Magic Carpets
Turks weave the dreams of American children.
By Sylvie Pederson
The Language of Carpets and the Magic Carpet Project:
Springfield Museum (Nov. 5-Jan. 17)
adoptive families. As soon as Piper received payment, taking no
commission for herself, she sent the money to Turkey, where
owners had trusted Avci’s judgment enough to hand over their
carpets without security.
Since then, Piper has gone back to Turkey a few more times
and there have been two more shipments. “Every time I go,”
Piper said, “it’s like being taken into the culture in a deeper and
different way.”
The Language of Carpets
As Piper sees it, the entire adventure from meeting Avci to the
current exhibition is about sharing and transmitting knowledge.
“Ali’s intent from the start was to teach and educate me,” Piper
W
ishes, hopes and dreams
are woven into some
carpets, and this is the
source of their magic.
It’s what makes people
fall in love with them. Not all carpets are magic,
of course. Yet not one, but two kinds of magic
carpets are on display at the Springfield
Museum. The first is steeped in cultural tradition,
and the other is new and cross-cultural. But both,
according to exhibition curator and contributing
artist Holly Piper and carpet aficionado and
Istanbul merchant Ali Avci, tell stories and ex-
press basic human needs, which is what makes
them special.
Holly Piper
and Ali Avci
Encounter in Istanbul
The origins of the exhibition go back to a serendipitous en-
counter on an afternoon in July 2001 in Istanbul. Fulfilling a long-
held dream, Piper had been visiting Turkey for a month. After vis-
iting countless carpet shops, she had become obsessed with car-
pets, their colors, lines and motifs, which she drew for herself.
That afternoon was the last on her trip. She wanted to take one
last look at carpets but, weary of the tea rituals in merchant shops
that had filled her days, she took a long walk instead. After a cou-
ple of hours, hungry and afraid of getting lost, she decided to turn
back when she caught sight of colorful piles of naturally dyed
wool drying on the sidewalk across the street. She hesitated, but
curiosity got the better of her, and she walked over to take a look.
Carpets hung over the sidewalk, between trees, against the
wall. They seemed different from anything she had seen else-
where. Particularly attractive was a small tapestry representing a
person alone in a garden surrounded by birds and plants. It
seemed to tell a personal tale
My Rug Represents
rather than come from a pro-
Protection, magic
duction line.
carpet design by
When Piper asked the at-
Stephen Board,
age 10, Great
tending vendor for its price, he
Falls, Va.
My Rug Represents
Protection, woven
in Turkey.
10 NOVEMBER 26, 2003
looked surprised and unsettled, and abruptly went back inside the
shop. Out came another man who, when she repeated her ques-
tion, became agitated. He, too, ran back inside. A third man came
out. He questioned her about her interest in the rug. “Are you a
collector?” he asked. “Are you buying for a museum?”
“No, no.”
“This piece costs far more than that one,” the merchant said,
pointing to a much larger rug. “Come in and I will tell you about it.”
So they went inside and had tea.
The merchant was Ali Avci, a man passionate about antique
oriental rugs with a story. The piece Piper liked so much was
tribal, and Avci told her stories about the people who had woven
it — just what she had been thirsting to hear. They established an
immediate connection. That very afternoon, he took her to rug
shops where tourists didn’t usually go, but where the rugs were
ancient. He told her what to look at and what to look for. He also
insisted on offering her as a gift the rug she had admired at his
shop. “You have the soul for this piece,” he said.
This was the beginning of both a friendship and a partnership.
Piper went back to Istanbul for the month of November, during
which Avci educated her about carpets. “It was grueling but ex-
hilarating,” Piper recalls. “Ali notices things about rugs and their
stories that no one else sees, and people in
the trade really value his opinion.”
After 9/11, tourism was down, and
some people in Turkey who depended on
tourists went hungry. Avci arranged to
ship about 90 “treasure rugs” for Piper to
sell back home. He estimated that the sale
of those rugs would feed about 300 fami-
lies for a month. Piper wondered how she
would ever manage to find homes for the
rugs, but Ali had faith. “People will
come,” he assured her.
And they did: The word spread about
the rugs at Piper’s barn without her ever
advertising, and the pieces quickly found
explained. “There was an urgency on his part to give me that
knowledge.” Piper has found ways to further share what she has
learned with people here, but it all starts with the carpets them-
selves, or rather with the individual who first conceives the de-
sign and embeds elements of her own life story — most weavers
are women — in them.
Obviously the story element does not apply to carpets com-
mercially designed with recycled motifs and patterns but only to
traditional tribal carpets that women wove for themselves and
their families to serve as rugs, prayer rugs, tables, covers, screens
and wall hangings.
“Not one is the same,” Avci said, “and the first copy is a treas-
ure and collectible. The woman will draw her surroundings,
something that she sees every day. She will add her wishes and
hopes, not directly, but they will influence the drawing.
“If a woman is weaving a rug for herself, she’ll add something
of herself to it even, if she’s copying the design from another car-
pet,” Avci said. “In this sense, the carpet is only partially a copy
and has value, though not as much as the original carpet.” On the
other hand, when it comes to commercial carpets, “The weaver
repeats exactly what’s in front of her,” Avci said. “There is no soul
in such carpets.”
The quality Avci loves in some carpets is their power to con-
vey meaning and carry messages about human life. Those mes-
sages are most often communicated through a vocabulary of
symbols and abstract patterns. Depicted objects are highly styl-
ized, and so are animals and people, which only appear where
Islamic rule against representation of beings is less strictly fol-
lowed.
Whatever is expressed — the grief of losing a child or the joy
of birth — is no less vivid for the weaver for being couched in ab-
stract symbols than for the letter-writer who uses the alphabet.
For the weaver, working her emotions into the weave of the car-
pet can be as therapeutic as for a painter working on canvas or a
poet weaving words together. It expresses her artistic skills –—
her sense of color, design and the weaving prowess.
The weaver’s personal statement also speaks for her culture,