Tapestry of a Country

As we sat along the perimeter of the room, squished onto faded cushioned couches or perched upon towers of rugs and with our teacups timidly balanced in our hands, the merchant started to pull rugs out of the stacks. His moves lacked hesitation, and his hands found each desired weaving like a librarian selecting sources out of seemingly chaotic piles of books. He spoke cheerfully, all the while creating a small mountain of woven kilim rugs and carpets at his feet.

“Tamam, I will now teach you how to choose a good carpet. The older the carpet, the higher the price. Now watch closely.” Our tea pooled under the lips of our glass teacups as we leaned in to observe his fingers pulling back the threads of a carpet, exposing their bases. “A carpet with natural dye is the best. You can tell by looking at the bottom of the yarn. The color should be consistent from top to bottom. That is natural dye.”

Among the mounds of carpets were intricately woven packs to place on a camel’s back and traditional baby cradles to hang from ceiling beams. These tangible examples indicate the depth to which this craftsmanship is entwined in and symbolic of Turkey’s culture. The rugs represent the intense labor of women, women who might invest more than a year to complete one and who sometimes wove with the anticipation of her future household. They are rich in color and often use traditional geometric designs. Merchants exchange aged rugs, matured with the soles of many feet and perhaps prized by its maker and multiple owners, to new and eager hands.

And to me, listening to this merchant in the heart of the Grand Bazaar, these masterpieces illustrate something more. Beyond their cultural significance, practicality, and tradition, they encapsulate my young understanding of Turkey, which is further perpetrated by the microcosm Istanbul. Like he said, a carpet made of natural dye, a desirable and quality carpet, is consistently colored from its spun roots to its surface. Entrenched in a collision of historical narratives, Turkey’s past is vividly woven into its present, neither more vibrant than the other in complexity or worth.

Our week-long orientation in Istanbul reinforced this. On my first day in the city, we took a bus up to the Golden Gate or the emperor’s doorway to Constantinople (Istanbul), constructed in the year 388 AD. Part of the city’s land walls, the grand entrance stands in the midst of an overgrown field, and was fortified and eventually patched over with miscellaneous rubble. In the following days, we made trips to the cities of Bursa and Edirne, the Ottoman’s first and second capitols before their capture of Constantinople in 1453 AD. Walking out from our hotel each morning along Istanbul’s narrow city streets, we passed through the Hippodrome and were immediately surrounded by the Hagia Sophia, finished in 537 AD, and the Blue Mosque, completed in 1616 AD, holy sites revealing the impact of both Christianity and Islam on Istanbul’s make-up. Regardless of where we turned, we constantly met history face to face.

The city is steeped in the abundance of its history, but this does not deter the country’s heart from beating with continual strength today. The young Republic of Turkey has attempted to deny its recent imperial heritage, but the people of the country live in a manner concurrent with the past and simultaneously transformed by the present. Religion still plays a dominant role, if not in politics, then in the daily lives of Turks. The call to prayer echoes out from the minarets of mosques five times a day, overriding the city’s clamor with its haunting, holy melodies.

One night our professor took the female students to the Blue Mosque to observe Friday prayers from the women’s section. We sat in a window nook, barefooted and heads covered. In front of us, women stood, knelt, and bowed shoulder to shoulder. Daughters followed their mothers’ unified movements, glancing at their mothers from time to time to make sure their own physical manifestations of prayer were in sync. As our professor stepped forward to join the women and add her own prayers, a woman kindly reached out and retied the slipping headscarf of our professor. Others shuffled to the side so that she had more room. These calls to prayer, the fasting and Iftar (daily breaking of the fast at sunset), these expressions of kindness and solidarity among the women in prayer— my first exposures to Islam in a country with a predominately Muslim population are something new and unfamiliar, but have allowed me to see firsthand the permeations of Islam in daily life and its emphasis on community.

Istanbul is a society where the past is part of its present fabric, where monuments and structures illustrate the layers of its history and traditions still shape the lives of its inhabitants. Modernity, however, is equally as visible in the city. Thus, the threads of Istanbul and further Turkey, the stuff that they are made of, are vibrantly colored with the culminations of civilizations and cultures, from bottom to top. To the rug merchant, that is what makes a good carpet. To me, in the few short days that I have been here, that is what makes a beautiful country.