 |
| Uzbek Samarkand Suzani |
 |
| Moroccan Boucherouite Carpet |
 |
| Baluchi Tribal Carpet Floor Pillow |
Vintage Turkish Cicim
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. A regular contributor of this blog, Catherine is also a member of our Fiber Focus group. She is currently working on a book on Turkish textiles. Visit Catherine and Abit at www.bazaarbayar.com or www.bazaarbayar.etsy.com.
Mamqan Lotus Embroidery, 7 Zones"The Islamic Republic of Iran’s rich petroleum resources — discovered in the Khuzestan province in 1908 — along with its natural gas reserves, have undoubtedly played a prominent role in the economy of that Middle Eastern country. Oil now accounts for 70 percent of all export revenues for the country, which possesses about 10 percent of the world’s crude oil reserves and is a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. However, Iran’s government has shifted its attention away from oil exports in recent decades and focused instead on the development of other sources of value-added products, such as the textile industry."
Although the carpet industry generally gets most of the attention, Iran has a rich history in other craft areas as well. The Persian empire was known for its sculptures, carvings, metal work, and other needle arts. Many of those skills continue to flourish, although much diminished from times past. Even in this diminished form, they achieve honors. In 2008, Isfahan, an area known for its crafts in Iran, received the Unesco Award for Excellence:
Local women do embroidery in Sistan-Baluchestan province. (Photo by Asghar Azaddel)
Turkish Prayer Rug
Prayer Rug Tree of Life Medallion
Long Kurdish Kilim Runner
Animals Depicted in the Kilim,
Woven Flowers, Representing Beauty and Abundance
40 Yr Old Suzani
Ink marks still evident on this Suzani from the 1960's.
The backs of Suzani embroideries are almost as solid as the fronts.
Scorch marks from an iron add history and character to this suzani.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. A regular contributor of this blog, Catherine is also a member of our Fiber Focus group. She is currently working on a book on Turkish textiles. Visit Catherine and Abit at www.bazaarbayar.com or www.bazaarbayar.etsy.com.
"For thousands of years, the women of nomadic tribes in what is now Afghanistan and its environs have been weaving rugs by hand. The oldest known and intact example of these rugs in the world is the “Pazyryk” rug dating from the 4th century B.C. (currently housed in the St. Petersburg Museum). These traditional pieces of folk art have long depicted the same deeply rooted motifs and patterns, with occasional images derived from the artist’s everyday experiences. However, about 25 years ago, all that suddenly changed. Following the 1979 Soviet invasion into Afghanistan, rug dealers began seeing drastic alterations in the content of Afghani rugs. Tanks replaced flowers, rocket launchers replaced vases and airplanes replaced abstract borders!
After the Soviet departure from Afghanistan the new ruling power instituted the strict Muslim Sharia law which governs the religious, political, social, domestic and private life. This law stripped many Afghani women of basic rights including banning them from talking to men outside of their family, walking outside alone, or working. Women were also made to abide by the practice of purdah which is the seclusion of women from public observation by having them wear concealing clothing from head to toe, like a burka, and by the use of high walls, curtains and screens erected within the home. This separates the women from learning about the outside world in order to make them ignorant of the practicalities of life and deprives the woman of economic independence by not allowing them to work outside the home. In order to keep females submissive, women know only what their fathers, husbands, and sons want them to know. The women who practice purdah have no voice or free will.
For women who break the fatwas, or edicts, associated with Sharia law, including purdah, there are dire consequences including harsh beatings or even death. Additionally, since Sharia law dictates that it is taboo to represent animate subjects in art; weavers were no longer allowed to portray images of birds, animals or people.
Thus as the artists iconography changed so did their outlets for expressing it. Those living outside of the war-torn Afghanistan can’t comprehend the reality of living in a world where the images depicted through the rugs are a part of everyday life. To the women of Afghanistan the rugs have become a way to make their voices heard and to communicate to the rest of the world what they live with everyday.
This new category of rugs has been termed “war rugs” and has sparked an underground movement in the art world. Many collectors see the rugs not only as art, but also as historical documents and a testament to the times."
NPR's Jim Zarroli interviewed Warrug.com's owner, Kevin Sudeith, in a moving piece while they were at a flea market in New York. Passersby stopped with either admiration or disgust for the rugs. The interview concluded with whatever the reaction, the rugs are a powerful testament to the political reality of and on an ancient culture.
My mother-in-law, doing a handcraft that she and I share – knitting
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.
A former carpet village of traditional style buildings near Selcuk.
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.
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.
The Carpet Merchant, Jean-Léon GérômeIt’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.
Carpet district, Nurosmaniye near the Grand Bazaar, IstanbulI’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.
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 BazaarThankfully, 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 14th 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.
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.
