The Floral Medallion Revolution and Ottoman Court Carpets

ISTANBUL, October 17, 2009 – Do carpet designs change with the fortunes of war?

It may not seem likely, but many historians have long attributed the changes that occurred in the design of Ottoman carpets in the 16th century to the battle of Chaldiran.

That battle was fought on a hot August day in 1514 and is famous for several reasons.

It marked the Ottoman halt of the vigorously expanding Safavid Empire under that empire’s founder, Ismail.

And it marked the first time that a Muslim army massively deployed artillery and musketry in the field. The Ottoman’s use of large-scale firepower devastated Ismail’s troops, who still relied upon the time-honored force of archers on horseback.

Before the battle, the two emperors, both of whom were Turkic speaking, exchanged belligerent letters daring each other to fight. In one, the previously undefeated Shah Ismail, who had already expanded from his base in Tabriz to conquer Persia, wrote:

Mən pirimi hak bilirəm,
Yoluna qurban oluram,
Dün dogdum bugün ölürəm,
Ölən gəlsin istə meydan.

I know the Truth as my supreme guide,
I would sacrifice myself in his way,
I was born yesterday, I will die today,
Come, whoever would die, here is the arena.

But how badly Ismail was defeated can be judged from the fact that he himself was wounded and almost seized and his harem with two of his wives was captured in the mayhem. After the defeat, which established the boundary between Turkey and Iran as it remains today, Shah Ismail never personally led his army into battle again.

Here is a photo of the memorial marking the battle-site near the Turkish border in northwestern Iran.

The victorious Ottoman sultan, Selim I, later made this comment about the confrontation: “A carpet is large enough to accommodate two sufis, but the world is not large enough for two Kings.”

Perhaps more directly related to rugs, the battle also led to the Ottoman’s brief occupation of Tabriz, the then-capital of the Safavids.

The city was a major weaving center for the new Safavid style of floral medallion carpets and, when the Ottomans withdrew several weeks later, they allegedly took top artisans from the city back to Istanbul with them.

This has long been seen by rug historians as one convincing way to explain why, around this time, carpets woven for the Ottoman court suddenly moved from being geometric (see: Renaissance European Painters’ Passion For Turkish Geometric Rugs) to a new floral medallion style of their own.

Here is a picture of one of the new Ottoman court medallion rugs, from around the 16th century.

Rug experts Murray L. Eiland and Murray Eiland III describe the new Ottomon court rugs this way in their book ‘Oriental Carpets’ (2005):

“Unlike other Turkish rugs these are extremely finely woven with a design vocabulary – the so called “saz” style that includes curvilinear medallions, palmettes, scrolling vines, and elaborate lancet-shaped leaves.”

The authors add, “The sudden appearance of such lushly naturalistic vegetation within a tradition that had previously produced coarser rugs in geometric designs has raised many questions, particularly since these (new) rugs are woven with the asymmetrical knot.”

The Eilands suggest the temporary Ottoman capture of Tabriz could be one explanation. They also suggest that the Ottoman’s capture of Cairo three years later, this time by using massive firepower against the Mamlukes, could equally be a factor.

Both Safavid and Cairene rugs were asymmetrically knotted – a knotting system which allows weaving of greater detail than does the traditional Turkish symmetric knot.

Still, if the Ottoman court carpets moved to a floral medallion style, they did not duplicate Safavid designs. They are very much their own variation on the theme.

Safavid carpets had a single large medallion that appeared to be floating like a picture in a frame created by four quarter-sized corner medallions.

But the Ottoman court carpets often had not one medallion but several columns of medallions.

The central medallion is still the focus, but identical, partial medallions float above and below it. Other, non-identical partial medallions, float beside it. The result is the impression that the medallions go on forever, in an endlessly repeating pattern extending beyond the rug.

This sense of an endlessly repeating pattern was heightened by the fact that these rugs were huge compared to other Ottoman rugs, often reaching a length of five to seven meters. They were palace carpets, conceived by professional artists and woven on huge looms by master craftsmen in court workshops in Istanbul or in the commercial center of Usak (Ushak, Oushak) in western Anatolia.

The differences between Ottoman and Safavid floral medallion rugs make some researchers wonder whether the Ottoman design revolution can really be explained merely as the result of the fortunes of war.

Another possibility now gaining ground is that the Ottoman and Safavid floral medallion carpet styles originated quite independently and more or less simultaneously as the result of trends in the shared artistic culture of the region.

Here is an Ottoman miniature painting from 1570, showing a medallion rug. It is from the illustrated book, the Sehname-i Selim Han, that celebrates the achievements of Sultan Selim, the victor at Chaldiran.

The argument for a shared regional culture, rather than Anatolia’s borrowing of the floral rug style from Safavid Persia, is based on some interesting bits of recent research.

For many years researchers assumed that the earliest surviving medallion carpets from the Safavid Empire pre-dated the medallion carpets of the Ottomans.

But art expert Julian Raby argues that the ovid Ottoman carpet medallions closely resemble the medallions tooled in leather on the covers of Ottoman manuscripts that date from the 1460s. That’s earlier than the Safavid rugs.

Here is an Ottoman bookbinding from the early 1500s for comparison. The resemblance to the Ottoman court carpet is especially close in the drawing of the medallions’ scrolling and interlocking floral forms.

Raby puts his argument this way: "The Ottoman carpet revolution was comparable to the change being wrought at the same period by Timurid designers. However ... the Timurids resorted to a different compositional formula in freeing their carpet designs from the geometric traditions. Their is therefore no need to argue a direct Timurid influence on Medallion Usaks. There development should be seen not in the context of a specific carpet influence but of a general change in Ottoman decorative arts." ("Court and Export: The Usak Carpets" by Julian Raby, Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies II, 1986)

If the Ottoman medallion carpets have their origins in the overall development of Turkish art in the late 15th century, that would make for an interesting parallel with the way Safavid carpets are closely related to the overall development of Timurid art of the late 15th century.

But if the floral revolutions on both sides of the Ottoman-Persian border were indeed two manifestations of a single “international style,” what would that say about the way art evolves? The message in this case, happily, would be that art is the world of shared ideas and inspirations, not of kings and wars.

The Ottoman court carpets came in two main variants: those with ovid medallions and those with star-shaped medallions. It is not known which style predates the other. Here is a Star Usak from the 16th century.

Ottoman court carpets continued to be woven for many centuries and their complexity was such that one might expect, incorrectly, that they would have a minimal impact on Turkish popular weaving. After all, their giant formats were much too big to fit ordinary looms and Turkish popular weaving, in any case, has always preferred geometric designs.

But, in fact, the court carpets had a massive influence. As textile expert Walter B. Denny notes in his book ‘The Classical Tradition in Anatolian Carpets’ (2002), “the new designs diffused into the lexicon of the town and village industries and adaptations of the court medallion rugs from Usak and elsewhere soon appeared.”

Town and village weavers adopted the floral designs by making them more geometric and that created a whole vocabulary of new designs that still influence Turkish weaving today.

Here is just one example: a three medallion carpet from Usak in the 16th century.

This process of highly complex, curvilinear court designs being re-interpreted into geometric patterns by town and village weavers was not limited to medallion rugs.

A still greater influence was exerted by Ottoman court prayer rugs upon popular prayer rug designs.

The “geometrization” of highly curvilinear court prayer rugs by village and town weavers would create some of Turkey’s most successful commercial carpet designs and set off a European passion for Turkish prayer rugs in the 19th century.

But how that happened is the subject of another story.

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The Circassians: Myths, Truths, And Oriental Carpets

LONDON, October 2, 2009 – When Europeans discovered Caucasian rugs in the 19th century, they often assumed they were woven by a once-famous people who today are barely remembered.

Those people are the Circassians. At the time, their domain was the Northwest Caucasus along the Black Sea (in modern Russia) and for a number of reasons they captivated the West’s imagination.

And so, even though the Circassians were not great rug weavers themselves, many rugs woven by other peoples in the Caucasus were attributed to them.

Rug experts Murray L. Eiland, Jr and Murray Eiland III write in their book ‘Oriental Carpets’ (2005) that “much has been written in old rug books” about the Tcherkess, the Turkish term for the Circassians.

“During the early 20th C, it was common to label many Kazak or Karabagh rugs as Tcherkess work, and even now one will occasionally run across a “sunburst” Karabagh with that label. However, the Tcherkess are not from the area that produced Kazak and Karabagh carpets, although they have been associated with the production of several types of kilim.”

What was it about the Circassians that once made them so much a part of Europe’s image of the Caucasus? And why are they almost totally forgotten today?

The story begins far back in history, probably with the Circassian’s own reputation as fierce warriors. In times gone by, there was much money to be made marketing able fighters to imperial armies and the Circassians developed an internationally famous brand-name.

Circassian and other youths from the Black Sea region and Central Asia were both purchased and recruited by Arab rulers as “Mamlukes,” or slave-troops. When the Mamlukes later usurped Egypt and Syria for themselves, several of their sultans were Circassians. The Circassian sultans, who reigned from 1422 to 1517, presided over the Mamluke empire during one of its highest points of power and artistic achievement.

Hundreds of years later, the Circassians continued to find ready employment as fighters in the Ottoman and Persian empires and their brand-name remained as strong as ever. It was powerful enough to attract the attention of Orientalist painters, who fanned out from Europe in the 19th century to rediscover the East both as it was and as the West imagined it to be.

One of those painters was William Allan, born in 1782, who apprenticed as a carriage painter but later studied fine arts at the Royal Academy of Edinburgh. Initially unsuccessful in the art world of London, he opted for travel instead. And for nine years, he journeyed deep into the Russian and Turkish empires.

He sketched what he saw and after he returned painted scenes such as these. It is titled “Circassian Chief Preparing his Stallion,” painted much later in the painter’s life, in 1843.

There is no doubt that Allan painted what he saw – his own collections of artifacts that he picked up during his travels attested to that.

And there is no doubt he was particularly passionate about the Circassians and their remote, mountainous homeland.

When, after his return to London in 1814, the London art world continued to reject him, he told friends he would retire to Circassia forever.

At times, Allan donned Circassian armor himself. Here he is in Circassian costume in 1815, shortly after returning from his travels.

Eventually, Allan’s friends persuaded him to give up Orientalism and focus on painting scenes from Scottish and English literature and history instead. He illustrated scenes from the novels of Sir Walter Scott, the creator of Ivanhoe. And, in the end, he was knighted, as Sir William Allan, before he died in 1850.

But if Allen had little success with his paintings of Circassians – he also painted works like “The Sale of Circassian Captives to a Turkish Bashaw (Pasha)” in 1816 -- others had more. And that success came as European artists traveling in the East portrayed Circassians in a quite different role: this time as women in Turkish harems.

The new fascination was with Circassians -- who are fair-skinned – as white sex slaves and concubines kept by Eastern masters.

This painting featuring likely Circassian women is “Choosing the Favorite,” by Giulio Rosati (1858 to 1917).

The fascination was frankly erotic and commercial and it connected with images that dated back in Europe to at least as far as Voltaire, a century earlier.

Here is what Voltaire wrote about Circassian women in 1734, in his “Letters on the English:”

"The Circassians are poor, and their daughters are beautiful, and indeed it is in them they chiefly trade. They furnish with those beauties the seraglios of the Turkish Sultan, of the Persian Sophy, and of all of those who are wealthy enough to purchase and maintain such precious merchandise. These maidens are very honorably and virtuously instructed how to fondle and caress men; are taught dances of a very polite and effeminate kind; and how to heighten by the most voluptuous artifices the pleasures of their disdainful masters for whom they are designed."

The idea of female Circassian beauty got a further boost in the early 19th century as early European physiologists and anthropologists took on the task of classifying humans.

The most influential was the German Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752 to1840), who taught comparative anatomy at the University of Göttingen. He used the school’s collection of skulls from around the world to divide the human species into races.

Blumenbach came up with five races and had to designate names for them. He chose the word “Caucasian” to denominate the white race, apparently with the view that the region’s inhabitants were uncommonly attractive and thus were archetypes for his grouping. The world Caucasian later passed into English as a synonym for white.

All this helped to create a brand-name for Circassian women as beauties that became easily as well-known as the earlier brand-name for Circassian men as warriors.

One result in England was several beauty and health products purporting to be from Circassia. Here is an advertisement for "Circassian hair dye" in the 1840s which promises “a rich dark lustrous effect.”

What the Circassians themselves thought of their market image in Europe is not recorded. And that may be because, throughout this period, they were busy fighting for their lives in the northwest Caucasus.

The threat was the Russian Empire’s moving south in the 18th and 19th centuries. In much of the Caucasus, Moscow’s aim was limited to sovereignty over the region. But in the northwest Caucasus, along the Black Sea, the drive for land came from Russian settlers, creating a situation not unlike that of the American West.

The Circassians fought against Russian conquest for over a century, from 1763 to 1864 – longer than any other people of the Caucasus. But the end was inevitable. Their final defeat in the 1860s led to massacre and forced deportation, mainly across the Black Sea to Turkey, during which a large proportion of them perished.

Here is a photo of a Circassian fighter in the Russian-Circassian wars by an unknown artist.

One Circassian leader described his people’s defeat this way in a conversation with the English writer, Frederick Burnaby (1842 - 1885), who traveled through Turkey around the time:

"We once thought that England was going to help us to drive the Russians out of our country. However, you did not come; they outnumbered us, and they had artillery opposed to our flint guns. What could we do? We resisted as long as possible, and then, sooner than be slaves, came here."

Burnaby describes the speaker, Osman Bey, as “the chief of a large band which had emigrated from the Caucasus a few years previous. He was dressed in the Circassian style, with a sheepskin coat, tightly buckled round his waist, embroidered leather trousers and high boots; a black Astrakhan cap surmounted his bronzed features.”

This final view of the Circassians, which appears in Burnaby’s book “On Horseback through Asia Minor,” was not as fascinating as the previous images of them had been. With time, the Circassians slipped out of the West’s memory.

Today, only a few hundred thousand Circassians remain in the Caucasus while the majority are scattered over the globe, particularly through Anatolia and the Levant.

For decades, carpet books were one of the last refuges where memories of the Circassians remained alive. The mention of them is still there, but now only to correct the record on Caucasian weavers.

(Photos from top to bottom: “Veiled Circassian Beauty,” by Jean-Leon Jerome, 1876; “Conference of Circassian Princes, G. Gagarin, 1839-40; “Circassian Chief Preparing his Stallion,” William Allan, 1843; William Allan in Circassian costume, 1815; Choosing the Favorite,” Giulio Rosati, 19th C; Portrait of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach; Advertisement “Circassian Hair Dye,” 19th C; “Circassian Fighter” 19th C.)

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Europe’s 19th-Century Discovery Of Caucasian Carpets

TBILISI, Sept. 19, 2009 -- In the 19th century, the West discovered one of the world’s great mother lodes of carpets: the Caucasus.

It was a late discovery as far as Caucasian carpets themselves were concerned. They had been there for millennia and debate rages today over whether some of them appear in Renaissance paintings.

But for home-owners of the mid 1800s – when western interest in carpets as furnishings was at its height – Caucasian carpets were a discovery not unlike finding a new planet.

What made the discovery so extraordinary was both the immense variety of Caucasian carpets and the fact that, previously, the region had been seemed so remote to most Europeans that it was well off their mental map.

It was not that people did not know how to locate the Caucasus -- the mountainous land between the Black and Caspian Seas that is home to Christian Armenians and Georgians, Muslim Azeris and many other peoples.

It was just that over the preceding centuries the region had become exclusively the backyard of two great Eastern powers.

The Caucasus was fought over by the Ottoman Turks and Safavid Persia throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. And it was only the fact that local Christian nobles and Muslim emirs managed to retain some independence while swearing allegiance to their powerful neighbors that they avoided being swallowed by them.

In distant Europe, that meant most people thought of the Caucasus in terms of Turkey and Persia, without realizing the region had its own unique artistic traditions.

But by the 18th century, things began changing dramatically.

Russia was moving south and, by the mid 19th century, had annexed the entire region. And suddenly, the Caucasus was not part of the East but part of the world’s biggest European empire.

The carpets that began flowing west via Russia were Kubas and Shirvans, from cities of the same names near the Caspian Sea, in present-day northeast Azerbaijan. This is a Shirvan from the end of the 19th century.

Here is an antique Shirvan carpet. The carpet is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

The carpets caused a sensation because their finely drawn ornamental features perfectly matched Europeans’ decorating tastes at that time.

To many Europeans, they appeared to be a welcome new variety of Persian carpets, which had similar high-knot densities and delicate ornamentation. Persian carpets were already so popular that European importers for some time had been investing in looms in northwestern Persia to try to satisfy Western demand.

But, in fact, the Caucasian carpets had a totally distinct weaving tradition behind them. And that tradition – of which Europeans were now just seeing the tip of the iceberg – contained a variety of styles that was nothing short of incredible given the relatively small size of the Caucasus region.

How wide is the range of Caucasian designs? Here is a Kazak rug from several hundred kilometers west of the Caspian, in an area roughly where the borders of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan meet today. Instead of ornamentation, its emphasis is on geometry and graphic design.

The boldness of the Kazaks' patterns and colors did not conform to the mainstream decorating tastes of the 19th century, and there was originally little European interest in them. But a hundred years later, when Western rug tastes shifted from decorative to abstract designs in the 1960s and 70s, collectors would rediscover them with a passion.

Where does the huge variety in Caucasian carpets come from?

The answer is in the region’s incredibly dense mix of ethnicities, cultures, and religions. Some of its peoples long pre-date the earliest recorded history, while others arrived later in wave after wave of invaders.

The constant waves of new invasions might have leveled the pre-existing cultures in a region less mountainous than the Caucasus. But the Caucasus chain is the highest in Eurasia apart from Himalayas, and is honeycombed with hidden and isolated valleys that serve as refuges.

Here is a photo of a small Georgian village today that gives some idea of the terrain.

Still, if hidden valleys suggest that groups could be so insulated that their culture existed separately from others, this was never the case in the Caucasus anymore than in the Alps.

Instead, overlying the individual cultures, a shared regional culture developed across the mountains. And in carpet weaving, the shared culture became so strong it often was impossible to know by which people a specific carpet was made.

In the Transcaucasus – the area on the southern slopes of the Caucasus mountain chain -- the principal population groups are Azeri, Georgian, Armenian, Kurdish, and Persian-speaking Talish.

Caucasian carpet expert Zdenka Klimtova writes in her 2006 book ‘Caucasian Rugs’ that all of these peoples in the 1800s and early 1900s were involved to a greater or lesser extent in weaving rugs and kilims.

The Azris, Kurds, and Talish wove both for home and commercial use. Klimtova notes that "most of the commercially produced rugs are assumed to have been created in the homes of Muslim Azeri Turks, who constitute the majority population of today's Azerbaijan."

Here is a photo, circa 1910, of a master weavers’ studio in the Kuba district, in present-day Azerbaijan.

By contrast, Kilmtova says, the Georgian and Armenian women wove almost exclusively for home use, with the Geogians weaving almost exclusively kilims.

This picture is of an Armenian woman surrounded by textiles in the late 19th century.

In the North Caucasus – on the northern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains -- there are still more population groups, too many to list. Among them, the peoples of present-day Daghestan were and are the best-known weavers.

What all the Caucasian weavers shared in common was a preference for bold colors and a love of abstractions rich in symbolism.

Their use of abstractions to represent both plants and animals is something that distinguishes their work from both the Turkish and Persian weaving traditions.

Whereas Turkish weavers will sometimes depict carnations, tulips or apple blossoms faithfully enough that they can be recognized as real plants, the abstractions on Caucasian rugs bear no relations to specific flowers.

And whereas Persian carpets often feature fully recognizable lions or fairy-tale beasts, the animals that appear in Caucasus carpets are only zoomorphic shapes.

In fact, the Caucasian weavers’ abstractions of animals are so complete, that zoomorphic forms even can appear on Muslim prayer rugs, a thing never seen in other Islamic areas.

The weaving style of this mountainous region has still other striking characteristics, particularly a love of sharp contrasts.

Richard E. Wright and John T. Wertime describe it well in their book ‘Caucasian Carpets and Covers’ (1995):

“Another major quality is contrast, created in numerous ways: the juxtaposition of certain colors (for example blue and yellow), the use of white (both as highlight and background), and abrupt changes in scale, that is, substantial size differences between adjacent motifs. The heart of Caucasian art is contrast in color and form, linked to brilliance of color.”

The origins of this artistic tradition are lost in time, but it is not hard to imagine they come from living in the mountains themselves, with their strong contrasts of altitude, light, and nature.

As Wright and Wertime put it, “Villagers and nomads of all ethnic origins shared a common world; they drew from the same design reservoir and portrayed the world as they saw it.”

This picture is of a Georgian woman standing upon a kilim. The picture was taken by the Russian traveler and photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii at the turn-of-the-last-century.

The Western traders of 19th century who first brought Caucasian carpets into department stores in London, Paris, New York and elsewhere did not even try to distinguish between the multiple designs of the carpets or the many peoples of the Caucasus who wove them.

They simply gave all eastern Caucasian carpets a common brand name: “Daghestans.”

That was a nothing more than the name of one region where the importers knew many Caucasian carpets could be purchased. Specifically, the purchase point was the ancient walled port city of Derbent, in Daghestan, on the Caspian Sea. It was a prominent export station for goods of all kinds from the Caucasus northward to Russia.

But, in fact, the carpets sold in Derbent came from a much wider region, including Kuba, the biggest commercial weaving center in the Caucasus at the time.

Still, the traders’ practice of giving Caucasian carpets all-encompassing generic names that lumped together dozens of styles continued for many years.

Another brand name, used as late as 1900, was “Genje.” It, too, is just the name of a trading center, now called Ganja, in western Azerbaijan. The bazaar of the town, photographed circa 1910-11 is shown here.

John Kimberly Mumford, a rug expert writing in 1900, described the use of “Genje” as a brand name this way:

“In Constantinople, as in the American market, miscellaneous bales of rugs, all measuring between three and five feet in width, and six and eight feet in length, are jobbed under the name of Ghenghis, or, as the bills of lading have it, ‘Guendje.’ They are made up of the odds and ends of Shirvan, Karabaghs, Mosul and other secondary fabrics of the Caucasian class which usually come from Elizavetpol, the old Armeno-Persian name for which was Gandja.” (Quoted in Ralph Kaffel’s 1998 book ‘Caucasian Prayer Rugs.’)

Such use of fanciful brand names went on for decades because the European importers themselves rarely traveled to the region. They even more rarely had any direct contact with the weavers, who often were in remote villages.

Nevertheless, with time, the Western traders eventually did become familiar with the nomenclature used by local rug merchants. And that became the basis for the European market's beginning to distinguish between the Caucasian rugs' many styles and origins.

The local rug merchants whose terms Western traders eventually adopted were located in Tiflis (today Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia), which was a major collection point for Caucasus carpets moving west through Russia’s Black Sea ports.

Here is a photo of rug shop in Tiflis at the turn-of-the-last-century.

The Tiflis dealers divided the carpets of the Transcaucasus – the source of the vast majority of exported carpets -- into three broad categories.

Western region: Kazak and Ganja rugs with bold geometric patterns, thick wool, and high piles.

Eastern region: Kuba, Baku, and Shirvan rugs with minute motifs, fine wool, and low piles.

Southern region: Karabagh, Moghan and Talish rugs.

There was an underlying genius to the system, because these categories to some extent mirror the different climates of the Transcaucasus region.

The west has a harsh climate where thick carpets are desirable for insulation from the cold ground. The thick yarn and long piles needed for that, in turn, allow only the weaving of large and rectilinear geometric motifs.

The east has milder climate, particularly along the Caspian Sea, allowing carpets to be more decorative. The weavers could use thinner yarn, and that allows a higher knot density and more intricate designs.

And the system has another bit of genius, because it implicitly recognizes the often subtle influences of neighboring cultures upon the designs.

The southwest weavings, with their powerful geometry echo, to a greater or lesser degree, the distinctly geometric patterns of Ottoman rugs dating from the 15th and 16th C in neighboring Anatolia. An example is the Kazak Karachop design, shown here, which is reminiscent of Large Pattern Holbein carpets.

By contrast, the northeast weavings with their detailed ornamentation show the influence of Tabriz, the great weaving capital of the Azeri Turk area of northwest Persia.

That same ornamental influence can be seen in the weavings of Karabagh, in the south. There, where rugs were woven by Armenians, Azeris, and Kurds, the designs are more ornate, frequently have floral motifs, and are more decorative than in other parts of the Caucasus. The picture below is an example.

But if the Tiflis merchants’ nomenclature gave a good framework for identifying the large categories, and even many sub-styles, of Caucasian weaving, it still was filled with large groupings of rugs under single place names that tell little about who wove what and when. Sorting out those details is the task of modern researchers and it remains an imposing one.

It is fascinating to think how many millennia of mountain life stand behind the designs and for how long – despite so many conquests and upheavals in the region – the weaving tradition remained distinctly its own.

In fact, the biggest challenge to the tradition did not come until the 19th century, just as Europe was discovering Caucasian carpets and beginning to understand their uniqueness.

The challenge was from Russia, the region’s third major neighboring power after Turkey and Iran and a country which, until then, had exerted almost no influence upon the region’s culture at all.

The occupation of the Caucasus by imperial Russia and subsequent life under the Soviet Union would drive the Caucasus’ carpet culture close to extinction. But how that happened is another story. (For more read: Russia And The History Of Caucasian Carpets.)

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Russia And The History Of Caucasian Carpets

MOSCOW, September 5, 2009 -- The only western nation ever to incorporate a major rug producing region of the east within its borders is Russia.

In fact, Russia incorporated two: the Caucasus and Central Asia. And the experience had not only a dramatic effect on the international rug market and Russian culture but a nearly fatal effect on the carpet producing cultures themselves.

The first region to be incorporated was the Caucasus.

The photo at the top of the page is a detail from an antique Shirvan carpet from the Caucasus. The carpet is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

In the 1700s, the Russian Empire began moving into the Caucasus and by 1830, after wars with Turkey and Iran, it was in control of ‘Transcaucasia’ -- the area on the other side of the Caucasus mountain chain from Russia (today's Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia).

The conquest of the North Caucasus -- directly bordering Russia proper and including Chechnya and Daghestan -- took considerably longer. It involved continual battles and suppressions known in Russia as the Caucasian Wars, which lasted from 1817 to 1864. Unlike in Transcaucasia, it also involved the mass expulsion of peoples – hundreds of thousands of Circassians – to Turkey to clear the way for Russian settlement.

By a strange coincidence of history, Russia’s move into this ancient and mountainous region, with its myriad cultures, happened at a time when Romanticism was at its height in Europe. So, despite the grim realities of subjugating fiercely independent peoples, the experience set off a wave of “Orientalist” Romanticism in Russia not unlike that epitomized by Byron in Britain.

What did Russian “Orientalism” look like?

A good summary is provided by Russian researcher Oleg Semenov in an article entitled “Oriental Carpets and Russian Interiors in the 19th Century” ('Oriental Carpet & Textile Studies,' Part 1, 1987).

He notes that “to Russians, the Caucasus was a mysterious country, the symbol of a free and natural life, dear to the young and romantic. One recalls the heroes of Pushkin, Lermontov, or even of Tolstoy’s 'Cossacks.'”

The new fascination with the east could be seen in everything from literature to interior decorating. The Caucasus offered a new, larger-than-life stage for young Russians and they seized the opportunity to break with the restrained fashion of their parents – Classicism – and idealize spontaneity, instead.

At home, the French Classicist style of spacious interiors with highly polished floors, symmetrically arranged furniture, and European Savonnerie carpets, was out. The new look, making heavy use of the Caucasian carpets and other art objects flowing back as war booty, was restive, tousled, and exuberant.

“Now the oriental carpet draped the wall or served to display weapons,” writes Semonov.

“Often there was a special divan, smoking room or a bathroom in the men’s part of the house, in which all furnishings were oriental in style. Here it was possible to hang a large carpet on the walls, and to use one to cover a wide ‘Turkish’ divan. Caucasian weapons, hookahs, chibouks (wooden pipes), brass jugs, and low tables with engraved trays embellished the furnishings. The international character of Classicism gave way to a choice of items which created a stylistically solid ‘Oriental’ image for a specific room.”

The displays of carpets and weapons from the Caucasus went along with a cult of gallantry that idealized the individual bravery of Eastern warriors in battle compared to the already ruthlessly efficient organization of Western armies. The cult itself was a holdover from the Napoleonic wars, when officers still sought to distinguish themselves as a warrior class from the growing use of masses of conscripts that marks the beginning of modern warfare.

The model of romantic gallantry, along with the knowledge that it was doomed in the modern age, was exemplified by the book 'A Hero of Our Time' in 1839 by Mikhail Lermontov (shown here).

The hero of the story, a duelist and an immoralist was, in fact, an anti-hero in the full sense of the word who outraged the literary critics of the day. But he was Byronic in his fierce individualism, and he saved his contempt not for the mountain warriors, whom he fought but admired, but for modern society around him. (Lermontov himself, dubbed the “poet of the Caucasus,’ was killed in a duel shortly after his only novel was published. He was 27.)

All this may help explain how the carpets and other material culture of the Caucasus could come into Russian homes on equal terms with Western furnishings even as the people who made them were being subjugated.

This 1894 picture of “Horsemen of the Caucasus” is by Russian artist Franz Alekseyevich Roubaud (1856 - 1928), who was famous for panoramic paintings.

Carpets from the Caucasus remained largely unknown in Western European homes until much later: almost the end of the 19th century.

The reason was the Russian Empire’s protectionist policy of favoring domestic trade over foreign trade.

At one point, merchants trying to export carpets and other goods through Russia’s main Black Sea port of Odessa were required to deposit with authorities a sum double that of the product’s estimated value. The sum would only be reimbursed once the contents of the bales were verified at the port. That imposed impossible capital requirements on the would-be exporters.

At another point, Moscow required that all products for export from the Caucasus be routed first to Tbilisi for customs clearance and tax assessment, whether or not it was the shortest route to market. That too, discouraged foreign trade. (These measures were noted by the French traveler Xavier Hommaire De Hell, who visited the region in 1847.)

As Richard E Wright and John T Wertime, note in their 1995 book ‘Caucasian Carpets & Covers,’ even as late as 1852 the number of rugs and related textiles exported from the Russian Empire was negligible.

But that situation changed in the following decades, as new political and social changes swept Russia.

This time a major part of the story was the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. The freed serfs, who represented slightly less than half of all peasants, were allocated land but in fact often did not get not enough to make ends meet. So, the government launched a program dubbed “Kustar” (Russian for ‘Artisan’) to encourage peasants across the empire to produce handicrafts to supplement their agricultural earnings.

In the Caucasus, the Kustar program sought to dramatically boost home weaving by providing villagers with wool and patterns and taking care of sales. The target was the booming market for Caucasian carpets in Russia and then, as Tsarist officials began encouraging foreign trade, exports to the two great carpet trading centers of the time: Istanbul and London.

The export efforts got a further, huge boost in the 1880s with the completion of the Trans-Caucasus railroad and soon tons of carpets were moving toward Russia’s Black Sea ports.

By the beginning of the 1880s, Europe began to be aware of Caucasian carpets, say Wright and Wertime. The carpets got full exposure at the Paris World Fair (Exposition Universelle) in 1878 and they became a popular addition to Victorian-era homes.

Semenov offers some figures to show how suddenly exports of carpets from Russia exploded.

“Carpet making, which had been a craft, in the second half of the 19th century developed into a marketable branch of manufacture,” he writes.

“Russia became not only one of the most important consumer countries but also a major exporter of Oriental carpets. In 1873 carpet exports from the Russian Empire amounted to 12,914 puds (1 pud = 16 kg) valued at 922,917 rubles; by 1874 they had grown to 17,781 puds at a value of 964,675 rubles.”

He continues: “The volume of exported carpets continued to increase until the outbreak of World War I. The major proportion exported – 90 to 94 percent – was of the more expensive Caucasian carpets, while cheaper Central Asian rugs were mostly brought in for the home market.”

Unfortunately, the story does not end there.

With the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Russian civil war, and the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922, Russian society again changed on an epic scale. And the effects were nearly fatal for the carpet producers at both the village and manufactory level.

White Russians poured out of the country after losing the civil war and many of them brought their valuables, including carpets, with them for sale. Istanbul’s grand bazaar was suddenly overloaded with the same carpets that had furnished Russia's 'Orientalist' interiors of the Tsarist era and many of these now flowed West in a booming business.

But in now communist Russia, the carpet market was finished. Luxury goods were to be despised, even if they were secretly collected, and interior design styles conformed to the new rules.

Semenov, writing during the last decade of the Soviet Union, describes the new mood as a return to more austere and rational style. And perhaps reflecting his times, he approvingly contrasts modernism with the luxurious disorder of the 19th century, when people “scattered carpets over the divans, arms-chairs, walls, and floors."

“Such an abundance of carpets exerted an aggressive influence on the interior’s creator, leaving him no room to think or speak. The carpets, as it were, ‘swaddled’ him, ‘wrapped him up’ from all sides. Their bright colors, unhurried rhythms of design, and originality of texture allowed him only a limited emotional range of somewhat passive, lethargic, stylistically ‘Oriental,’ moods. On one level, harmony between the house owner and his actions gave way to languor and comfort, but beneath the surface subjected him to stress and drama; an intrinsic conflict between the individualistic, subjective man and the habitat he had created. The carpet was no longer a treasure, but a luxury object and this resulted in economic, aesthetic, psychological and even moral and ethical consequences.”

Soviet officials may have had little use for the Tsarist era's love of carpets, but they did not put an immediate end to the Kustar program. The state continued to support carpet weaving as an export commodity.

However, the support shifted from helping weavers who worked at home, and mostly used patterns traditional to their areas, to funding of manufactories receiving and fulfilling orders on a central-planning basis.

The result was that orders for rug with patterns long identified with one region of the Caucasus were routinely given to weaving centers in other regions with very different local traditions. The weavers made mistakes. And over time the sense of unique origin and local lineages that gave Caucasian rugs a special cachet in the Western market eroded away.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Western interest in the region’s weaving has revived. But it is still an open question whether carpet making in the Caucasus -- after so many decades of neglect -- can eventually return to its once famous heights. (For more, read: Can Caucasian Carpets Make A Comeback In The Caucasus?)

(Photos top to bottom: Detail of Shirvan carpet, late 19th C; Lithograph of Mt. Elberus, the highest peak in the Caucasus range; Russian interior, men’s study, 1880s; Mikhail Lermontov, portrait; "Horsemen of the Caucasus" by F.A. Roubaud; Kustar pattern for Derbent rug, 19th C; Russian Pavilion, Paris World’s Fair 1878; Bolshevik poster “You … Have you signed up as a volunteer?”; Intourist travel poster for Caucasus.)

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The Silk Road, The Camel, And Oriental Carpets

PRAGUE, August 22, 2009 -- Could the Silk Roads have existed without camels?

After all, for thousands of years before and during the Silk Roads the wheel also existed across all of Eurasia, and wagons were used to carry heavy goods for long distances

The Central Asian nomads, for example, commonly used wagons to transport their possession across the steppes and at times even put their yurts – their round, rigid tents – on wheels to transport them.

And at both the Eastern end of the Silk Roads in China and the Western end in the Middle East, the countryside was teeming with on- and off-road wheeled vehicles of all kinds, from horse drawn chariots to carts to wagons.

The answer to why, despite this, the Silk Roads became entirely camel-driven can be found in a fascinating book by historian Richard W. Bulliet. The book is ‘The Camel and the Wheel’ (1975).

Bulliet explains how the camel, which became a transport animal long after the horse, proved so efficient for moving cargo that it not only made the Silk Roads possible it also completely replaced the use of wagons across a vast swath of the Middle East, from central Turkey to North Africa.

Here is a Chinese scroll painting from 1280 by Liu Kuan-tao showing a camel caravan carrying carpets in the background of a scene of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan hunting. For a close up: click here

What were a camel’s advantages over wheeled vehicles?

For one, a camel can match horse or ox-drawn wagons for load and speed. A camel can carry 300 to 500 pounds on its back and, walking at speed of two and-a-half miles an hour, travel 20 miles a day.

But where wagons are expensive to build and operate, a camel is relatively cost-free.

Its saddle requires little wood, which is a valuable commodity in arid parts of the world.

And unlike horses and oxen, camels don’t need special fodder or much water. They can eat desert plants and – when unburdened – go as much as two weeks without a drink of water. And when they do drink, they fill up fast, at the rate of 28 gallons in 10 minutes.

Best of all, once a camel drinks water, he does not lose it again quickly – thanks to an amazing physiology. A camel’s feces are dry and its urine viscous. It sweats only after first tolerating a rise in its body temperature of a full 10 degrees Fahrenheit. And when it does start perspiring, it can survive a water loss of up to one-third of its body weight, then drink again and continue on its way.

All these factors made camel caravans incredibly cost-effective for overland travel.

Bulliet writes that the Romans, for example, estimated camel transport was about 20 percent cheaper than wagon transport, according to an edict on prices issued by Emperor Diocletian in the third century AD.

And it's interesting to note that once the cost-effective camel, supplemented by donkeys for lighter loads, displaced the wheel in the Middle East, the wheel did not return again until the age of the automobile.

A French traveler, Volney, observed in the 1780’s that “"It is remarkable that in all of Syria one does not see a single cart or wagon."

Bulliet says that the evidence of that total displacement of wagons can still be seen today in the patterns of the narrow streets in the historic old quarters of many towns:

“Although camels themselves were not too widely used within the walls of medieval towns, it was they who caused the tradition of wheeled transport to vanish; and it is the absence of carts and wagons that accounts in large part for the layout of medieval Middle Eastern cities,” he writes.



On the Silk Roads, two-humped camels were used from China through Central Asia and one-humped camels were used in the Middle East.

At either end, the physical challenges for the camel caravans that trekked across the vast distances involved were staggering.

Many historians like to describe the journey as equivalent to crossing an ocean – an ocean which stretched across almost the entire width of Eurasia.

There were caravansarais in accessible areas where the camels and merchants could rest, sometimes even at the end of each days’ journey. But there also were inaccessible areas that had to be crossed at risk of life and limb for days at a stretch.

Marco Polo, the Venetian traveler of the 13th century, provides vivid descriptions of some of the dangers in the account of his travels from Venice to the court of Kublai Khan in Khanbalik (modern Beijing):

* The Pamirs -- From here, one travels three days east, always climbing, until you reach gigantic mountains which are said to be the highest in the world.

* Taklamakan Desert – Those who venture here must take great care not to become separated from the others … because if they lose contact with their fellow travelers, they will only find their friends again with great difficulty, for all around them arise other voices which seem to call their names. From such hallucinations, many who cross (these singing sands) perish.

* Che-Si Corridor, near Kanju, China – Travelers do not dare to enter these mountains with any animals … because here a certain plant grows which is so poisonous that any animal who eats it is lost.

As Bulliet points out, a camel easily outperforms any other beast of burden in such in extreme places because, in fact, such places are its natural habitat.

For eons, the camel’s survival strategy has been to safeguard itself from predators by staying away from them. Over the course of its evolution, it deliberately abandoned the grasslands for the desert, where most predators cannot stand the extremes of heat and drought. And in this way, though it is totally defenseless and usually moves slowly, it has thrived.

Man originally domesticated the camel for milk and food. But those uses are negligible compared to the possibilities it offered as a pack-animal for long-distance travel and, ultimately, cross-continental caravans.

The caravans of the Silk Roads could involve hundreds of camels at once, with a combined carrying capacity equivalent to a sea-going ship of their time. They were highly organized and carried not just goods but paying passengers along regular and established routes.

A detailed idea of how they worked can be had from accounts as recent as the 1920’s, when camel caravans were still common in China’s eastern Xinjiang region – once a major crossroads of the Silk Roads.

This description comes from Owen Lattimore, who chronicled his travels with a caravan in his book 'Desert Road to Turkestan' (1929):

“A caravan could consist of 150 or so camels (8 or more files), with a camel-puller for each file. Besides the camel-pullers the caravan would also include a xiansheng (literally, "Sir" or "Mister," who was typically an older man with a long experience as a camel-puller, now playing the role of a general manager), one or two cooks, and the caravan master, whose authority over the caravan and its people was as absolute as that of a captain on a sea ship. If the owner of the caravan did not travel with the caravan himself, he would send along a supercargo - the person who will take care of the disposal of the freight upon arrival, but had no say during the travel. The caravan could carry a number of paying passengers as well, who would alternate between riding on top of a camel load and walking.”

The bonds that the camel handlers formed with their beasts can still be seen in traditions that remain strong in some places today.

One is the sport of camel fighting – a sport which, unlike many animal fights, was developed to entertain spectators while minimizing the danger for the camels, which were too valuable to put at risk.

The picture here of a camel fight is from 1585, painted by Abd as-Samad in Mughal India.

Camel fights still draw crowds of camel devotees in Turkey in the winter, which is the camel’s mating season and the time when males will try to knock each other down to win the females’ attention.

The battles are not unlike Sumo matches.

To start, specially bred camels weighing as much as a ton are led toward each other. Sometimes, one will run away just at the sight of the other. Usually, they crash into each other and then begin a shoulder-to-shoulder shoving match.

Injuries are rare because the camels, which usually hurt each other by biting, have their mouths tied shut. But the camels are full of tricks with their front legs and long necks, which they use to trip each other in skillful ways.

The fight ends when one camel flees, neighs out a call of surrender, or falls. The action, which can be hard to follow, is breathlessly called out play-by-play by a sports announcer.

Camel wrestling devotees in Turkey trace the sport back to the nomadic and caravan days of the region. The matches are spectacles that involve whole towns, with the camels paraded through the streets beforehand decked in mirrored blankets, bells, and colorful pompoms and accompanied by drummers and folk dancers.

Curiously, in a strange nod to the camel populations of both the Silk Roads’ eastern and western ends, the best fighting camels in Turkey are bred by mating a female camel with a single hump with a male camel with double humps.

What kind of prizes are at stake? From the sport’s earliest origins until today, that has never been in question. There is money to be made by betting, of course, but the symbol of victory that is awarded to the winner by the organizers is a carpet.

These days, the carpet is usually machine-made and of little value. But the practice recalls a time when, centuries ago on the Silk Roads, carpets were as much a form of currency as money.

(Illustrations from top to bottom: Tang dynasty terra-cotta camels, 618-907AD; Silk scroll painting of Kublai Khan Hunting by Liu Kuan-tao, 13th century; detail of camel carrying carpet from Liu Kuan-tao’s scroll; map of major Silk Road routes; NASA satellite image of Taklamakan desert; Bas relief, camel, Palazzo Mastelli, Venice; Mughal painting, 1585; Camel match, Selcuk, Turkey, 2000.)

Related Links:

Richard W. Bulliet: Why They Lost the Wheel, Saudi Aramco World, 1972

Stephen Kinzer, New York Times: On a Winter's Weekend in Turkey, The Camel Fight Is the Place to Be

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Istanbul: When The Grand Bazaar Was The Center Of The Ottoman World

ISTANBUL, August 15, 2009 – For centuries, the world greatest emporium for buying carpets was Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire.

And, specifically, the address was the Grand Bazaar, the richest and most popular shopping palace in the city.

The Grand Bazaar was the biggest terminus of the Silk Roads that moved west across Eurasia and it was to here that carpets and luxury goods of every kind flowed.

The Ottoman Empire itself, one of the world’s largest empires from its founding in the 14th century to its decline beginning in the 18th, was the biggest customer. But merchants from all over Europe also came to buy the goods wholesale and take them home for resale.

What could you find in the Grand Bazaar? What couldn’t you find in the Grand Bazaar!

There were rugs from Central Asia, from the Caucasus, from Anatolia. There were rugs smuggled by the tons across the border from Persia, the Ottoman Empire’s great eastern rival. The border was often officially closed but the carpet trade was so lucrative that both sides turned to a third party – their Armenian populations – to act as the go-between for the business and let them freely cross the frontier.

The carpets were sold in the Grand Bazaar along with rich silk and brocaded fabrics, precious stones, gold, silver, pearls, shoes, books, and jewel-encrusted weapons. The value of the goods was reflected in the rent merchants paid to occupy a space in the bazaar: many times more than for anywhere else in the city. And the bazaar extended through miles and miles of covered, labyrinthine lanes.

The story of the Grand Bazaar is told in a book of the same name written by the late Celik Gulersoy in 1980.

Gulersoy, a leading historical preservationist, conjures up the atmosphere of the bazaar in the Ottoman era through the impressions of Turkish and European writers of the time.

One vivid account comes from a French traveler in 1877, during the last years that the Grand Bazaar could still be seen in its original form. The writer, M. de Gasparin, is an incurable romantic. But there is clearly enough color in the bazaar to spark any imagination:

“An Arab, with his spear in hand, sitting surrounded by the Persian shawls which he brought by his caravans, used to walk after a long row of camels in the desert. Another merchant is from the depths of Central Asia. Another one, with a thin face and pale complexion, has passed the sand and the seaside beaches of Syria on horseback and brought golden colored silk from Lebanon and soft clothes and pleasant scarves from Tyre and Sidon ... Egypt has sent that nearly black-skinned merchant who has brought the heavy cloth of that country, a mixture of silk and wool. This thin-faced bronze, tanned man comes from Morocco, leaning against milk-white threads and lapis blue dresses. Wherever these men may have been, whatever adventures they may have lived and whichever foreign country has injected the traces of other skies into their faces, their brows have lost nothing of their majestic nobility and their meaningful eyes have lost nothing of the depth that comes from authority, self-respect, and self-assurance. These merchants do not call the passers-by to their shops. They do not even have an inviting attitude; one could sense no greed in them, nor any worry in their posture … If a buyer came, ‘Masallah,’ if no one entered their shops, ‘So what?’”

That is a very different image than the bazaar of today, where hustling a customer is the rule. But the Ottoman bazaar was a very different place before Turkey modernized at the turn-of-the-last century.

The traditional arrangement was for the traders to line both sides of the bazaar’s covered streets. Not standing in the doorway of walk-in shops like today, but sitting on divans with nothing behind them but a large cabinet or a set of shelves. The cabinets, fixed to the walls, showcased some of their wares and hid the rest.

“The space occupied by any one of these tradesmen was generally small, about six to eight feet in length,” Gulersoy says. “In the bazaar jargon, these were known as ‘dolap’(stalls) and they had a depth of about three to four feet. Sometimes they were separated by thin curtains or wooden latticework partitions. It was possible for the customer to sit on the divan next to the tradesman and examine his choice while conversing in an easy, comfortable manner and drinking coffee or smoking a ‘long pipe.’”

At night, the cabinets were closed up.

Why did the merchants favor this open-street arrangement for the bazaar?

One reason, says Gulersoy, was “the old traditional practice of women covering their faces in the presence of men. There was a need to prevent women from having to enter closed places where there were men. There was a tendency to resolve all social matters out in the open.” He adds that “the custom was that all the shopkeepers, Muslim and non-Muslim, sit on their benches quietly and only answer when the customer directs as question at them.”

The Ottoman Grand Bazaar was not just the richest shopping center in Istanbul, it was in many ways its economic heart.

Its core, two separate covered markets called the Inner and Outer Bedestan, was built by Mehmet soon after he conquered Constantinople in 1453. Over the following years, the streets between the two covered bazaars were covered over, too, along with the surrounding streets, creating a covered city.

This covered city was not just a marketplace but a bank, too. The Inner Bedestan, built with walls 1.5 meters thick that stand to this day, was Istanbul’s 'coffre fort' where the richest citizens could keep their valuables in security. The Inner Bedestan also had the city’s wealthiest merchants, who lent money at interest for business ventures and themselves might own trading ships or major shares in camel caravans.

When sultans wanted to impress the citizenry with the Ottoman Empire’s wealth, or celebrate special occasions, they would sometimes call out the Grand Bazaar's merchants to parade in public. One Turkish observer of such a parade, Evilya Celebi, wrote this account in the early 1600s:

“Sultan Murad IV, before the Baghdad campaign in the year of the Hagira 1048, summoned the authorities to his audience chamber and said, ‘If I conquer the city of Baghdad in this expedition, I want all the soldiers and shop owners of Istanbul, according to the old regulations, with their guild wardens, sages, sheiks, stewards, Aghas, guild caretakers, and guards, to parade in front of Alay Kosku (a pavilion not far from the Grand Bazaar formerly used by the sultans to watch parades) both on foot and horseback, in groups, with eight military bands playing. Take down all these instructions correctly. Those who supply false information, I will cut in four.”

Celibi then describes the merchants as they march with their wares. Some of them ride on carriages decked out like parade floats:

Carpet dealers – 40 shops and 111 men. They parade with their 'mounted shops' adorned with Thessaloniki, Ushak, Kula, Egyptian, and Isfahan rugs.

Silken Robes of Honor dealers – 5 shops and 105 people. This guild joins the parade weaving the seven types of the Royal Robes of Honor and adorning the robes.

Not just the merchants and craftsmen parade, so do the hundreds of officials and employees of the bazaar:

The Trade Watchmen of the Inner Bedestan – 70 persons. The head of these is the second officer of the Sultan’s black eunuchs. These are all guaranteed people, devout Muslims who light the oil lamps in the Market Hall … when their post is vacated … the vacancy is filled by one of the Bedestan porters who is worthy of the post.

The Porters of the Inner Bedestan – 300 persons. Each night they carry the tradesmen’s chests and merchandise to the outer cellars of the Bedestan, stacking them there as a safeguard against fire. These porters parade with their load supports on their backs, rope in hand, and sword in belt.

The Market Hall Criers – These men have warrants and trade charters and are magnificent and trustworthy men who serve in the Inner Bedestan. All of them join the parade with jewelry on their clothes, wearing swords, double-edged scimitars, fur, and other valuable clothes.

And on, and on.

As the parade suggests, the Grand Bazaar was a highly organized institution, as much or more than an urban shopping mall today. Its administration was overseen by the royal court and its commerce was carefully regulated by a guild system.

The guilds insisted that all the merchants of a single trade be located in a single street or area of adjoining streets in the bazaar. The close seating arrangement was a form of price control because it prevented individual merchants from underselling their fellow guildsmen or overcharging and driving away customers.

Today, the Ottoman market has long since become a free market. The guild system, abolished in 1913, has given way to shop owners of all kinds mixed together and competing for the highest prices.

It is ironic for visitors to realize that today's hustling chaos is a world removed from the calm, rich, self-satisfied air of the Grand Bazaar’s heyday.

Just how different was it?

Gulersoy tries to answer the question this way:

“While gold poured down on the Throne City, the Covered Bazaar was also filled with gold, silver, silver thread, silk, jewelry, and crystal. But when the empire fell, the pale and dead colors of the sunset reflected on these walls.”

He adds: “the mood of Istanbul in each period is shown in the Grand Bazaar … certain other ages came, and copper took the place of gold and bead that of pearl.”

Today, the Grand Bazaar is only one of many places in Istanbul to buy carpets and there are many opinions about which is the best.

But the Bazaar does offer one thing that no other venue can provide. That is, 1,500 years of history and the sense that, like the starting price of a carpet, there is more to the story than meets the eye.

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