The Diary of Young Explorers: Turkey

The Diary of Young Explorers is a collection of travel accounts from Ankur, Giulio, and Caspar, who are documenting their experiences while journeying from Venice, Italy to Xi'an, China. You can read the introduction to their adventure here: The Diary of Young Explorers: Retracing the Ancient Silk Roads.

The next step in our Silk Roads itinerary after the Balkans was Turkey, the bridge between Europe and Asia. Arriving in Istanbul we were immediately impressed by the cultural diversity of the people and mesh of influences that permeate the historic city. This cultural synthesis was perhaps most apparent in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, where we witnessed a cornucopia of goods from spices and fruits to electronics, antiques, clothing, and carpets of all shapes and sizes. The omnipresence and beauty of these latter objects marked our time in Turkey, a country where carpets are practical wall hangings, pictures, living room spreads, religious objects, and traditional ornaments, telling stories of times past. Our journey through Turkey would take us several thousand kilometres along the Western coast and Eastward into Anatolia and towards the Caucasus. In this piece we will focus on a small but important part of this journey in Cappadocia, in central Turkey, where we visited a carpet-making workshop and school.

The Avanos carpet making cooperative has been in operation for several generations. We visited the firm on one of its open days, and were given a tour of the workshop, exposition rooms and gardens. During our tour we were met by many of the firm’s Turkish staff, and were impressed by the diversity of languages spoken there, which included English, Italian, Russian, French, and Chinese, in part reflecting the diversity of tourists attracted by Cappadocia's breathtaking landscapes and the chance to see real carpet making.

The Avanos workshop contains around 250 looms, staffed principally by local women, who are taught at Avanos and might stay there for their entire careers. This training scheme provides the local youth with employment while also preserving the traditional craftsmanship of the area. Interestingly, once trained the women are given the option to take their loom home and work on carpets from there, enabling them to combine work and family life. On our tour of the workshop we were taught about the different motifs and stories which feature on the carpets. These included traditional Cappadocian tales, but also more modern stories about life in Turkey today, and universal motifs about humanity, nature, love and family.

Attached to the workshop is a materials room, which contains wools and cottons, as well as a silk production line. Most of Avanos’ carpets are made from a combination of these materials, but we were particularly interested in the silk. In one corner of the room were the white silk worms eating mulberry leaves. These worms spin cocoons, which are then dropped into a large pot of boiling water, before cocoon’s strands of silk are pulled apart and spun into thread. The thread is then dyed, using only natural products such as indigo and chamomile.

Carpets have been made for thousands of years and are iconic along the Silk Roads. The combination of materials (wool, cotton and silk), the stories on the carpets and the nationalities of the different buyers at Avanos reflect the cultural melting pot that has and continues to thrive along the Silk Road. While tourism and modern techniques have changed the carpet industry globally, at Avanos the traditional techniques in Cappadocian carpet making and silk production persist, blending together the local and the global, the old and the new.

 

Read their previous entries here:

- Introduction

-Venice

-The Balkans