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RUG FARMING IN ANATOLIA
Turkey resonates with rug weaving. Whatever it means, it is a rug-weaving culture. It resuscitates the anemic term, authentic. The conditions are right, both economically and culturally, for a revival of weaving the likes of which the 20th century has not seen. It is a revival of good craft, founded on the informal partnership of many parties, from the village girls to the repairman-turned-entrepreneur, and from the fragment dealer to the rug farmer. Taken individually, its projects are on a small scale. Seen as a whole, it represents the single most important contribution to Oriental rug weaving in decades. It may be that I am talking about a small fraction of total production, but that may be enough. The partnership I speak of is like the conversation that swings between the possible and the impossible faster than one's mood can change, with the grey area in between left to God's will. It has nothing to do with one's faith in God. It has to do with habit, the habit of making difficult things impossible because experience taught us so. In this sense, revival means the rejection of rejections.
Rug farming in eastern Turkey has been an orchestrated effort, combining the skills of natural dyeing with the flexibility of young women who weave commercially. As if turning back time, we have devised a system to spin large amounts of wool by hand, employing hundreds of women in work that can be done at home. I call these carpets Azeri, after the Turks of Azerbaijan. It is a whimsical name, meant to recall the beautiful patterns of rugs vaguely called "north west Persian." As an idea, Azeri carpets are about the art of girls making pictures, using drawings and samples merely as a guide in their weaving. The room for interpretation could easily be mistaken as primitive, but nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, an organization has been fashioned around the notion that several weavers sitting on a bench, in a room with many other large looms, can use a hard, lustrous yarn to produce rugs that are as much an individual statement as they are a statement about decoration.
http://www.rugreview.com/84a.htm
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