madder red and indigo blue to bring prosperity and protection; the triangles represent the mountains that encircle their childhood town of Derik, in the eastern province of Mardin. It was used to drape the horse her sister rode to her wedding, and then as a bedcover. The numerous fabric strips tied to the bottom, below, are ‘wishes’ from each woman in the family for a healthy, happy, abundant life for the newly married couple.

My mother-in-law thinks it’s quite absurd that we have kilims she and her sisters wove in our shop. She sees little value or beauty in them at all, and has often teased me about the threadbare but exquisitely striped kilim I insist on keeping in our bedroom, below. Perhaps someday I’ll get that big hole repaired by one of the expert reweavers here, all men for some reason, who can make it look like new, but to me it’s already perfect. I like seeing it just this way as I get out of bed each morning, as a reminder of a time when a woman would spend perhaps an entire afternoon per 1/2 inch of this finely spun wool kilim, about 3 feet wide by 5 feet long; a woman who obviously took joy in combining such bright reds, oranges, pinks, chartreuse and periwinkle. This piece was given to us by the family in Abit’s home village in Eastern Turkey. They were cleaning out storerooms and would have thrown it away! Abit gave his aunt $200 for several kilims she was discarding; she clearly thought he was foolish to give her good money for them. Word of the ‘big spender’ from the West got around the village. The next day, numerous relatives showed up with their cast-offs, amused that the boy who’d left more than 20 years ago was now making a living selling these old useless things.

These days, the easy-care machine made polyester/cotton textiles for cushions and bedding plus wool and synthetic carpets being churned out by factories all over Turkey are the preferred house wares of the Turkish middle classes (behind and beneath my bread-making sisters-in-law, below). Turkey grows its own cotton and is still predominately an agricultural country, so the wool gathered from sheep and goats now goes more to urban factories than it stays in the villages. These textiles are targeted at the domestic market, so reflect the color combinations and patterns of vintage hand woven pieces, but are prized for being modern and machine washable.

None of my seven sisters-in-law weaves, unless you count the sister who asked to be sent to a local government-run program that trains women in the art. She and I had begun collaborating on carpets of our own design, but the family decided that she should move East to marry and raise a family rather than stay in Selcuk and work for us. I know she does not regret having the adorable children in the photo below, but she does miss the chance to express her originality and talent through weaving. It is still common for women in Cappadocia in Central Turkey or in East to work at home weaving for various manufacturers. They are usually paid by the piece, though it cannot be much money for their labor based on the wholesale prices of new goods. No wholesaler would divulge how much the women make, another reason we don’t sell new rugs in our business.

My husband’s family is traditional and typical for Eastern Turkey even though they have lived in this Aegean region town since 1985. The girls are expected to be homemakers and mothers, and if they must work, they do so together in the fields and orchards, picking crops such as cotton or peaches. Abit and I do not agree with these limitations and have had countless discussions with the family, to no avail. However, most girls in Selcuk complete mandatory schooling by the age of 16, and many go on to universities. Our town is filled with women in business, medicine, law and service occupations in percentages that are similar to Eastern European countries.

A portable loom for small rugs less than a meter (39”) wide.

The majority of women schooled in hand weaving today in Western Turkey work in ‘carpet villages’, traditional style complexes to which the tour companies take captive busloads of tourists to demonstrate how rugs are made. They make for a good show of the craft, but little do the tourists realize that most of the rugs they are being shown and sold were woven far from here, in countries with fewer regulations about child labor and fair wage laws. Most carpet villages near Selcuk pay their workers – male sellers and female weavers – a salary, not in commissions or by the piece. They usually do get healthcare and other benefits, including meals and transportation to their jobs, and work regular 8-hour days, though often 6-7 days a week during the tourist season from April to October and far fewer days in winter.

A former carpet village of traditional style buildings near Selcuk.
The looms are dismantled, but colored yarns still hanging from the rafters.

The pieces hand woven today by manufacturers have been ‘merchandised’ to cater to the buying tastes of the visitors. Traditional color combinations of reds and blues are replaced by more subtle Westernized palettes of pastels or earth tone combinations. Unlike in the West, where rugs woven in undyed natural wool colors of off-whites, browns and blacks would fit in well with most home décor, these ‘drab’ pieces would have been pitied in a Turkish village. It would have been assumed that the family did not have the skills or money to gather dyestuffs or purchase them in the local market. The traditional long, narrow rugs to fit a Turkish living room are now woven instead in standard sizes revised to reflect room proportions in Western homes. What in the West would be used as hallway runners, for instance, would have been attached to the lower walls of a Turkish salon to comfort the backs of those seated around the room on low cushions.

The predominant art of the Turkish culture, the art that has survived centuries of population migrations, the art truly inclusive and expressive of women’s emotions, desires and creativity, has been hijacked by mass commerce. This is not a story unique to Turkey of course; as countries modernize and mechanize, traditional handcrafts are less prized by the culture and fade away. Beyond the tourism-driven carpet villages, there are groups of entrepreneurs in Turkey who want to sustain traditional hand crafts and offer women the alternative to support themselves though weaving, but these enterprises may never create the same works as a woman who is weaving from her soul would.

A strictly-for-commerce ‘new’ piece that combines multiple portions of old prayer rugs – a creative way to reinvent authentic carpets, but sold for thousands of Euros – as seen in the window of one of the most expensive carpet shops in Sultanahmet.

Has the art of weaving been completely lost to commerce here? Not quite yet, but with women no longer weaving for themselves and shopping hordes of tourists in the tight control of tour conglomerates, businesses like ours have fewer authentically Turkish-made alternatives to offer our visitors. And the uniquely expressive voices of our sisters, the weavers, are being silenced.



Catherine Salter Bayar lives with her husband Abit in Selcuk, near Ephesus, Turkey, where they own a vintage textile shop and a water pipe & wine bar.

Visit them at www.bazaarbayar.com or www.bazaarbayar.etsy.com.

This article is a companion one to Turkish Textile Arts in Transition: A Brotherhood of Carpet Sellers

Turkish Textile Arts in Transition: A Sisterhood of Weavers

Turkish Textile Arts in Transition: A Brotherhood of Carpet Sellers

by Catherine Salter Bayar
Catherine is a regular contributor to Fiber Focus.
Click on her name to see all of her posts on one page.

The Carpet Merchant, Jean-Léon Gérôme

The occupants of the cavernous room, with walls of hewn stone punctuated by arabesque carved doorways and filled with a soft light from above, are rapt with attention. Three men in flowing robes and large turbans watch while a barefoot carpet seller with a long beard works his best sales techniques on a fourth potential buyer, while the second, white-bearded carpet seller gauges the reaction of the group. The two sellers – one perhaps Persian, the other Afghan - gesture as they point out the unique qualities of a vast Heriz carpet, hanging from a balcony above the room and enormous in scale, even in the huge space. Other Persian and Turkish carpets are strewn around the floor behind the men in rejected heaps. Around the periphery of the room, several young men and boys watch and await instructions from the carpet sellers; the most attentive assistant is an African, perhaps a slave. A woman veiled in blue brazenly peeks from the corner doorway, ready to completely cover her face if the buyers, one of whom is a European wearing a dashing red coat, happen to glance her way. The question “Will the visitors buy?” tangibly pervades the scene.

It’s possible that French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme accurately captured what a carpet shop was like more than 100 years ago, when he painted this Orientalist scene, The Carpet Merchant,while visiting the rug market in Cairo. The nostalgic setting this 1887 painting portrays, a mysterious market place full of colorful carpets from all along the Silk Road, with Egyptians, Turks, Persians and Europeans vying to purchase the best pieces, is still much what visitors to Turkey expect to find today.

Though there are a few places in Turkey that replicate this exotic environment, buying carpets to resell these days is not that experience, though this painting appears on countless carpet shop walls, even ours. Perhaps because we trade in weavings from the past, we’d like to recall those days, however romantically portrayed, in which such magnificent, authentic carpets were highly sought after by every visitor to our region.

Carpet district, Nurosmaniye near the Grand Bazaar, Istanbul

I’d never seen The Carpet Merchant before I moved to Turkey, though the idea of wading through deep piles of those vibrant rugs in alabaster rooms greatly appealed to my sensuous nature. At least I didn’t have to be that woman peering from the doorway, excluded from participating in the business proceedings. Or so I thought when Abit and I first started buying for our shop in the Western Turkish town of Selcuk in 1999. No novice to textile commerce worldwide, I was not surprised to find myself once again in a business completely dominated by men. Those in power in the carpet trade here, at least the traders with whom Abit, my husband, had developed the essential relationships, were very traditional, very powerful men with origins in Van, a region in Eastern Turkey, on the Iranian border.

These men were not the chic, European-educated business owners I worked with when I first visited Istanbul in the early 1990’s. Dealing with those men – whose offices and factories were almost completely run by extremely bright and well organized Turkish women – gave me a favorable impression of Turkey as a modern place to work. But I’d also shopped the Grand Bazaar and surrounding lanes on my own during my early trips enough to have discerned that carpet dealers were not cut from the same progressive cloth.

During our first season of purchasing in the Turkish carpet trade, I immediately realized that the exotic stroll through an ancient marketplace my romantic mind’s eye pictured had little basis in reality. Visits to the wholesalers we used when we first started our business were in the old quarters of Nuruosmaniye within the walls of Istanbul’s old city near the Grand Bazaar (with one palatial entrance to this enormous complex pictured above), or along the cramped narrow lanes of Kemeralti in Izmir. These districts have a certain seedy charm, with their greyed, unpainted wood exteriors concealing vast warehouses of colorful carpets within. And like the painting, the men we visited were eager to fill our shop with their wares, spending hours unfolding kilims and unrolling carpets to convince us that they had the finest rugs on offer. But other than our dealings also being among people from several ethnic groups – Kurds, Turkmen, Uzbeks, and me, the solo ethnic European - the resemblance to the painting ended there.

Upon a first visit to a wholesaler, I might be completely ignored after the initial greeting, and sometimes even then. Just like my clothing industry visits to China and other countries in the Far East, I could not possibly be the person in charge of finances, so was of no importance, until the surprised men discovered otherwise. We drank endless glasses of tea while the men chain smoked cigarettes. Obviously, business dealings required constant supplies of nicotine, no matter what harm all that smoke may do to the fibers.

Abit (center in the photo above) and I would select the pieces we wanted. The men were clearly intrigued and sometimes quite mystified that Abit would consult me at all about what I liked. Though he had explained my textile background and ability to know quality when I saw it, the men were not at all convinced that I, a foreign woman, had any idea what I was doing. As the meetings went on though, sometimes for hours late into the night or even several meetings over days, the men grudgingly began to understand that I knew what I was doing. Not that this was stated, and in those early days my Turkish was not sufficient to know what they were saying. And the men were also speaking Kurdish in their negotiations, since that was most often the mother tongue to everyone in the room but me. Nonetheless, I understood the looks of admiration I eventually got from some of the dealers, and Abit was told more than once how lucky he was. I was sure however they were convinced Abit had caught a wealthy American fish and they were eager to reel in as much of our cash as they could.

In the early years of our business, the semi-annual visit to the wholesalers was still a treasure hunt, with dealers emptying never-ending black bags crammed with perfect suzanis, or leading us through rooms stacked to the high ceilings with old rugs from all over the Near East. Today, buying merchandise from these same dealers would be like going to Pasadena’s Sunday Rose Bowl flea market on a mission to find the genuine vintage handmade textile buried under heaps of machine-made odds and ends. In the decade since we started our business, wholesalers have become merchants of newly woven goods. In traditional Turkish patterns, yes, though they are imported from countries such as Pakistan, Nepal or China.

Interior, Grand Bazaar

Working with only a few main wholesalers, each specializing in different regions, therefore differing types of textiles, was logical for 1999. In the barter system used here, the more we bought, in “American cash dollars”, the phrase always used, the better the wholesale prices got. Ten years ago, that meant that we could buy a wonderful assortment of vintage rugs – those kilims and carpets woven decades before as dowry pieces with no concern for what a Westerner would buy, with nothing newly made, and all of it woven in Turkey or Central Asia – for amounts of money that seemed very reasonable to me. Now, in 2008, it would be impossible to buy the same goods for three times the price, if you could find them here at all.

Thankfully, we bought so much when prices were good that we have some of those original purchases in stock. Selcuk does not often get buyers who are looking for collectors’ pieces; frustrating for income but fine in the long run since these vintage rugs do not lose, but increase, in value if they are well taken care of. Investing in dowry kilims and carpets in the late 1990’s turned out to be a wise decision, since they are truly a vanishing market in Turkey. These days, we buy very few pieces, and only from trusted older men who scour the villages looking for rugs no one wants any longer. Like all things vintage, once these weavings are sold, we will be looking for a new business.

Our shop in Selcuk, with most of the carpets and kilims kept inside
these days to protect them from the hot summer sun.
The minaret behind to the left is the oldest in town, from the 14^th Century Seljuk Empire.
One stork is just visible on top – Selcuk’s high places host
enormous nests where the storks live from May to October.

Next post: Though a brotherhood of wholesalers and sellers control the carpet trade in Turkey, it is a sisterhood of weavers that is very much affected by this weaving art in transition.


Catherine Salter Bayar lives with her husband Abit in Selcuk, near Ephesus, Turkey, where they own a vintage textile shop and a water pipe & wine bar. Visit them at www.bazaarbayar.com or www.bazaarbayar.etsy.com.

Turkish Textile Arts in Transition: A Brotherhood of Carpet Sellers

Cicim Kilim Rugs: Pure Nomadic Art of Turkey

By Catherine Salter Bayar

My favorite kilims are often the most uncomplicated. In the context of Turkish hand-woven textiles however, simplicity is rarely a straightforward square-weave. Simple in this case? Starting with a rustic base of undyed goat hair in its varied natural colors – dark greys, creams, deep browns, and sometimes even beige shades that verge on mauve - then embellishing that base cloth with brightly colored wool yarns in a very simple geometric pattern in an overall repeat.

When Abit and I first started collecting vintage hand-woven ‘kilims’ (the Turkish name used for all types of flat-woven textiles, in contrast to carpets, ‘hali’ in Turkish, which are knotted) nine years ago for our shop in Selcuk, Turkey, this style immediately caught my eye with its naïve and playful simplicity. Called ‘cicim’ in Turkish, the word is pronounced ‘jijim’ and is sometimes spelled that way by non-Turkish speakers. Instead of weaving wool yarns together into solid colored blocks of geometric pattern, cicims employ embroidery to create their colorful raised geometric shapes.

The cicim weaver either brocaded the pattern into the goat hair warp and weft as she wove, or embroidered it in sections as the goat hair base was completed and still on the loom.

None of the cicims we’ve collected are less than perhaps 30 years old. In my 60-something mother-in-law’s generation, women throughout Anatolia and Eastern Turkey still lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle. Winters were spent in the villages, but summers the families went up into the mountains to take advantage of grazing their animals at higher and cooler altitudes.

Turkish weavers in years gone by had no choice other than to make everything for their homes. There were of course no big-box stores where a homemaker could outfit an entire house at once, like there are today here in modern Turkey. In fact, there were very few shops of any kind outside of large cities. If a woman needed coverings for the floors, cloths to be used for dining, cushions for sitting or containers to carry belongings from place to place, she had to know how to weave.

Because thicker goat hair yarn and large gauge colored wool were used, these pieces were woven fairly quickly, so were favored for all sorts of utilitarian purposes. Goat hair was plentiful, strong and coarse, and had the extra practical aspect of being more waterproof than wool based on a higher oil content. The cicim below was originally folded with sides stitched together to form a ‘donkey bag’, which was literally slung over the back of that hard-working farm animal.

Ends were left in plain-weave stripes, though in this case, the cream-colored goat hair was dyed a vibrant orange and red.

The ends of the cicim below are undyed. This yarn of this cicim is courtesy of those mauve-colored goats I mentioned before, along with their more typical grey cousins!

The goat hair warp yarns were sometimes braided or woven into a beautifully striped natural color twill trim, as seen in the two photos of the same cicim below.

Selvages (the vertical sides of a weaving) were usually bound in a whipstitch of contrasting yarns, as a means to reinforce the edges from fraying, to make the seams of a bag sturdier, as well as to add a decorative touch.

Some cicims were woven on narrow looms, about 12” -15” (30 – 40cm) wide, while others were made on large looms easily 6 – 8 feet (2 – 2.5 meters) wide. This opened bag has wonderful herringbone weave ends to accentuate the central raised triangular motifs representing mountains, and diamond shapes acting as protection for the family against the ‘evil eye’ jealousy of outsiders.

The central geometric theme can get more complex, depending on the skill and imagination of the weaver; or oversized, as in the approximately 7’ x 10’ piece below, which would have covered most all of the floor in a traditional Turkish village salon.

As in all Turkish kilims, symbols have meanings, and the desires of the weaver were spoken though her work. Below, tiny embroidered flowers for abundance outline the letter “S”. In Turkish, “I love you” is “Seni Seviyorum”, so that alliterative phrase was represented frequently in Turkish weavings by that letter.

Though the central ground of a cicim was usually one geometric pattern repeated throughout, there were typically contrasting borders in some form. These borders might be a simple single motif, or a combination of a few. Below, the starburst forms may represent the mountainous terrain, the daily passage of time in sunrise and sunset, or that protective diamond shape which can also mean abundance for the family home.

Below, a striped outline means a rippling stream of clean running water. To the left, the pale green triangle with connected spiral forms is the ‘hands on hips’ symbol of fertility. To the right, the hatchmarks in red (meaning abundance and love) and indigo blue (meaning protection) are the double protection of strong ‘wolves’ mouths’ and diamond ‘evil eyes’.

These are just a few examples of cicims we’ve collected, with the undyed goat hair base weaving common to all the pieces here as the connecting feature. Some of these cicims are for sale on our etsy site: www.bazaarbayar.etsy.com with additional photos. More of my favorite cicim styles to come in future posts, to illustrate the enormous variety of kilims, within just one weaving style, that were woven here in generations past.

Catherine Salter Bayar lives with her husband Abit in Selcuk, near Ephesus, Turkey, where they own a vintage textile shop and a water pipe& wine bar. Visit them at www.bazaarbayar.com or www.bazaarbayar.etsy.com.

Cicim Kilim Rugs: Pure Nomadic Art of Turkey

Introducing Catherine Salter Bayar: Our Voice from Turkey

I found Catherine through her Etsy store, Bazaar Bayar. I invited her to write an article for Fiber Focus which led to a spurry of e-mails back and forth. Turns out we have a lot of common ground in our passion for textiles, our marriages to Muslim men, our dreams for our businesses, and a good sense of humor. Catherine is an interior designer and spends part of each year working in California, while her heart remains in Turkey. She has agreed to become our regular voice from Turkey, so this is hopefully the first of many articles for Fiber Focus. Welcome, Catherine!

Blame It on This Carpet…

Okay, I admit it. I've been addicted to textiles, especially the handmade variety, since my childhood in Santa Barbara, a beach town which thrived with artists, Mexican and old Californian artifacts, and a colorful, vibrant lifestyle. Early days of dressing up in layers of embroidered flouncy dresses with flowing mantillas on my head in order to ride a donkey down State Street for the annual Fiesta Parade obviously got me hooked. Perhaps my fixation was compounded by those family summer road trips as well. Memorable visits to Native American settlements in the Southwest where men raised wonderfully wooly sheep (on sand dunes, of all places!) and women wove finely patterned blankets are some of my earliest recollections. I was dazzled by it all, even if their work was targeted at impressionable young tourists like me.

By the time I'd grown up, color, pattern and texture were three elements that I could not live without. I had to play with them daily. To feed my obsession, yet be able to support myself, I became a clothing designer, a job in which I got to dream up garments AND the fabrics or yarns they were made from, then travel around the world to get them manufactured. Sounds more glamorous than it really was, since my dreams always had to be practical and make mass-market money for my bosses. Not the most creative combination, but it was an interesting way to make a living.

Until one trip to Turkey changed my life in 1998. I visited the small Aegean town of Selcuk, home of the last standing column of the 550BC Ancient Wonder Temple of the Greek Goddess Artemis, and her predecessor, the Anatolian Goddess Kybele, pictured above. Anatolia, the western portion of the Asian part of modern Turkey, actually means "full of mothers". In this mystical feminine environment I met, quite by chance, a man who would broaden my already burgeoning textile horizons to include a wealth of carpets, kilims and other delectable Turkish treasures. That was it…this textile junkie had found Nirvana. And yes, not only did I go into the vintage hand woven textiles business with Abit Bayar, the most earnest carpet seller in Turkey, but I married him. We've been passionately treasure hunting our way through life ever since.

That first culprit, pictured at the start of this story, the rug that launched our collection? It's a museum quality single knot carpet from the very early 20th century, woven in the Cappadocian town of Avanos. A town better known for its ceramics than its weaving, but I see a connection to earthenware tones and patterns when I look at this intricate piece. The pile of this 5' x 8' carpet is very evenly worn, yet the pattern is still so well preserved. A well made carpet should have the same intensity of color on the front and on the back, and this one does. We cannot know the woman who knotted this piece about 100 years ago, but it had to be a well-loved part of her home.

Traditionally in Turkey, women do almost all the tasks related to spinning, dyeing and weaving or knotting rugs. Unusually muted in color for a Turkish carpet, Abit and I were entranced by all the symbolism here. A good carpet seller can 'read' a carpet or kilim like I can read a great novel. Abit's been teaching me this ancient language as 'spoken' by the women of his culture, who used these symbols to tell the world what they hoped for in life.

The Tree of Life, the center from which all families spring and the form that holds the generations together (I especially love the small birds!).

A zigzag border represents the running water that all life needs to survive, and the clean heart that a woman hopes she, her husband, and all their children will have.

"Wolves' mouths" - also called "dragons" - to protect the family and keep it from harm. Note that the diamond in the center is added protection, in the form of an 'evil eye'. This symbol of protection is so old in Anatolia that no one really knows how the tradition started, but evil eyes are seen everywhere in modern Turkey even today, though usually in blue.

An intricate series of squares to form checkerboards - five together remind the household of their obligation in Islam to pray five times a day.

A hairbrush, a symbol of vanity! Girls started to learn carpet weaving at a young age so they could make pieces for their dowries. Part of the idea of a dowry was to catch the attention of the best available bachelor (or, in Turkish culture, the eye of that bachelor's mother!). Proclaiming the beauty of the weaver by the weaver herself was not considered immodest, but a tactic to ensure a good future. In fact, the better a woman could weave, the more likely she'd draw wanted attention to herself.

And finally, multitudes of flowers, including Turkey's indigenous tulip, as symbols of the Garden of Eden, to ask for abundance and beauty in life.

By weaving such symbols into a carpet, women were creating ideals of a perfect life. One filled with love, luck, prosperity and every other good thing mentioned above. Today, we visualize our perfect lives in order to make them real. The women of Anatolia have been doing that for millennia. Filling our lives with things of beauty in order to attract more goodness is a very ancient idea, though one I did not fully understand until I found the treasures I was seeking in Selcuk.

I've been kindly invited to post here regularly about carpet shop life and the hand woven textiles and other wonderful handmade art that comes from all around Turkey and beyond to Central Asia. Thanks, Rachel!

Catherine Salter Bayar lives with her husband Abit in Selcuk, near Ephesus, Turkey, where they own a vintage textile shop and a water pipe& wine bar. Visit them at www.bazaarbayar.com or www.bazaarbayar.etsy.com.

Introducing Catherine Salter Bayar: Our Voice from Turkey