Village Rugs

Handmade Vegetable Dyed Turkish Carpets

The Anatolian lands have hosted more than thirty civilizations for over eighty centuries.  The art of carpet weaving has been brought to out lands by the Seljuk people to Anatolia from Middle Asia.  Anatolian people have been working with this art for ten centuries.  It is important to keep this historical background clearly in mind since there are traces of many differant cultures in the symblos, motifs, pattern and techniques still used in Turkish weaving today.

Along with our friend, Ali Can, we recognized the fact that rug weaving in Turkey has been commercially exploited over the past 150 years to the point where quality and creativity have suffered greatly.  The skills and traditions of the Turkish village weavers have been put aside to make way for mass marketing.  Ali Can is a product of a rug weaving family and understands the importantance of tradition as well as all phases of the trade.  We are happy to be partners with him in the renaissance of high-quality, vegetable dyed, beautifully knotted Turkish carpets.

We use the wool from the finest sheep raised on high Anatolian plateaus.  The cotton used for the foundations is the best quality available, 20 NE 24 twisted pure cotton.  Our carpets are completely vegetable dyed.  Ali Ihsan, one of the Taurus nomads delivers to us dyes from flowers and roots from the Taurus mountains.  Ali has learned his trade from his aunt who learned from her mother and so on back through the generations.

Our carpets are being made withtraditional geometric designs once again, related to those made in the sixteenth century and drawn by Abdullah in faith to its original.  He has graduated from the Beauty Art Academy in Isparta and is now director of this school.  He is one of the best of his field.

Our carpets are woven in small villages high in the mountains of the Konya region of Central Anatolia.  The weavers add their feelings to the carpets with each knot.  The rugs are washed and sheared using the oldest techniques, which do not damage the carpets but bring out their luster.  Only pure water is used for the final rinse and setting of the dyes.

We hope you like our carpets and that each day you will discover a new feeling for the Anatolian people and their life.