BACK TO TRANSYLVANIA
Rediscovering Antiquer Ottoman Rugs
Alberto Boralevi

About a year ago, back in the spring of 2002, I returned to Transylvania.
I had already visited this splendid region thirty years before and, naturally, I stopped to visit the famous Black Church of Brasov (Kronstadt),1 an obligatory halt for anyone interested in carpets. Even then, although I had little knowledge and my carpet studies were just beginning, I had been deeply impressed (fig.1). Such a lot of antique Turkish rugs hanging on the walls and between the pews, hanging from the balconies, laid out like festoons around the columns and on the high backs of the chorus stalls and in the apse! My first reaction was to ask myself why there were so many: I was in an Evangelical church, not a mosque, in which a rug has a ritual and liturgical role to play, and is indeed called a Ôprayer rugÕ. At the time, I could find no satisfactory answer, apart from the usual tales that were told of adventurous merchants returning from the East laden with precious goods, and leaving a rug as a gift for their safe return to Christian lands as a sort of ex-voto in the first church they came to. ...

The art of carpet-making in the North Caucasus has a centuries-old history that developed during many years of artistic weaving, in which the methods of decorative design of carpet fabrics and the technological methods of their manufacture were created and perfected. Characteristic features of the carpets are their strength and durability, softness and low heat conductivity, and most importantly, their high artistic qualities that contributed to their wide spreading in Caucasian nations since ancient times. Widely used in the everyday life of these nations, carpet-making became a significant handicraft. Some materials in the highly developed carpet-making in the Caucasus date back to the 7th-8th centuries. One of the first mentions of Caucasian carpets can be found in the works of the Arabian historian Tabary (839-923), who wrote that as early as the 22nd year of Hidjry (642), carpets of high quality were being produced in the north-eastern part of Azerbaijan. Tabary showed that the territory of the north-eastern part of Azerbaijan was the largest centre of carpet-making in the Caucasus-Lesghi-Azerbaijan area...

I was a member of the Local Organizing Committee for ICOC X. So my perspective is necessarily somewhat suspect from the beginning, but IÕll do my best to be objective.
ICOC X was planned and held under difficult circumstances. The fact that most Western economies are in the doldrums did not help, but a chief difficulty was the international situation, which some Europeans and others suggested made them reluctant to travel.
In addition, we were stuck with the Easter-Passover weekend if we wanted to use the Omni-Shoreham Hotel, since this was the only weekend in the entire year when they could offer us sufficient space to set up five in-hotel exhibitions. Jerry Silverman has on Turkotek.com already described ICOC X as the conference of the ÒunbelieversÓ and there may be some truth, for the two seders we carefully arranged in the hotel drew not a single person.
....