If we look back we must confess that all the major exhibitions in Europe in the last years dealt with kilims. Piled pieces were not excluded but played a minor role. Specifically, the exhibitions include "Kult-Kilim" in Köln; the wonderful special show-and-tell on a castle in the Mühlviertel in northwestern Austria (collection Dr. Prammer), Traunstein (kind of "Yayla 2" ), Graz (under the leadership of Helmut Reinisch), the important congress on radiocarbon dating of kilims and the accompanying exhibition in Riehen/Basel (organized by Jürg Rageth), the combination of important kilims and steel sculpture in Essen (my, M.B, personal favourite of all kilim exhibitions until now) and now "Kelim, Textil Kunst aus Anatolien" in the Deutsches Textilmuseum in Krefeld, until May 5, 2003.

The most suitable method for repairing damaged textiles depends very much on the reason for repairing it. Is the textile a work of art, or of a relatively high level of home decoration? We believe that these are opposed to each other. The second includes much more than 90% of the trade, including the market for so called collectors pieces.

In 1953, Cecil Edwards published his important book, The Persian Carpet (1).   Edwards may well be single-handedly responsible for the modern assessment of Luri rugs.  In discussing the rugs of the Fars region, he breaks down the output of rugs from this area as 15% Qashqai, 40% Khamseh, 44% Village Persian and 1% Luri

Of the Fars Mamassani and Hulagu Lurs he points out that they are mostly settled.  “The output of these two tribes is insignificant.”   “During my stay in Shiraz in 1948 I came across only two pieces – neither of which was of any particular merit.”

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.

Islamic art in general is poorly understood and the appreciation of Islamic, Moroccan textiles is a case in point. Western markets seem more prepared to recognise the pre-Islamic and pagan origins of kilims than they do the influence of Islam; this anthropological approach misconstrues the art as backward rather than progressive.  Reference is made to a number of misconceptions in the literature - barakha, jinn, alms and marriage dowries - and an Islamic interpretation offered to assist readers in developing a truer appreciation of these textiles, which deserve a place in any comprehensive account of 20th century art.

"When I was seventeen, it was a very good year", sung The Kingston Trio from the radio in the dashboard, and I wholeheartedly agreed. Now I was eighteen, and it was an even better year. The summer of 1966 saw me in a small band of friends roving the higher latitudes of Scandinavia in an old Volkswagen Beetle, enjoying life under the midnight sun and the company of nice Finnish girls. No thoughts of rugs at this time. But I had been working on it. The year before, in Belgrade, I had acquired my first kelim.

This subject would have seemed illegitimate just a few years ago because rug weaving wasn't thought of as a significant Armenian enterprise throughout most of the 20th century. Even today some rug enthusiasts feel that Armenian rugs are only those inscribed with Armenian writing. It has largely been through the work of the Armenian Rug Society and its members that we are now coming to terms with the important role Armenians have played in rug culture and more specifically in Caucasian rug weaving through the ages.

The current category of collectable Armenian rugs is mainly composed of rugs inscribed with Armenian writing and dates. This trend in Armenian rug connoisseurship deflects world attention away from the larger impact Armenian weavers had on Caucasus Mountain weaving and design.

This paper describes a possible mechanism for early Turcoman design evolution and more specifically how a 13th century Turcoman border design evolved into the field design or gull of a later 14th century Turcoman Rug. The borders of all classic Turcoman weavings have been under analyzed versus field decorations, especially tribal gulls. The fragment pictured below, slide #1, is from a 13th century Turcoman fragment at the TIME, Istanbul. The TIME also has a complete similar carpet on exhibition and it is extremely large, at least four times the surface area of traditional Turcoman main carpets.

A great carpet from the Alexander or Kirchheim collections (Alexander, 1993; Kirchheim, Franses et al., 1993) transcends its materials and connects with the viewer in much the same way as would another living being. But what is it that gives "life" to a carpet? Lovers of old carpets instinctively know what is beautiful, yet many points in that assessment are only subconscious. The following discussion tries to raise such factors to a conscious level. By codifying the principles underlying the design of carpets, it may eventually be possible to compute the "life" of a carpet as a mathematical coefficient from the design.

How many times have we heard that oriental rugs make great investments. Do they? There are certainly many that have been. One that is fairly well known is the Salor tent bag that went through the hands of a couple of dealers before a third one recognized it for what it was, bought it for less than $1,000, and made a killing on it. Another is the Saryk torba that languished with a $300 price tag in a New Orleans antique shop for many years, then found its way to Skinner's in Boston a few years ago and sold for over $23,000 (this piece was included in the ICOC "Atlantic Collections" catalog). Tales like these are enough to give many a customer visions of a retirement nest egg with aesthetics (do monthly statements from stock brokers and mutual funds have that!). How realistic is the prospect that you can get finds like those often enough to accumulate wealth by buying rugs? Not very much better than hitting the lottery, maybe even worse.