The Manastir kilim, a small category of textiles, has primarily thrown up questions and only provided very few hesitant answers.  Though known by this name for the past twenty years, only single items turn up by that name on the market, and very little knowledge about them exists.  A variety of assumptions about their origins have been in circulation: they were either known as Balkan kilims or west Anatolian kilims.  The name “Balkan kilim” made them unattractive to the market and, consequently, also to the collector; it was a devaluation in the hierarchy of provenance because they were not “really Turkish.”  This prejudice needs to be corrected as our comprehension of the connected cultural content strongly deviates from the Turkish interpretation of its own history.