Turkish Carpets

We got a great lesson in Turkish carpetmaking today.  We stopped at a cooperative in Cappadocia that draws in carpets from villages across Turkey.  The coop tries to support the carpet weaving culture in the country through training village weavers to higher levels.  He showed us several women who were at work on their looms.  Turkish carpets are tied with double knots (wrapping the strings around twice for the knots, rather than once, which is Persian style).  (Machine woven carpets do not have knots at all, they are held together with addition of glue).

The weavers we saw were levels 4 and 10 (10 is  master weaver and can take up to 15 years to achieve certification if you are especially talented).  Many village weavers are level 4 and can come to the coop to receive training to a higher level.  The government specifies minimum wage for each level.  Level 1 is 850 lira/month;  Level 10 is 2700 lira/month (1 lira = 50 US cents)  The lowest level weavers tie wool string on wool threads with approx 65 knots/sq inch.  Cotton carpets are finer than the wool ones and have approx 350 knots/sq inch.  The top weavers tie silk on silk with 645 knots/sq inch.  

We got to see how they separate the silk from the silk worm pods.  One pod, about the size of your thumb has 1 1/2 miles of silk wound up in it.  They boil the pods, then pull out the fiber from 25 pods and twine them into one strand for weaving.

One of the group members asked if only women weave.  The coop director asked a man if the group if he would do such fine work and he replied no.  The director said 'only women have the patience and delicacy to do such work'.  Men do other "manly" work.  This manly work involved hauling out over 20 carpets to show our group in the show room later.  They did this with great flair : )

The salesman is in the middle making his excellent talk.  At a signal from him, the men on either side fling out their carpet and roll it at our feet for viewing.

This one was not  one of the ones that was pulled out for display, but it caught my eye.  The picture doesn't quite capture what a rich blue this carpet is.  It has 1 million knots!

This brown runner carpet is all natural colored threads (not dyed at all).  Very pretty.

This silk masterpiece woven by a level 10 master artist is worth $50,000 carpet!  Its about 3' x 2' and absolutely magnificent close up!

The "warehouse" was quite attractive with marble floors and hard wood floors to help you get a sense of what the carpet would look like in your home.  They had 15,000 carpets in stock.  After the group demonstration, they broke up the group and tried to sell us carpets individually.  The salesman showed us several large carpets and then asked "which one do you see in your house?"  At the cost of $7,000, our answer was obviously "none of the above".  Fortunately they did not press too hard.  One member of the group did get a smaller rug for a much smaller price.