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Uşak Carpet

If you walk through the Renaissance galleries of European museums and look closely at the table cover in a painting or at the floor in front of a throne, you will often see a carpet with navy and red medallions or with e.

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Uşak Carpet

If you walk through the Renaissance galleries of European museums and look closely at the table cover in a painting or at the floor in front of a throne, you will often see a carpet with navy and red medallions or with eight-pointed stars. A large share of those carpets were woven in and around Uşak. Uşak carpet is today a product protected by a geographical indication, but its real identity is a story of craft and trade that stretched from Anatolia to Europe over centuries. This article explains how to recognise an Uşak carpet, where it comes from and how you can follow the trail of this tradition in the city.

The second golden age of Turkish carpet art

Uşak Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism writes that the second and last golden age of Turkish carpet art began with the carpets made in and around Uşak in the sixteenth century. An article by art historian Nurcan Perdahçı in the Trakya University Journal of Social Sciences follows the same sequence: the first golden age is that of the Anatolian Seljuk carpets with their solid geometric motifs, and the second begins with the Uşak carpets, in which compositions with medallion motifs appear. As Perdahçı notes, Uşak carpets are the largest and best-known group among Turkish carpets, yet the name Uşak hardly appears in European inventory records; there they are known simply as Turkish carpets.

A study published in the Turkish Historical Society's journal Belleten explains that carpet weaving lived on in this region with Turkmen and Yörük tribes such as the Kınıklı, Kaçar, Karakeçili and Tekeli. Weaving was at first work that stayed inside the home: each family wove the carpets, kilims and woollen covers it and its daughter needed. With the orders that arrived in the sixteenth century, this handicraft turned into a branch of production.

Two great families, medallion and star

The geographical indication record at the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office defines the two main types of Uşak carpet as medallion and star Uşak carpets. Medallion carpets are the more important group, and examples up to ten metres long were made. Round medallions in the centre and pointed, lobed medallions at the sides are lined up, and the composition points to infinity; the edge of the carpet seems like a piece cut out of this endless pattern. According to the record, the finest of the medallion Uşaks, which lasted from the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth, are those with dark red and blue medallions on a navy ground filled with yellow flowers. The red-ground examples are richer, and their medallions are always navy.

Star Uşak carpets are a smaller group in number and of medium size; the registration document notes that very few are longer than four metres. In these, eight-pointed stars and small lozenge-shaped medallions alternate along offset axes. The ground is almost always red, the centre of the carpet is not marked, and it is clearly visible that the medallions belong to an endless pattern. The colour scheme is distinctive too: red, navy and bright yellow dominate, green and blue are used as secondary colours, and the outlines are black. The document sums this up as a rich decoration built from three main and two supporting colours.

Carpets in European paintings

What made the name of Uşak carpets lasting in Europe was painting. Perdahçı writes that from the middle of the fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth these carpets were depicted often and in fine detail in European painting. In carpet history some types carry the names of the painters who painted them. The small-pattern geometric carpets frequently seen in the paintings of the German painter Hans Holbein are called Holbein carpets. Another type, often seen in the paintings of the Italian painter Lorenzo Lotto, took the name Lotto carpets. Perdahçı links both types to the Uşak region.

According to Uşak Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism, by the late sixteenth century the fame of Uşak carpets had spread all over Europe, and noble families began to order Uşak carpets bearing their own coats of arms. The directorate also notes that many carpets of this kind are kept in European museums. The carpets were sought after in the Ottoman capital as well; according to the records Perdahçı cites, in 1726 carpets were ordered from Uşak for Topkapı Palace.

The road to the port of İzmir

To reach the sea, Uşak carpets travelled to İzmir. Perdahçı relates that the carpets brought in the morning to the carpet market set up on Dokuzsele Bridge in Uşak caught the attention of the English trading in İzmir, and that the carpets were sent to İzmir by camel. According to the Belleten study, in the sixteenth century carpets were carried to Europe by cart and on the backs of camels and horses. First the English, then the Dutch, the Italian principalities, the Austrians and the Germans began to buy Uşak carpets from İzmir.

The same study also gives figures for the nineteenth century. In the 1840s Uşak carpet was the main economic activity of the town and one of the most important trade items of the port of İzmir. In the 1870s three quarters of carpet production in Anatolia took place in this town. Carpet making was then the livelihood of many households; while men dealt with wool and fleece, women supported their families by weaving carpets. Spinning and dyeing workshops also appeared as side branches of this economy. According to the Belleten study, among the 220 carpet samples sent to the Sergi-i Umumi-i Osmani, the first large international exhibition opened by the Ottoman state in 1863, were sofa carpets woven around Uşak and Kütahya. These carpets stood out with lively colours such as blue, green, yellow and orange on a light brown ground.

From madder to aniline

The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of great change in Uşak carpet making. According to the Belleten study, foreign trading houses in İzmir began to have carpets woven by giving villagers yarn and patterns. After 1856 chemists began to produce the colours of natural dyes from synthetic sources, and aniline dyes brought from Europe started to replace madder and other root dyes. In 1888 aniline dyes were banned in the province of Aydın and the use of local root dyes was made compulsory, but the ban soon loosened, and at the start of the twentieth century alizarin dye became widespread. In 1890 European motifs were introduced in place of traditional ones. The fame of Uşak carpet was so great that, according to the study, in 1893 several English industrialists came to Uşak and took four skilled weavers to England with the promise of higher wages. The study notes that the heavy demand that began in the eighteenth century also brought a decline in the motifs.

What the geographical indication guarantees

Uşak carpet is today a designation of origin registered under number 152 at the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office. The application made by the Uşak Chamber of Commerce and Industry on 7 January 2010 was announced in the Official Gazette on 16 May 2011; the registration date is 7 February 2012, and the geographical boundary is the province of Uşak. The document defines the technical identity of the product in detail. The knot is the Turkish knot, referred to in the document as the Uşak double knot; in this symmetrical knot each knot is passed between two separate warp threads and tied around both. The number of knots per square decimetre is between 675 and 2000, and the pile height is kept between five and seven millimetres.

For yarn, hand-spun yarn and semi-worsted yarn made with the spindle technique are specified; the raw material is one hundred per cent wool. Two routes are accepted for dyeing: root dye from plant extracts and metal complex dye. Weaving is done on iron looms whose length varies with the size of the carpet. According to the document, the most distinctive feature of the carpet is nevertheless its motifs. Inspection is coordinated by the Uşak Chamber of Commerce and Industry; a three-person board made up of one person each appointed by Uşak University, the Uşak Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism and the chamber checks knot count, knot type, yarn, dye and pattern once a year and whenever there is a complaint.

On the trail of the tradition in Uşak

To see carpet weaving up close in the city, you can visit Dokur Evi, the Weaver House. According to the Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism, this building of about one hundred and eighty years, restored by Uşak Municipality with its original materials preserved, opened in 2010 and contains forty carpet looms. Here the weaving art of the Uşak carpets depicted in the paintings of European painters is kept alive. Before you go, find out about visiting conditions and opening hours from the operating institution or from the Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism.

The weaving tradition is not limited to carpets. The directorate writes that the kilims woven in the district of Eşme are known as Eşme kilims and that, with their pastel, muted colours made with root dyes and woollen weft and warp, they differ from the other kilims of Anatolia. Red, green, blue, black, white, brown and navy are the most common colours in these kilims.

If you are thinking of buying an Uşak carpet, take your time. First look for the designation of origin emblem on the product or its label. Ask the seller whether the yarn is hand-spun or semi-worsted and whether the dye is root dye or metal complex dye; the document accepts both, but you have a right to know which was used. Checking whether a medallion sits whole in the centre, that is whether it is a medallion Uşak or a star Uşak whose centre is not marked, will no longer be difficult for you.

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