Turkish Rugs & Carpets

Turkey (Anatolia) is a vast peninsula surrounded by the Black, Mediterranean and Aegean Seas. Settled, agricultural civilization goes back at least 8,000 years and weaving must have been virtually concurrent with its rise. Kilim textile fragments dating to the Bronze Age have been uncovered in several controlled excavations. Pile carpet weaving dates at least to the Turkish invasions of the Byzantine Empire in the 10th century, but the Greeks may have practiced the craft earlier.

Unlike Persia, with its numerous urban centers creating room size carpets, the production of large pieces has been confined to Oushak and Smyrna in the west, with the significantly smaller towns of Hereke (near Istanbul) and Sivas (in the east) contributing to 20th century output. Most of the weaving is in scatter sizes and runners from a myriad of small towns and villages from the Bergama district in the northwest through Konya-Cappadocia in central Anatolia to the Kurdish Yuruk tribes in the east near Persia and Iraq.

The symmetric (Turkish) knot is almost universal and medium to long wool piles on wool foundations are standard. The weaves of most antique Turkish rugs tend to medium coarse. [...]

Turkey (Anatolia) is a vast peninsula surrounded by the Black, Mediterranean and Aegean Seas. Settled, agricultural civilization goes back at least 8,000 years and weaving must have been virtually concurrent with its rise. Kilim textile fragments dating to the Bronze Age have been uncovered in several controlled excavations. Pile carpet weaving dates at least to the Turkish invasions of the Byzantine Empire in the 10th century, but the Greeks may have practiced the craft earlier.

Unlike Persia, with its numerous urban centers creating room size carpets, the production of large pieces has been confined to Oushak and Smyrna in the west, with the significantly smaller towns of Hereke (near Istanbul) and Sivas (in the east) contributing to 20th-century output. Most of the weaving is in scatter sizes and runners from a myriad of small towns and villages from the Bergama district in the northwest through Konya-Cappadocia in central Anatolia to the Kurdish Yuruk tribes in the east near Persia and Iraq.

The symmetric (Turkish) knot is almost universal and medium to long wool piles on wool foundations are standard. The weaves of most antique Turkish rugs tend to medium coarse.

Oushak has been weaving carpets since at least the 15th century and there has been a well-documented progression from the repeating small medallion 15th century “Holbein” rugs, through the various Star and Medallion types of the 16th through 18th centuries, and right on up to the room size carpets of the circa 1900 period with their unusual color schemes of salmon, peach, rust, pistachio, gold and ivory, and large, bold, eclectic patterns drawing on traditional Turkish and Persian sources. Smyrna, the port city for Oushak, has a substantial rug weaving tradition of its own, beginning in the 17th century with palmette carpets and continuing into the early 20th century with many Oushak rugs actually woven there. Antique Oushak rugs hand-knotted prior to the 20th century are in tones of red, dark and light blue, green, yellow and ivory. They are all workshop carpets made in sizes up to 30 feet in length for domestic use and primarily for export. Oushak carpets appear in European paintings from the 15th century onward and they were the first oriental rugs to reach the West in quantity.

The northwest Anatolian area of Bergama has many towns and villages weaving scatter rugs in locally characteristic, geometric patterns: Bergama, Yacibedir, Yuntdag, Ezine, Canakkale and Kozak, among many others. These rugs often appear in Old Master paintings and they must have been channeled through the early Istanbul carpet trade. To the southwest are the weaving towns of Melas, Dazkir and Cal with finer knotted colorful scatters with many in prayer patterns. Their weaving tradition seems to date back to the 18th century. Some antique Melas rugs have a European Rococo flavor. These were handwoven to satisfy the Westernizing Ottoman tastes under Sultan Abdulmejid in the mid-19th century.

The town of Ghiordes, near Oushak, is widely known for its fine, well detailed antique rugs, often with columns flanking plain niches in ivory, red, dark blue or light green. In the 19th century Ghiordes began weaving room size carpets for the export market in mellow colors with soft cochineal rose or ivory grounds. An antique Ghiordes rug in top condition has always been a collector prize. The nearby towns of Kula and Ladik also weave prayer designs almost exclusively. Ladiks employ tulip panels above or below the niche, and red or dark blue fields with yellow rosette and tulip borders, all in saturated colors.

The Konya basin region of Central Anatolia is the home of numerous rug weaving villages besides Konya town itself: Karapinar, Karaman, Obruk, Nigde, Gelveri, and Aksaray, to name only a few. Many antique rugs or fragments thereof have fetched up in local mosques, allowing us to postulate chronologies for several groups. The rugs are true rustic creations with long piles, loose knotting, and big and irregular patterns. Yellow grounds are particularly common and the palettes are bright and cheerful. The patterns are bold and utterly abstract. The town of Kayseri, on the other hand, is known for its mercerized cotton, silk-like copies of Ghiordes prayer rugs, sold in the Istanbul bazaar to visiting travelers.

The semi-mountainous region of eastern Turkey is home to the semi-nomadic Yuruks. Their scatter rugs have a vaguely Caucasian geometric aesthetic, but with strong cochineal reds and saturated orange tones. Hooked lozenges, stepped octagons, zig-zags and hexagonal pendanted medallions are among their decorative mainstays. They are often irregular in shape because of the primitive looms and elastic coarse wool warps. Around Kars in the far northeast, there is a production of Kazaks following their Caucasian archetypes.

Sivas, in the east, weaves larger rugs in the Persian Tabriz manner: light colored, curvilinear and with cotton foundations. These are slightly less formal and precise than the Tabriz originals. Hereke near Istanbul was the site of the Imperial Ottoman carpet workshop, weaving some very large pieces in European Axminster or Savonnerie patterns for Turkish palaces and public buildings in the 19th century. Now ultra-fine silk pieces, some with 2000 Persian knots per square inch, come from various private ateliers. These are wall hangings rather than floor coverings. At the turn of the 19th century, Armenian master weavers set up shops in Istanbul weaving very fine all silk rugs in 16th century Persian patterns. These antique rugs shout opulence and are extremely pricey and rare.

This brief introduction cannot do justice to the vast variety and artistic creativity of antique and vintage Turkish rugs. There are new discoveries all the time and much remains to be studied of this long, fecund tradition. You can learn more about specific Turkish rugs by clicking on the links above, or just browse our vast collection of Turkish rugs below.