Aug 07 2006
Beautiful Turkish Antique Rugs
Written by David Castriota
Monday, 07 August 2006
Want to know about beautiful Turkish rugs in a nutshell? Then check out this primer written by our expert in the field, David Castriota. Turkey has one of the most venerable and distinguished carpet weaving traditions in the Middle East. It was largely the Turks and related peoples from Central Asia who introduced the knotted pile carpet to the Islamic world. The largest and oldest body of early Oriental carpets comes from Turkey, the so-called geometric or Seljuk carpets of the thirteenth century preserved in the mosques of Konya and other towns in Central Anatolia. These are probably the carpets remarked upon by Marco Polo in his travels. The early Turkish animal carpets are a century or so later. During the Ottoman period in the later fifteenth century Turkish court production began to emulate the carpets of the Timurids and early Safavids in Iran, creating the Cairene type and the so called Star- and Medallion-Ushak carpets which continued to be made up though the seventeenth century. Within the same general period a rich tradition of local village rug weaving also developed all across Turkey. This process gave birth to the various types that are known almost down to the present time - Bergama, Ladik, Konya, Ghiordes, etc. In the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries Turkish production stepped up to commpete for the western market with Persian carpets at centers like Sivas, Oushak, Hereke, and Sparda. Although kilims or plain tapestry weavings were produced in most regions of the Near East, Turkey is probably most well known and celebrated for antique flatweave carpets of this kind.
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