Imperial Ottoman

Economy · Article

Ottoman Carpet Weaving

Ottoman carpet production in Uşak, Ghiordes, and Kula, the Holbein and Lotto types, the Hereke court factory, the Anatolian knot, and the European Turkey-carpet market.

The earliest dated Ottoman carpet known to survive, the Lotto-type prayer rug in the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin, is inscribed with the year 1462. By the 1520s the geometric medallion rugs of Uşak, in western Anatolia, were appearing in the portraits of Lorenzo Lotto and Hans Holbein the Younger, and the European market for “Turkey carpets” was already a substantial industry. The 1530s in particular — the date usually associated with the “Holbein carpets” in the popular literature — was the period when the type reached its widest European diffusion. The Ottomans organized the production in village workshops, sold the finished products through the great emporia of Smyrna, and competed with the French Savonnerie (founded 1627) and the Austrian factory at Gloggnitz (1723) on the European market. The story of Ottoman carpet weaving is part of the larger history of Ottoman crafts and manufacturing and of the Ottoman economy and trade.

Key dates

  • 1462 — Earliest dated Ottoman carpet known to survive.
  • 1490s–1530s — Great period of the Uşak medallion rug; type appears in Holbein and Lotto portraits.
  • c. 1600–1700 — Shift of production from Uşak to Ghiordes, Kula, and the Aegean village industry.
  • 1723 — Austrian factory at Gloggnitz begins production in conscious imitation of the Turkish type.
  • 1841–43 — Hereke court factory founded under Abdülmecid I.
  • 1890s — Hereke carpets reach their late-Ottoman classical style.

Knot, dye, and weave

A few technical points are worth fixing at the start, because they underlie everything that follows. Ottoman carpets use the so-called “Turkish” or “symmetrical” knot, in which the yarn is passed over two adjacent warp threads and pulled tight behind, producing a knot that is itself symmetrical around the warp pair. The Persian (or “asymmetrical”) knot, used in most Safavid and later Persian carpets, passes the yarn over one warp and around the other, producing a smaller and more flexible knot. The distinction is not decorative; it affects the resolution of the pattern and the durability of the carpet, and a trained eye can tell the type from a square inch of pile.

The dyes were the standard Near Eastern palette: madder root for the deep reds, indigo for the dark blues, weld or pomegranate rind for the yellows, and, after the 1550s, cochineal imported from the Spanish Americas through the capitulations for the most vivid crimsons. The mordants were alum and iron sulphate, the wool was the local Awassi or Karayaka, and the warp and weft were of cotton or wool depending on the workshop. The Uşak medallion rugs used a cotton warp and a wool pile, a combination suited to the relatively large knot (c. 100–150 knots per square inch) of the type; the Ghiordes prayer rugs, smaller and finer (often 200+ knots per square inch), used a woollen warp and a wool or silk pile.

Uşak and the “Holbein carpets”

The earliest Ottoman carpets to reach Europe in large numbers were the large geometric medallion rugs of Uşak, in western Anatolia. The so-called “Holbein carpets” — named after the German painter Hans Holbein the Younger, whose portraits of the 1530s popularized them in European visual culture, though the type itself dates from c. 1462 — are the most famous example. These rugs are characterized by a geometric pattern of large octagons or stars arranged in a grid, with a small prayer-niche design, and they were woven in large numbers from the late fifteenth through the seventeenth century. Walter Denny’s 1987 dating study places the type’s apogee in the 1500s–1530s and its decline in the 1570s; the type was not, as the older literature suggested, a sixteenth-century innovation.

The Uşak industry was a village and small-town enterprise, organized in family workshops. The carpets were sold in the regional bazaars, exported through the port of Smyrna, and shipped to Europe by Venetian, French, and English merchants under the capitulations. A second major Uşak pattern, the “Lotto carpet” (named after the Italian painter Lorenzo Lotto, who painted them in the 1540s), used a geometric angular pattern of yellow and red on a dark ground, and was particularly popular in Italy. Both the Holbein and the Lotto carpets were influenced by designs from the court workshop, and the Uşak medallion pattern is the most-copied carpet design in European art history.

Ghiordes, Kula, and the village industry

By the seventeenth century the centre of Ottoman carpet production had begun to move away from Uşak and toward the villages of western Anatolia. The town of Ghiordes (modern Gördes) and the town of Kula, both in the Manisa region, became major centres of a new type of carpet, woven by village women and sold through merchant houses in Smyrna. The Ghiordes and Kula rugs used bold geometric patterns in bright colours, often red, blue, and yellow, and they were smaller and more varied than the great Uşak medallion rugs. The Ghiordes prayer rug, with its distinctive mihrab-shaped niche and angular motifs, became the model for the Anatolian village prayer rug for the next three centuries.

The village carpet industry was organized differently from the older urban workshops. The carpets were woven in the homes of peasant women, often as a winter occupation, and the merchants of Smyrna financed the production in advance, supplied the wool and dyes, and sold the finished products in Europe. The system was a form of putting-out, similar to the European textile industries of the same period, and it gave the merchants of Smyrna a substantial profit while allowing the village weavers to supplement their income from agriculture. The çulha (weaving) was women’s work, and the nakış (design) was often drawn by the village imam or by a travelling designer in the kalfa tradition.

The Hereke factory

The most prestigious carpets of the later Ottoman period were produced in the Hereke factory, on the shore of the Sea of Marmara. The factory was established in 1841 by Sultan Abdülmecid I, in part to provide carpets for the new Dolmabahçe Palace and in part to revive the court carpet industry that had been a major feature of the older palace workshop. The Hereke factory employed trained designers and weavers, used the finest silk and wool, and produced rugs and carpets of the highest quality. Hereke carpets are recognizable by their fine knotting (often 400+ knots per square inch in the silk pieces), their brilliant colours, and their use of classical Ottoman patterns drawn from the great tradition of the older Uşak rugs.

The Hereke factory was a state enterprise, and its products were reserved for the palace and for diplomatic gifts. The factory also produced a number of carpets for export, particularly to the wealthy households of Europe and America, and the European taste for “Turkey carpets” continued to be supplied in part from Hereke. The factory continued to operate, with various changes, into the republican period, and the firm is still one of the most prestigious carpet makers in Turkey.

The court carpets and the palace tradition

Long before the Hereke factory, the Ottoman court had produced carpets of the highest quality. The great court carpets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, preserved in the Topkapı Palace Museum and in the great collections of Europe (the V&A, the Metropolitan, the Ashmolean), are large silk and wool rugs woven in palace workshops in Istanbul and Bursa. The court carpets used the finest materials, were designed by the court artists, and depicted the same patterns as the tiles of İznik, the textiles of Bursa, and the manuscripts of the palace studio. The court carpets were gifts, reserved for the sultan, his family, and the highest officials, and they are now among the most valuable objects in Islamic art.

The classical court carpets, like the other manufactures of the imperial workshops of Ehl-i Hiref, were produced by skilled craftsmen working in a closed environment. The designs were adapted from the great tradition of Ottoman ornamental art, with the same tulip (lale), carnation (karanfil), and cloud-band motifs that appeared on tiles and textiles. The court carpet industry declined in the seventeenth century, and the Hereke factory of the nineteenth century was an attempt to revive it under modern conditions.

The European market

The European demand for “Turkey carpets” was the principal stimulus to Ottoman carpet production from the late fifteenth century onward. The carpets reached Europe through the Ottoman overland and maritime trade routes, and they were sold in Venice, Florence, Marseille, Antwerp, and London. The European trade grew steadily through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and was the model for a number of European imitations, including the French Savonnerie (established in the seventeenth century) and the Austrian factory at Gloggnitz. The English East India Company tried to compete from the 1620s onward, but the hand-knotted Turkish carpet, with its particular wool and its particular knot, resisted factory imitation well into the nineteenth century.

The trade in Ottoman carpets was disrupted by the long European wars of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and by the increasing European taste for oriental designs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The 1838 free-trade agreement with Britain, signed under the framework of the capitulations and treated in detail there, opened the Ottoman market to European imports and reduced the protection of local industries. The carpet industry survived better than the textile industry, partly because European factories could not easily imitate the hand-woven oriental rug, and partly because the European taste for oriental rugs continued to grow.

Frequently asked questions

How can I tell an Ottoman carpet from a Persian one?

The most reliable single clue is the knot. Ottoman carpets use the symmetrical (“Turkish”) knot, in which the yarn passes over two adjacent warp threads. Persian carpets, with a few exceptions, use the asymmetrical (“Persian”) knot, in which the yarn passes over one warp and around the other. The visual difference is small, but a trained eye can detect it from a single knot, and the distinction is preserved in museum catalogues. Other clues: the colour palette (Ottoman rugs tend to be redder, with more use of the madder-root red and the Armenian bole), the design vocabulary (the Uşak medallion, the Ghiordes mihrab, the çintamani dotted triangle), and the wool (the Anatolian Awassi or Karayaka is generally rougher and longer-stapled than the Khorasan or Tabriz wools of the great Persian courts).

When were “Holbein carpets” made?

The Holbein type was woven in western Anatolia, principally Uşak, from the late fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century, with the great period in the 1500s–1530s. The type takes its name from the German painter Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543), whose portraits of the 1530s popularized the pattern in European visual culture, but the type itself predates Holbein by at least a generation; the earliest dated example known is from 1462. The name is art-historical, not Ottoman.

Are Ottoman carpets still being made?

Yes. The Hereke factory continues to operate, with various changes, and the firm is still one of the most prestigious carpet makers in Turkey. The village industry of Ghiordes, Kula, and the surrounding region has also continued, with a partial revival in the twentieth century. Most modern “Turkish” carpets, however, are woven in the Uşak and Kayseri factory districts for the export market, and the technical vocabulary of the older village industry is preserved in the museum collections and in the catalogues of the great auction houses rather than in the working workshops.

Sources and further reading

  • Walter B. Denny, How to Read Islamic Carpets (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014).
  • Walter B. Denny, “Dating the Turkish ‘Holbein’ Carpets,” in Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies I (Halı Congress, 1987).
  • Ahmet Ertuğ, Carpets of the Islamic World: A Collector’s Guide (Ertuğ & Kocabıyık, 1999).
  • Charles Grant Ellis, Oriental Carpets in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1988).
  • Friedrich Spuhler, “Carpets and Textiles,” in The Ottoman World, ed. Christine Woodhead (Routledge, 2011).
  • Arthur Beinor, “The Hereke Factory,” Hali 60 (1993): 75–83.