The Mysterious World of Chintamani And Bird Carpets

ISTANBUL, December 5, 2009 -- Some of the most striking carpets of the Ottoman era are as white as a painter’s canvas and covered with finely drawn, mysterious icons.

The never-changing symbols repeat in array after array, like waves building strength, creating a powerful, mesmerizing effect

The mysterious icons are the “chintamani,” three balls hovering over a pair of cloud-like wavy lines. And for much of the 16th and 17th centuries, they held a special fascination for Ottoman court artists.

The chintamani appear on silks, ceramic plates, tiles, book-bindings, and embroideries. Sometimes, they even appear on the kaftans worn by the Ottoman sultans.

This kaftan, from the mid-17th century and now kept in the Topkapi Palace museum, is an example.

The huge scale of the design, which was typical of Ottoman royal costumes, made the Sultan visible even in large crowds as he appeared in public.

The chintamani design was so popular in all the decorative arts of the time that it was probably inevitable it would spill over to carpets as well. And that is exactly what many rug experts believe happened.

Rug expert Louise W. Mackie writes in “A Turkish Carpets with Spots and Stripes” (Textile Journal, 1976) that it is “highly probable” that the origin of the chintamni carpet design can be traced to the symbol’s popularity in the art of the Ottoman court in Istanbul.

But what is much harder to explain is where the symbol of the chintamani itself originated and what it means.

In carpet literature, the design is often said to derive from a Buddhist emblem. The word chintamani itself comes from Sanskrit and in Buddhist philosophy signifies a treasure ball or wish-granting jewel.

A Buddhist background for the design is an appealing argument because it also recalls the distant past of the Turkic tribes who migrated to Anatolia from Central Asia and created the succession of dynasties that culminated in the Ottoman Empire.

The original cultures of the Turkic tribes were based on religions like Buddhism and Shamanism for millennia before they converted to Islam.

But if the three-ball pattern appears in early Central Asian painting and even is associated with the badge of the great Turkic-Mongol conqueror Timur (Tamerlane) in the 14th century, there are still parts of the symbol that a Buddhist origin cannot easily explain.

Particularly puzzling are the paired stripes that appear in combination with the floating balls.

Some scholars think that the eye-catching combination may have evolved from mixing a Buddhist motif with much more worldly patterns inspired by animal skins to create an instantly recognizable symbol of power.

The argument here is that the stripes and dots are similar to tiger stripes and leopard spots on the kinds of furs powerful rulers may have worn as symbols of their office.

But perhaps the only certainty about the chintamani design is that comes from Eastern Asia, is very old and, despite every effort at interpretation, remains as mysterious as ever.

“The true significance and sources of this ancient pattern still await satisfactory explanations,” Mackie notes.

The chintamani pattern was used both for carpets woven in the Ottoman court workshops of Istanbul or Cairo, and in commercial workshops in towns like Selendi around the city of Ushak (Usak, Oushak) in western Anatolia.

The two kinds of weaving centers – royal and commercial – produced their own distinctive chintamani patterns.

The Ottoman court carpets (right) have the spots placed above the raised center of the stripes.

But the Anatolian carpets (left) have the spots placed above the lowered center of the stripes.

Why this happened is just another mystery associated with this most mysterious of designs.

The chintamani pattern proved so popular that it was woven for hundreds of years, both on white and colored backgrounds, long after the passion for the design faded in the Ottoman court itself.

Today, the motif has finally passed from rugs, too, but it remains popular in Turkey on plates and other household items.

All this makes the chintamani design one of the great success stories in Ottoman carpets. But it is not the only mysterious pattern to be set against a white background in the 16th century that achieved lasting fame.

Another is the so-called “Bird” pattern, which also was produced in or near Ushak and was much prized in Renaissance Europe.

Europeans used the term “Bird” because the design could easily be seen to represent a bird, with its head, wings, and tail.

But in fact the design is a floral pattern of leaves attached to rosettes.

The sharp, birdlike angles are simply the result of Anatolian weavers doing what they did to all Ottoman-era floral designs: converting them to more geometric to fit their own weaving traditions and techniques.

Some researchers believe that the Bird pattern is actually a variation of the chintamani design.

The late Ferenc Batari of the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts suggested the Bird pattern may have evolved from weavers experimenting with framing the floating balls of the chintamani within different arrangements of paired lines.

Batari presented this carpet as a possible step along the way in his article “White Ground Carpets in Budapest" (Oriental Carpet & Textile Studies II, 1986).

If Bird carpets did indeed evolve this way, it would be an interesting example of how one successful carpet design gives rise to another as weavers constantly explore new ideas.

White carpets decorated with chintamani, birds, or other mysterious symbols viewed as crabs or scorpions fascinated the European market, where they all were referred to popularly as “White Ushaks.”

Here is a Bird carpet circa 1625 in the painting ‘Mother, Child and Gentleman’ by Alessandro Varotari.

Three hundred years later, in the early 1900s, the fascination with White Ushaks remained strong enough to inspire one the few short stories specifically about carpets in European literature.

The story is ‘Birds and Chintamani,’ written by Czech novelist Karel Capek in 1929. It describes the discovery of a carpet that, by all known rules, cannot exist. That is, a white carpet on which the two famous designs of birds and chintamani are combined together.

The discovery of the carpet, tucked away in stack of unsold items in a Prague rug shop, changes the collector’s life forever.

You can read the story by clicking here: Birds and Chintamani.

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A Rare Oushak Carpet In A Czech Castle Catches The Rug World’s Eye

PRAGUE, March 14, 2008 – The Czech Republic’s economic rebound has brought more than the restoration of historic buildings whose beauty was long hidden under sooty and cracking plaster.

It also has seen an upsurge of interest in the country’s many art treasures, including – for oriental carpet lovers – the valuable rugs held in state and private collections.

One of these treasures can be seen in the most recent edition (Winter 2007) of ‘Hali,’ the leading international magazine covering the world of carpets, textiles and Islamic art. The carpet, an Ottoman from the second half of the 16th century, is the oldest one in the Czech Republic and its magazine debut marks the first time it can widely be seen in color.

The historic carpet hangs in a castle in the south of the country that is associated with the wealthy Schwarzenberg family. It was woven in the Turkish city of Oushak, famous in Ottoman times for its fine rugs.

The Schwarzenberg piece is one of the renown “white oushaks,” which were named for their white background and were much prized in renaissance Europe. This one is decorated with mysterious symbols known as “chintamani” that appear as triangles of dots above two wavy lines. The Turkic symbols are believed to harken back to Buddhist times in Central Asia.

The appearance of the carpet in ‘Hali’ is the latest sign of a revival of interest both outside and inside the Czech Republic in the country’s rug collections.

The same carpet, which rarely leaves Hluboka Castle, also recently appeared in a major domestic exhibition of pieces held by Czech museums and private collectors. The exhibit in Brno this winter followed similar showings in Prague and Plzen that have drawn sizeable crowds over the past few years.

The visitors to the exhibits are curious to rediscover oriental carpets after they have been an almost forgotten item in Czech households for many decades. How they became so forgotten is a curious tale from the communist era, when many traditional status symbols were turned upside down.

Miroslav Jungr tells the story in his 2005 book “Oriental Carpets,” itself the first Czech-language collectors’ handbook to be published since before World War II. Born in 1942, he writes from personal experience.

Jungr notes that until World War II, oriental carpets were a standard part of any successful family’s décor in a society that maintained the values of turn-of-the-century Europe.

“My grandmother, who had four daughters, bought oriental carpets as part of the dowries that they would take into their marriages,” he recalls. The carpets came from a selection of high-quality carpet shops in Prague which at the time did good business.

But with the communist coup in 1948, oriental carpets were branded capitalist luxuries. The retail shops disappeared and were replaced by something unique to the communist era: state-owned antiquity shops.

The “Antikva” shops were always full of rugs, porcelain, and other collectibles. The stock came from formerly successful families which had to sell their valuables to pay a “millionaire’s tax” that was passed just before the communists seized power and nationalized most private property. With no businesses or other such holdings to liquidate to pay the tax, there was nothing for these families to do but liquidate their personal possessions at the antique shops.

In effect the antique stores were pawn shops and their purpose was to earn hard currency for the party. Their staffs were usually the wives of party officials and they sold only to foreign diplomats and touring groups.

The effect on Eastern Europe’s heirlooms was like that of a vacuum cleaner moving them West at absurdly low prices. Jungr says the shop staffs often had only the crudest ideas of the collectibles’ value and priced them to sell quickly.

As oriental carpets were devalued in communist Czechoslovakia, they were replaced as status symbols by what was truly hard to get: modern Western-grade home furnishings.

Most in demand was plain wall-to-wall carpeting. Such carpeting was produced domestically by the long-famous commercial carpet factories in northern Bohemia. But the product was almost entirely destined for export.

Jungr says that people, including himself, would go to any lengths to find a friend-of-a-friend who had some contact with the factories or with the rare state shop stocking their goods. A bribe was absolutely necessary to bring home the prize.

In his apartment in Prague, Jungr still has one room covered in white wall-to-wall from that era. It represents a trophy hard to give up even now. The choice for those who didn’t go to such lengths was shabby wall-to-wall carpeting produced for the socialist and third world markets in gaudy patterns.

Today, oriental carpets cost in Prague about what they cost anywhere else in Europe. A number of mid-range shops do consistent business but an early attempt at a higher-end collectors’ shop failed after several years due to lack of buyers.

That raises a question for Jungr and other rug enthusiasts in the country. Is the loss of habit for oriental carpets in home furnishings permanent, especially given today’s global trend toward minimalist decors?

Or, will the rediscovery of the lost family heirlooms – now so frequently on exhibit -- rekindle interest?

It is a question only time, and fashion, will answer.

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