Brussels Celebrates Savonnerie Carpets With 700,000 Begonias

BRUSSELS, August 29, 2008 – Every summer, Brussels weaves a giant carpet of begonia blooms that covers almost the entire Grande Place.

The flower carpet does not last long: just three days and four nights. And the amount of work is immense, with hundreds of volunteers arranging some 700,000 begonias (knot count of 300 flowers per square meter) into a meticulously planned pattern.

Still, Brussels considers the effort worthwhile.

The annual event, which began in 1971, reminds the world that Belgium is the world’s biggest producer of begonias -- exporting about 48 million bulbs a year.

Plus, the flower carpet reminds everyone that Belgium also is one of the world’s largest makers and exporters of carpets -- machine-made.

This year, the floral design (above) honored France’s Savonnerie carpets. Doing so, it recalled the days when European weavers first “Occidentalized” oriental rugs on a commercial scale, setting the stage for today’s immensely successful Western rug industry.

Savonnerie carpets were first produced in the early 1600s and combined Eastern pile-rug weaving with French Baroque designs. The success of the patterns – whose motifs include flower bouquets, fleur-de-lys, fruits, and acanthus leaves – was so great that it swung European taste away from oriental rugs for two centuries.

Here is a Baroque carpet in the kind of typical French interior design that defined Western standards of elegance at the time.

Just how Europe developed its own handwoven carpet industry is a fascinating story with two parts.

The first is the deliberate effort by French kings to monopolize the luxury carpet market in Europe, which was previously supplied from the East.

The second is the coincidence of this effort with a sudden feeling of Western cultural superiority as Europe’s kingdoms first became world powers.

Some steps along the way:

* King Henri IV (1533 – 1610) decides to revive France’s luxury goods industry, which was decimated in France’s wars of religion. He provides leading artisans, including weavers, with workshops in the Louvre.

** Weaving master Pierre DuPont establishes the style that will become famous as “Savonnerie.” The name is taken from the Paris soap factory which becomes the location of a major carpet workshop in 1644.

*** European forces defeat the Ottoman army besieging Vienna in 1683. The victory convinces High Renaissance Europe of its cultural supremacy over its Eastern rivals.

**** King Louis XIV bans the import of oriental carpets into France, protecting French production and ending the huge outflow of revenues to buy luxury goods from the East.

Europe’s handwoven carpets had many variations, including Savonnerie and Aubusson in France and, later, Axminster and Wilton in Britain.

Here is a 19th century Aubusson carpet from France. The carpet is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Such carpets were commissioned only by courts and by the very wealthy. Their patterns proved adaptable enough to be a centerpiece of furnishing from the Baroque and Neoclassical periods into the Napoleonic era.

It was Napoleon, in fact, who gave the Savonnerie factory its last great royal support. Beginning in 1805, he commissioned carpets in the Empire style that defined his age.

The Savonnerie’s story finally ends in 1825 when the manufactory was incorporated with another weaving workshop, the Gobelins, which was famous for tapestries. By this time, the passion for European handwoven carpets had faded under a new set of social circumstances.

Among them was colonialism. As Europeans expanded across the globe, they came again into direct contact with oriental artwork and renewed their interest in it. By the mid-1850’s imports of oriental rugs were booming, along with Orientalism in general.

But perhaps still more fateful for the European hand-knotted carpet industry was the invention of the steam-powered loom in 1785. Carpet producers quickly discovered they could earn much more with mass production for the expanding middle class than they could with artisinal production for just the very rich. Within 50 years, the great names in European handwoven rugs disappeared or became associated with machine-made carpets instead.

Today, one can still buy Savonnerie carpets but they are reproductions hand-made in China. And one can still buy Axminister carpets, but they are machine-made in England (as pictured here).

Does all this make Brussels' Savonnerie flower carpet a bittersweet souvenir of Europe’s rug-making industry?

Champions of hand-knotted carpets might say ‘yes’ if it reminds them too much of a glorious past gone forever.

But one can also argue that history must take its course and that the way Savonnerie carpets evolved into today’s multi-billion dollar machine-made carpet industry is as amazing as any other aspect of the rug trade.

If so, the Savonnerie which bloomed in Brussels' Grande Place this year from August 15 to 17 is a perfect symbol for Europe’s carpet world.



Related Links:

YouTube: Brussels Flower Carpet 2008 - Savonnerie

Brussels Flower Carpet: official website

Wikipedia: Savonnerie

Early Axminster Carpets, by Brenda Rose

Renaissance Carpets and Tapestries Company

Every Era Sees Oriental Rugs It's Own Way

PRAGUE, August 15, 2008 -- Oriental carpets have caught the eye of Western writers ever since they began trickling into Europe in the 13th century or earlier.

But how Western writers look at these exotic creations has changed dramatically over the years.

In the early days, carpets were symbols of impossible luxury and power. They helped seal alliances between the Ottoman court and European kings, and ambassadors carefully recorded their acceptance and delivery.

Just what potent symbols these objects of art could be is apparent in this brief description of the victorious Sultan Suleyman II summoning the Hungarian king John to him immediately after the battle of Mohacs in 1526:

“Along the short mile the King traversed to go to the Emperor, Turkish and various fine carpets were laid on the earth as far as the tent of the Emperor.”

The words belong to the Hungarian royal chaplain George Szerémy, who was there. The picture of Sultan Suleyman II above is from an Ottoman court miniature.

Over time, carpets as trappings of royal command found their way (in reduced versions) into more and more Western households. First nobility, then merchants and then, with the industrial age, the ever more comfortable middle class bought eastern rugs. So many, in fact, that by the mid-1800s, the way carpets were displayed in Western homes could be an issue of public debate.

Edgar Allen Poe is best remembered today as an American pioneer of the Romanticist Horror genre. But he was also a well-known literary and, sometimes, social critic who contributed an essay entitled 'The Philosophy of Furniture' to Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in 1840:

“Carpets are better understood of late than of ancient days, but we still very frequently err in their patterns and colours. A carpet is the soul of the apartment. From it are deduced not only the hues but the forms of all objects incumbent. A judge at common law may be an ordinary man; a good judge of a carpet must be a genius. Yet I have heard fellows discourse of carpets with the visage of a sheep in reverie — "d'un mouton qui rêve" — who should not and who could not be entrusted with the management of their own moustachios."

Poe goes on to accuse the main commercial carpet centers of his day of violating all public standards of good taste. "Brussels is the preterpluperfect tense of fashion" in Western rugs, he claims, and "Turkey is taste in its dying agonies" for Eastern ones.

What does Poe like? Well, colors that are not too lively. "A carpet should not be bedizzened out like a Riccaree Indian — all red chalk, yellow ochre, and cock's feathers," he says, apparently having seen something like that on someone's floor. As for patterns, only non-figurative and preferably Arabesque. "Distinct grounds and vivid circular figures, of no meaning," are his maxim.

If Poe seems surprisingly argumentative about carpets, he is only a little ahead of his time. By the end of the 1800s, passions rose still higher.

Britain's The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs offers this view of carpet collecting in a 1903 commentary:

“There are, I must suppose, but few hobbies that claim so absorbing a devotion as does the pursuit of the oriental carpet. Every hobby, no doubt demands a good deal from its victims, but the exactions of most of them are tempered with mercy: thus the collector of old furniture does not necessarily cut himself adrift from pictures, nor does the lover of old arms from bric-a-brac; but the oriental carpet is inexorable and remorseless, and the true carpet lover gives himself to carpets and to carpets only. They are his pictures, his furniture, his bric-a-brac, his all. True, the field of the oriental carpet seeker is an immensely wide one. His horizon extends from Morocco to China, and the period during which the objects of his affections have existed, and existed as they do today, dates back to the days of the Pharaohs; in the palaces of ancient Egypt they were employed as decorations and the priests at Heliopolis used them at religious ceremonies.”

Whether these notes about the ancient Egyptians are well-researched, we can't say. But just a few years later, the same magazine makes it clear that a real connoisseur should and can get to a museum or bookstore to learn more about rugs:

"Not very long ago oriental carpets were bought only as house decorations. It is not much more than a decade since our museums accorded them notice on their own account. Today, however, we have turned over a new leaf. Bode, who may in one word be called the magnet of modern art dealing, has devoted intense labour to carpets and filled with them two rooms in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum at Berlin. Since the transition of our interest in this species of art from art-craft to the actual art museums, the carpet has become a distinguished gentleman in the salons of science. I know of at least half a dozen books already written or in the press which will go into the new problem. The first of these works – a standard work in compass and contents – lies before me: F.R. Martin’s 'History of Oriental Carpets before 1800.'

The article, which appeared in 1908 translated from German, is signed Professor Josef Strzygowski. Pictured here is the Central Asian collection of the Russian pavillion at the 1900 Paris Exhibition, an event that greatly increased Western interest in the rugs of Turkestan.

Today, good taste, a collector's passion, and scholarly interest are all part of our outlook on oriental carpets. And there is still a sense of medieval awe that overwhelms anyone standing before a masterwork of the Mamluke, Ottoman, Safavid, or Mughal courts.

But contemporary writers also express something new, and that is anxiety - with a capital "A" - about something no previous generation had to think about. The anxiety is that today the chance of finding any new, as yet undiscovered, weaving cultures is nil and that, meanwhile, all the known weaving cultures are rapidly modernizing.

This gives rise to worries that come in both mild and potent varieties. The mild version is that carpet collecting has now reached a dead end and the thrill of new discoveries must give way to recycling what we have. The potent version is fear that the growing globalization of the carpet market will eventually drive many weaving cultures to extinction.

Here is the abstract of a scholarly paper presented in 1999 by anthropologist Tom O'Neill of Canada's University of Western Ontario. It describes how classical Tibetan weaving (below left) has turned into modern Tibetan-refugee weaving (below right) in Nepal:

"The popularity of the Tibeto-Nepalese carpet in the European hand-knotted carpet market created a modern industry in peri-urban Kathmandu, Nepal, that established the Tibetan refugee population there as well as a new class of Nepalese entrepreneur. This paper employs Igor Kopytoff's (1986) perspective on the social life of things and Keith Hart's (1982) definition of commoditization to argue that the short career of the Tibeto-Nepalese carpet as an export commodity has been one of increasing homogenization that has transformed the materials, weaving techniques, and meanings of the carpet.Easy access to the lucrative 'middle' markets of Europe has meant that Tibeto-Nepalese carpets are now standardized to compete with other categories of floor coverings, and that the unique hand-knotted quality desired by connoisseurs and collectors is slowly being eliminated."

The article is entitled 'The Lives of the Tibeto-Nepalese Carpet' and appears in the Journal of Material Culture, 1999.

How will writers of future eras view the art of oriental carpets? As the 21st century only just begins, it is far too early to guess. But if the past is any guide, the subject will remain as full of surprises tomorrow as it is today, or was yesterday.

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Related Links:

Edgar Allen Poe: The Philosophy of Furniture

The Burlington Magazine: On Carpets

The Burlington Magazine: Oriental Carpets

Tom O’Neill: The Lives of the Tibeto-Nepalese Carpet

In Afghanistan's Turkmen Rug Belt, It's Globalization vs. Tradition

ANDKHOY, Afghanistan; August 1, 2008 -- Twice a week the men whose wives and daughters weave the traditional red rugs of Central Asia come to this town in northern Afghanistan to sell their work.

The carpet bazaar is a rectangular courtyard with a two-floor gallery of traders’ stalls on every side, and the men approach it with trepidation.

Many of the men have dropped in as onlookers on the previous market day to learn what they can about the going prices. Now, accompanied by friends for support, they file into the courtyard and squat around its perimeter with their bundled rugs.

When the traders walk by to inspect what they have, the bargaining begins. First, the carpet is spread face-down on the dusty ground. The uncut top is of no interest; it is only the back the trader wants to see.

He inspects for knot density and evenness of weave. He folds the edges to see if they meet in the middle. And he looks for evenness of tension by carefully measuring the length and width at various points. And all the time he is checking for flaws.

Then he makes an offer: $75. The seller, who wants $120 won’t hear of it. Slowly the offer creeps up to $85 and onlookers begin to exhort the seller to agree. The trader tries to grab the seller’s hand and pump it to show there is a deal. A third person joins the negotiations, probably an agent of the trader, and pretends to be a fair-minded broker.

But still the seller refuses until, finally, the meeting breaks up. No deal.

The seller will test several more traders before he chooses between accepting what seems to be today’s price or coming back another day. He knows that on Mondays and Thursdays, so long as this is Andkhoy, the traders will be here.

Andkhoy’s bazaar is described in fascinating detail in a report prepared for the World Bank. The authors, Adam Pain and Moharram Ali of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit surveyed the town’s carpet business over the years 2001 to 2003.

Their work offers a look into a world of sellers and buyers that few Westerners ever see as the famous red rugs of Afghanistan begin their journey to the outside world.

The men who come to the market are heads of Turkmen households that produce carpets on an independent basis. These families have the financial means to purchase wool on credit and usually have at least one other source of income such as land or livestock. They are the most successful producers because when they sell their carpet, they keep the full selling price.

How much can these independent weavers earn? The profit depends a great deal on the quality of wool they are able to buy.

If they weave with low-quality wool from Pakistan, Pain and Ali calculate (in 2003) that they will earn about $25 per square meter from a traditional red rug that sells in the United Kingdom for $250 per square meter.

But if they weave what is known locally as a ‘Biljeek,’ that is a rug woven with finer wool imported from Belgium, they can earn $58 dollars per square meter on a red rug that sells retail for $429 per square meter.

Pain and Ali estimate that about 10 to 20 percent of the weavers in the Andkhoy area are independent. The rest work under entirely different arrangements and, in fact, never come to the bazaar to sell at all. Instead, they work under profit sharing or wage-labor contracts.

A minority of the profit-sharing weavers --like the independents -- still produce the Turkmens' traditional repeating ‘gul’ designs or more recent varities of red rugs such as Khal Muhammadi or Mauri. Exporters’ agents provide them the wool and the dimensions and the weavers get 50 percent of the rug’s local market value.

But today the majority of local weavers (the researchers estimate 50 to 70 percent) work under labor contracts and produce carpets that have no local roots at all. Agents give them some $35 per square meter (for a carpet that retails for $549 per square meter) and wool from the Mideast to produce Chobis that have a modified Indo-Persian design.

The Chobis -- which ironically use natural dyes while the ‘traditional’ local designs use chemical dyes - strongly resemble the commercially successful Zieglers produced in northern Persia by Western firms in the early 1900s.

Pain and Ali say that Chobi production, which originated in the Afghan refugee camps around Peshawar, came to Andkhoy as the refugees – both Turkmens and Uzbeks -- returned home.

The contract-labor terms pay as well or better than profit sharing and minimize the weavers’ risk. That makes it attractive to poor weavers even though the agents commonly reduce the final wage payment if they find the slightest flaws.

Now, as carpet production in northern Afghanistan keeps expanding, the number of contracted weavers keeps growing.

Pain and Ali note that there are clear economic benefits as the contract weaving joins sharecropping and agricultural labor as the mainstays of people too poor to own land or livestock.

But the authors also sound a warning.

They observe that the happiest position for artisans is when retail customers recognize their work as the expression of a unique artistic heritage and willingly pay more for it than they do for generic goods.

However, if generic weavings become what Afghanistan is best known for, they say, "there is little hope at present that Afghanistan’s carpets will be able to achieve that position."

(Photos of Andkhoy market from: Alti Bolaq)

(Photos of Turkmen Ersari carpets from: Carpet Collection)

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Related Links:

Understanding Markets in Afghanistan: A case study of carpets and the Andkhoy carpet market, by Adam Pain and Moharram Ali

From Andkhoy to Jeddah

Habibullah Kerimi Making a Life and Rugs in Exile

Barry O’Connell: Turkmen Rugs - Guide To Ersari Rugs and Carpets

Barry O’Connell: Guide to Turkmen Rugs and Carpets, Turkoman Rugs

Barry O’Connell: Guide to Rugs and Carpets of Afghanistan

Emmett Eiland: Afghan Rugs and Carpets - Rugs from Afghanistan

Tribal Rugs: How The 1960s Changed The West’s Taste In Oriental Carpets

PRAGUE, July 18, 2008 – In the mid-1960s and into the mid-1970s, hundreds of thousands of young Europeans and Americans traveled East – to Morocco and Turkey or, much farther, to Iran, Afghanistan, India, and Nepal.

To the East, as in this verse from ‘Marrakesh Express:”

“Take the train from Casablanca going south
Blowing smoke rings from the corners of my mouth
Colored cottons hang in the air
Charming cobras in the square
Striped djellebas we can wear at home …”

The sudden longing for places with strong colors, tribal designs, and mysticism had an enormous influence on Western taste in oriental carpets. But before considering how much, it is time for the story of ‘Mercedes’ Werner.

Werner, his first name, is a retired German antiques dealer who divides his time today between Wurzburg and Prague. But even a few minutes after meeting him, it becomes clear he considers his spiritual home to be Turkey.

It began in the 1960’s, when he flew to Istanbul for a short vacation. He fell in love with the city and quickly realized he would need a car if he wanted to explore the country. So he flew back to Wurzburg for his old Mercedes and then began regularly driving 20 to 24 hours non-stop from Germany to Turkey.

To pay for his trips, he carried back Turkish rugs, artifacts and, because it was so easy to give the Turkish border guards 5 DM, even antiquities. But the story he likes to tell most is not business related. It is about a roadside village near Lake Van, which had nothing to offer except scenery.

Werner stopped so often at this village that he became very attached to it. He exchanged stories with the people at his favorite restaurant, became friends with the owner, and learned all about the local music. Then, for many years, he stopped going there as business took him elsewhere.

One day, when he was already middle-aged, Werner was home watching a documentary about eastern Turkey. Suddenly he heard the same village music he knew so well and there on the screen was the restaurant owner being asked if tourists ever came to such a remote area.

“No,” said the restaurant owner, “they only go to the seaside resorts.” And he added, “It’s not like 30 years ago when people came here just to see our mountains and learn about how we live.”

“What kind of people were those?” the interviewer asked in surprise.

“Well, like Mercedes Werner,” the restaurant owner said.

Werner says that when heard that he broke down in tears. He didn't know he had this affectionate nickname. And he had not realized how much his visits had been something extraordinary not only for himself but for his friends. The next year he returned to the village and revived what he now sees as a very important part of his life.

Interestingly, there were lots of Werners who came out of the adventures of the 1960s and 70s. Dennis Dodds, the head of the ICOC (International Conference on Carpets), says many current rug dealers got their start just that way. The rugs they discovered on their travels did much to shift their generation’s taste toward village and tribal designs and away from the elaborate city rugs favored by their parents.

In Istanbul, the travelers – including Dodds – gathered at the Pudding Shop, where they exchanged information and contacts for trips across Turkey and on to India. The café’s owner was said to be so helpful that he once gave a chair to a customer to sit on for the journey to Kathmandu. That was when all the usual seats in the minibus were full.

Dodds says that because the travelers were on a low budget and keen to get in touch with nature and natural lifestyles, they were attracted by affordable village and tribal pieces rather than by Ottoman, Safavid, or Mughal-derived designs. The geometric patterns of the rugs they brought home to Europe and America fit nicely with the 1960s fashion of Op Art and they soon became the new market standard.

What weavings most owe their success to these years? Probably kilims. They suddenly became hugely popular, in part because they are so boldly graphic – offering just colors and patterns. By contrast, pile carpets add a third dimension - texture - which diminishes the clarity of the design.

The 1960s and 70s are long gone, along with long hair and long, strange trips. But it is interesting to realize that the aesthetic tastes the travelers helped set for rugs are still very current, and probably will remain so until the next great shift in Western pop culture.

(Kilims pictured here are from: Turkish Culture)

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Related Links

Barry O’Connell: Turkish Rugs and Carpets

Barry O’Connell: Guide To Turkish Rug and Carpet Books

The Pudding Shop

Wikipedia: The Asia Overland Hippie Trail

Touring The Hippie Trail Today

YouTube: Afghanistan On The Hippie Trail 1967

YouTube: London To Kathmandu Overland

YouTube: Les Annees Hippies au Maroc (Part 1)

YouTube: Les Annees Hippies au Maroc (Part 2)

Turkish Prayer Rugs And The Gates Of Eternity

ISTANBUL, July 4, 2008 -- Is eternity something artists should illustrate as a physical thing? Or should artists represent it as something abstract and supernatural?

It is a question that every religion approaches differently and on which philosophers disagree.

But it is interesting that Turkish prayer carpets offer both possibilities: realistic and abstract. And perhaps that is one reason for their great appeal.

Turkish prayer carpets became widely familiar in Europe and America during the late 19th century, when Western tourists began traveling to Istanbul in large numbers by the Orient Express and by ship. The travelers helped popularize the rugs as symbols of the exotic and spiritual East at a time when Orientalism was at its height.

As a result, production boomed in towns like Ghiordes, Ladik, and Melas (Milas), and their typical designs became household names in the Western market.

The Anatolian town and village weavers, who adapted and simplified the designs of earlier Ottomon court prayer rugs, were not trying to show what heaven looks like. The purpose of all prayer rugs is only to mark out a space for prayer that is secluded from the mundane.

This is in line with the injunction in the Koran to "pray in a clean place". The first mosque is traditionally said to have been a space drawn in the sand by the Prophet Mohammed, who said "take off your shoes when you enter here. This is holy ground."

But because the weavers had to fill the space set aside for prayer, they had to address an art problem that is shared by all cultures. That is, how to best symbolize the eternal.

The designers of Ghiordes and Konya opted for solid architecture. They depicted the central feature of all prayer rugs – the arch – as resting upon columns. The arch itself symbolizes the focal point in a real mosque, which is the mihrab, or ornamental niche, that marks the wall facing Mecca.

This carpet above is a 19th century piece from Konya in central Anatolia.

But weaving natural-looking “gates to eternity ” -- as some Western experts like to describe prayer rugs -- is just one possibility.

By contrast, the rugs of several of the other great traditional prayer rug centers of Turkey – Kula, Ladik, Melas, and Mudjur -- took an abstract approach.

In these rugs, the mihrab is still the defining feature. But the field of the rug is fluid and appears to change with each glance. Instead of a sense of certainty, it offers the mystery of a curtain which one day may be drawn aside.

The rug shown here is from Ladik, a town in central Anatolia not far from Konya.

Both the realistic and the abstract designs were widely collected in the West. But partly due to export pressure to adapt to Western tastes, the quality of the patterns began to decline with time. They became more and more decorative and less and less certain of their identity.

Some experts say the export pressure was so great it caused workshops to reverse the way the rugs were woven. Instead of starting at the bottom and weaving toward the mihrab, some weavers started at the top. That way, the pile would catch the light best when hung on a wall.

Other experts disagree. They say that individual weavers may have started at the top when they were uncertain of their stocks of dyed wool. Since the mihrab is considered the most important element in any prayer rug, they may have wanted to be sure of completing it first before running out of preferred colors.

Whatever the case, it is certain that by the middle of the 20th century, Turkish prayer rugs had lost favor – both in the West and at home.

In the West, fashions changed and collectors began looking for bolder village and tribal weavings free of – among other things – Western influence. Today, in real terms, the cost of a Ghiordes or Ladik in the West is said to be less than it was at the height of the rugs’ popularity at the turn-of-the-last century.

In Turkey, the end of the Ottomon Empire and the rise of the secular republic equally reduced the prayer rugs’ value as weavings.

Townspeople who once commissioned expensive pieces for the Haj or for their homes, and later bequeathed them to the local mosque, gave up those customs as the population shifted to major cities. Prayer rugs became plainer and simpler, as shown by this recently made Ladik.

But all that may just make the great 19th century prayer rugs of Turkey more interesting for those who still want to collect them. Not only do they offer a creative vision of the spiritual world, they also offer a reminder of how much our own aesthetic world keeps eternally changing.

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Related Links:

Spongobongo: A Guide to Turkish Prayer Rugs

Spongobongo: Notes on Ghiordes Rugs and Carpets

Spongobongo: Guide to Konya Rugs

Spongobong: Guide to Ladik Prayer Rugs

Spongobongo: Guide to Melas Rugs

Old Turkish Carpets: Prayer Carpets

What Do You Mean, “It’s A Prayer Rug?”

New England Rug Society: Prayer Rugs and Related Textiles

Wikipedia: Mihrab

Pierre Loti: When Oriental Carpets Are Not Enough

ROCHEFORT, France; June 20, 2008 -- Many non-French speakers hear of Pierre Loti for the first time when they visit Istanbul

That is partly thanks to the café that bears his name on a hill overlooking the Bosphorus. The veranda and interior are said to have changed little since the French traveler and writer went there at the turn-of-the-last century to smoke the narghile and gaze at his favorite city.

But once one hears of Loti -- the pen-name of French naval captain Julien Viaud (1850-1923) -- it is hard not to be intrigued.

There is the story, for example, of Loti and Sarah Bernhardt. When Loti wanted to meet the famous actress, he had himself rolled up in an oriental rug and delivered to her door by two men dressed in Arab costume. When he rolled out of the carpet, she was so surprised that they quickly became good friends.

And there is his book ‘Aziyadé,’ first published in 1872. It chronicles the doomed love affair of a young British officer, named Loti, and a Circassian concubine of a Turkish merchant in Salonica. The two flee to Istanbul until finally they are separated by the pulls of their different worlds.

"I swear to you, Aziyadé," Loti tells her, "I would give up everything with no regrets, my position, my name, my country. As for my friends, I have none and I don’t care. But you see, I do have an aged mother."

How much of the tale is autobiography, how much fiction, no-one knows. But Loti maintained for the rest of his life that his one true love was Aziyadé and that she died of heartbreak before they could meet again.

Loti was perhaps the last great French writer of Romanticism and – sailing with the French fleet – took the genre to settings it had never seen before.

His novels and travelogues explore the Ottomon Empire, Japan (his book 'Madame Chrysanthemum' is the forerunner of Madame Butterfly), Polynesia, Morocco, Iran, China, Egypt and Iceland. What his stories had in common is a longing for the exotic, a world-weariness with European bourgeois life, and immense appeal for bourgeois European readers.

But Loti, who was a member of the Academie Francaise and both admired and ridiculed in his day, reserves his greatest surprise for visitors to his rather ordinary looking home in Rochefort, on France’s Atlantic coast.

From his voyages, he brought home immense quantities of momentos. Gradually, they began to overfill his ancestral home until, as he grew richer, he bought the neighboring house and connected it to his own.

Then, he began refashioning the interior into a whole series of rooms that conjured up the exotic world of his books and, he said, inspired him to write more.

The most amazing room is a full, operetta-stage replica of a mosque. To construct it he purchased a fire-damaged mosque in Damascus that was about to be pulled down and had it shipped in its entirety to France accompanied by a team of Syrian masons.


The mosque is complete down to a Turkish multi-niche prayer rug, or Saff, and is adorned with a giant gravestone from an Istanbul cemetery. Loti said it was the stele from Aziyadé’s grave site.

By his own account, he spent hours in these rooms – which also include a fully furnished Turkish salon -- dreaming of lost love.

“I spend a lot of time at home, they are the hours of calm in my life, and smoking my narghile I dream of Istanbul and the lovely limpid green eyes of my dear sweet Aziyadé.”

At the same time, Loti loved to give parties and he dressed himself and his servants for the occasion – in Arab or Turkish robes.

Was Loti mildly eccentric? That would be an insulting understatement. He was massively and joyously, but also wistfully, out of step with his rapidly modernizing and Euro-centric world.

During his travels in Morocco, he wrote ecstatically of places that Western influence had yet to reach and, at the same time, described what he knew was doomed to disappear. The clarity, detail, and color of his writing won the admiration of painters such as Matisse and writers including Marcel Proust.

Today, a quick browse through the Internet shows Loti available mostly only in French and Turkish and long out of print in English. But his house – now a museum – is an open invitation to follow him home and, from there, still further home to the farthest corners of the East.

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Related Links:

Wikipedia: Pierre Loti

‘The Orient of Pierre Loti’ – Saudi Aramco World

‘Phantoms of the Orient’ - An Exhibition of Loti’s Life and Work – Al-Ahram Weeky

'Armchair Travels with Pierre Loti' - Al-Ahram Weekly

Pierre Loti Museum, Rochefort

Extracts from first chapters of ‘Aziyadé’ (French)

‘Pierre Loti – Turcophile’ (French)

Arabesque Mamluk Carpets Mix Perfect Art With Perfect Mystery

CAIRO, June 6, 2008 -- Are Mamluk carpets the most mysterious rugs of all?

There are many reasons to think so.

The rugs were created during the reign of the Mamluk sultans in Cairo from 1250 to 1517 at a time when medieval Islamic art was at its pinnacle in Egypt.

And it is clear that the sultans spared no expense -- from the painstaking weaving of the rugs’ mosaic-like designs to their saturated colors and their superb wool.

But no-one is sure exactly where these masterpiece workshop rugs were woven. Some carpets experts say Egypt, some Spain, some Turkey.

One of the reasons for considering so many places is that the rugs appeared under the Mamluks as if out of thin air. Elisabeth Greenberg observes in her article ‘Jewelled Carpets: Treasures of the Mamluk Empire’ that “prior to these rugs there was no pile-rug weaving tradition in Egypt.”

Examining the rugs for clues just offers more riddles. Their lustrous wool is unlike that used in other Egyptian textiles of the time, but doesn’t clearly come from somewhere else. The wool is spun clockwise, when most carpet wools are spun counterclockwise. And, the red dye is obtained from lac – an Indian insect – at a time when master weavers in Turkey and Iran were using entirely different pigments.

That leaves only the carpets’ designs as a guide. These, at least, are consistent with other artworks created under the Mamluks. Thus many experts conclude that the carpets must have been woven in Cairo under the close supervision of the Mamluk court.

As to who the Mamluks were, their story is no less extraordinary. Although they ruled Egypt and Syria, they originally came to the Mideast as slave-solders from Central Asia and the Caucasus. Arab rulers purchased or recruited them as youths from Turkic, Mongol, and Circassian tribes in Central Asia and trained them as elite palace troops.

But the Mamluks revolted and seized power for themselves. And still more surprisingly -- despite a warrior ethos so competitive that, on the average, the Mamluks killed or removed their own leaders every five years – they were huge patrons of art.

When the Mamluk empire fell to the Ottomons in 1517, their distinctive carpets disappeared with them. Today, only one remains in Cairo and the rest of the some 100 or so pieces that survive are the prizes of a handful of top world museums. The images above are of a rug in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Museums rarely display their centuries-old Mamluks for fear they will be damaged by too much exposure to light. But when the rugs are shown, they always amaze viewers -- just as their designers intended.

The Mamluk’s complex Arabesque patterns evoke the harmony and infinity of the divine. Astonishingly, they do so with patterns that appear both perfectly mathematical and perfectly mystical at the same time. And the carpets literally shimmer before the eyes, making a them appear as much like a vision of a rug as a reality.

Small surprise, then, that some carpet producers today are interested in trying to recreate the Mamluks in whole or part.

Woven Legends, a Philadephia-based company, has for several years worked with Turkish weavers to try to duplicate some of the Mamluk Rugs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The results – Woven Legends’ ‘Sardis’ line (right) – have won critical acclaim. The retail price is $ 968 per square meter and the rugs come in a variety of sizes and patterns.

The original Mamluk weavers not only produced the complex geometric medallion carpets they are most famous for but also full-field rugs as well.

The full-field designs are best exemplified by the so-called para-mamluks produced in Damascus. The rugs are often referred to ‘chessboard’ carpets in Europe and are highly coveted collectors’ items.

This one (left) is from the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C.

Today, the chessboard designs, too, are inspiring some carpet producers to explore new possibilities.

This rug is produced by Afghan weavers, who are among the most innovative designers for the popular market today.


Simply called 'Mamluk' (right), it is offered by Nomad Rugs of San Francisco and has an Arabesque field with cartouche borders – both staples of Mamluk design.

At a price of $ 488 per square meter, it can only hint at the charms of more complex chessboard patterns.

But that may be just where many first-time rug explorers would want to begin.

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Related Links:

Barry O'Connel: Guide To Mamluk Art

Jewelled Carpets : Treasures of the Mamluk Empire, by Elisabeth Greenberg

Mamluk Carpets - Legacy of the Conquering Nomads, by Roy Chatalbash

Art of the Mamluks – Saudi Aramco World, Nov/Dec 1981

History of Mamluks – The Battle of ‘Ain Jalut

Woven Legends

Nomad Rugs of San Francisco