Kilim Motifs and Meanings: How to Read a Flatweave

Kilim motifs are the geometric figures woven into Anatolian flatweaves — elibelinde, ram's horn, eye, hook, tree of life — built from stepped diagonals because slit-weave construction cannot draw a curve. The meanings attached to them come mostly from twentieth-century collectors and ethnographers rather than from weavers' own recorded words.

This page is about the motifs of flat weaving specifically: why they look the way they do, what the loom does to them, which regions draw them differently, and the dowry tradition most of them were woven for. The full dictionary of Turkish rug and kilim ornament — every named figure, pile and flat alike — is in the companion piece on Turkish rug and kilim motifs. What follows does not repeat it.

Why kilim motifs are angular

Because of a slit. In the classic Anatolian kilim the pattern is made by the weft alone, and each color's weft turns back on the last warp of its own block rather than crossing into the next color. Where two colors meet along a vertical line, the fabric is simply not joined — a narrow gap opens between them, the ilik, the slit that gives slit-weave its name. Hold a handwoven kilim up to a window and the outlines of the pattern glow as thin vertical lines of daylight.

A slit is a structural weakness, and a long one is a tear waiting to happen. So the weaver moves the boundary sideways: one warp over every few passes of the weft, then another. That single habit is responsible for the entire look of Anatolian flat weaving. A vertical edge becomes a staircase. A circle becomes an octagon or a lozenge. A stem becomes a zigzag. Every rounded thing in the world arrives at the loom and leaves it with corners.

Knotted pile has no such constraint. Each knot is tied around its own pair of warps and holds whatever color it likes without weakening anything, so a pile weaver can round an outline as finely as the knot count allows — which is why the curling floral drawing of a fine court rug is possible on a hand-knotted rug and impossible on a kilim. The difference between an angular motif and a curvilinear one is not a difference of taste between two peoples. It is a difference of technique, and you can see it in the fabric.

The same logic explains the compromises. A weaver who wants a longer vertical line without a long slit can wrap the two wefts around a shared warp as she passes — dovetailing — which closes the gap and blurs the edge slightly. Where you see a crisp, lit outline, the kilim is slit-woven. Where the edge is toothed and solid, it is not.

Kilim, cicim, zili and sumak

Four techniques, one loom, one comb. Everyday Turkish calls all of them kilim; the weaving tradition does not. All four are beaten down with the kirkit, the heavy toothed comb, and all four are pileless. What changes is the route the patterning yarn takes across the surface.

Technique	How the pattern is made	Surface	Traditional use
Kilim	Colored wefts interlace with the warps and turn back at each color change, leaving a slit	Completely flat, the two faces identical	Floor spread, wall panel, prayer kilim
Cicim	Extra colored yarns are laid over the ground weave as it proceeds	Motifs stand separately on a visible ground, as though embroidered	Covers, cushions, small spreads
Zili	Pattern yarns float over the whole surface in two-over-one or three-over-one steps	Ribbed, slightly raised, strongly linear	Spreads, cushions, sacks
Sumak	Pattern yarns are wrapped around the warps rather than passed between them	Dense braided or chain-like face, very hard-wearing	Saddlebags, storage sacks, spreads

Only the first of the four is bound by the slit. Cicim, zili and sumak lay their pattern yarn on top of a ground that is already holding itself together, so their motifs can be smaller, denser and a little freer — which is why a cicim reads as needlework and a kilim reads as architecture. Villages mix them in one piece routinely. Compare Anatolian kilims with the modern kilim range to see how far the same four techniques stretch.

What the motifs are said to mean, and who says so

One thing has to be said plainly before the list. Almost none of the standard motif meanings comes from a weaver on record explaining her own work. They were assembled in the twentieth century, largely from the 1960s onward, by collectors, dealers and ethnographers who interviewed village women late in the tradition's life, compared regional names, and reached back into folklore and mythology to fill the gaps. Different compilers reached different readings for the same figure. The line that traces kilim motifs directly to the wall paintings of Çatalhöyük in the seventh millennium BC is one of those reconstructions — proposed by the site's first excavator, repeated everywhere since, and never confirmed by the archaeology.

That does not make the readings worthless. It makes them a second thing rather than the first: a well-documented body of interpretation, roughly a century old, that Turkish weaving families themselves now use and teach. Read below as "this is what the motif is called and what it is taken to mean," not "this is what the woman at the loom in 1890 intended." The honest version is more interesting anyway.

The figures that belong most specifically to flat weaving:

• Elibelinde — "hands on hips," a standing female figure reduced to a triangle, two crooked arms and a headdress. Taken to stand for motherhood and fertility. It is the most frequently woven figure in the corpus, and the stepped construction is why it has elbows instead of shoulders.
• Koçboynuzu — the ram's horn, a pair of opposed hooks, read as strength and male authority. It also served as a clan brand among the Oğuz tribes, so on some kilims it is closer to a signature than to a symbol.
• Bereket — the fertility composition: two elibelinde and two ram's horns crossing at the center, with an eye set in the middle. Read as the founding of a household and the protection of it.
• Göz and muska — the eye, drawn as nested lozenges, and the amulet, a triangle standing for a folded written charm. Both against the evil eye, and both easy to draw well in steps, which is part of why they are everywhere.
• Bukağı — the hobble, the tether tied to a horse's foreleg. Read as the binding of a family, and as the attachment of lovers.
• Sandık — the dowry chest, a stepped rectangle. Read as a girl's trousseau and her readiness to marry, and in some districts, on the same drawing, as death. One figure with two contrary readings is the clearest evidence there is that the vocabulary is regional rather than fixed.
• Kurt ağzı — the wolf's mouth or wolf track, woven by shepherds' households as protection of the flock from the animal the motif depicts.
• Su yolu — the waterway, a running zigzag in the border, read as the continuity of life. It is also what a weft does naturally when it is asked to make a diagonal, which may be the whole explanation.
• Mihrab and ibrik — the pointed niche of a prayer kilim and the ewer set beside it. See prayer rugs for how the directional composition works.
• Hayat ağacı — the tree of life, treated at length in the tree of life motif.

Regional dialects

Every weaving district draws the same words with a different accent, and the accent is usually easier to identify than the words.

• Konya and Karapınar. A weaving center since the Seljuks. The Konya plain kilims — Karapınar, Hotamış, Ereğli, Ilgın Çiğil — run to white or ivory grounds, wide-spaced compositions with air around each figure, and Oğuz clan brands. The largest Anatolian pieces come from here.
• Malatya. Its own naming tradition, entirely local: palaz, sandıklı, gözü ak, harar, çıbıklı, kanatlı. Most are woven in two narrow halves, the şak, and joined down the middle — look for the seam. Strong, quick color changes.
• The Aegean and the Taurus. Yörük nomadic weaving along the Fethiye, Aydın, Mut and Döşemealtı line: the deepest indigo and the deepest madder in Anatolia, sharp geometry, small formats made to be carried. See Döşemealtı rugs for the pile version of the same taste.
• Van and Hakkari. Eastern Anatolian tribal weaving: dark grounds, few motifs, each of them large, and clan brands used openly.
• Şarköy. The Thracian and Balkan school, also called Şarköy-Pirot. Burgundy grounds, flowers drawn almost naturalistically, and a weave fine and light enough to be recognized across a room.

"Village weaving" is not a region but a condition: a piece made on a household loom to the size and taste of the house, answering to nobody's catalog. It is why two kilims from one village can be five centimeters apart in width and neither is wrong.

The dowry chest

Most of the finest old Anatolian kilims were woven for a trousseau, not for sale. A girl's weaving went into the sandık, the dowry chest, and it was the piece the two families examined during a marriage negotiation. Her handling of a difficult composition, the evenness of her selvedges and the steadiness of her color were taken as evidence of patience and judgment, which meant that the best work in a household went into the object with no market price attached to it.

The materials followed from the same closed economy. Wool came off the family's own sheep, was spun by hand on a spindle, and was dyed at home — madder root, Rubia tinctorum, for red; indigo for blue; walnut husk for brown; vine leaf and chamomile for the yellows. Dyeing in small household lots is exactly why old kilims have abrash, the horizontal band where one dye batch ran out and the next began. It is the signature of hand work rather than a fault. If you want to test a piece yourself, the methods are in natural versus synthetic dyes.

That world ended in stages across the twentieth century, and the weavings left it in the other direction — from the chest to the collector. William Morris's interest in Anatolian weaving helped found kilim collecting in Britain, and the 1910 Munich exhibition of Islamic art moved Anatolian pieces into the international art market for good. The oldest survivors now come up at auction; how they are graded is covered in antique versus vintage handwoven rugs.

Reading the one in front of you

Start with the structure, not the symbols. Turn the kilim over: a flatweave has no back, only a second front, and if the two faces are not near-identical you are looking at cicim, zili, sumak or a machine-woven piece. Then hold it to the light and look for the slits at the vertical color boundaries. Then look at the selvedges and the ends, where wear starts, and at the joins if it is a Malatya-style piece in two halves.

Only then read the field. A single motif tells you very little; the composition tells you more. A prayer niche with an ewer and a lamp is a devotional object, whatever else is in it. Elibelinde with ram's horns and an eye at the crossing is a household piece, and it was almost certainly a dowry weaving. A border of nothing but running waterway and a field of scattered clan brands is a nomadic piece from a household that had no reason to explain itself to a buyer.

Living with one is simple, because there is no pile to crush. Vacuum both faces without the brush head and keep the nozzle off the fringes. Blot spills rather than rubbing them, and test any cleaning agent on a corner first, since natural dyes can move. Store a kilim rolled and not folded, in a dry place, with acid-free paper between the turns. For a full wash, use a professional who will keep the water below 30°C and dry the piece flat in shade — how a rug is washed covers the rest. Browse handwoven kilims to see the techniques above in finished pieces.

Frequently asked questions

Why are kilim motifs angular instead of curved?

Because slit-weave construction leaves a gap wherever two colors meet along a vertical line. A long gap weakens the fabric, so weavers step the boundary sideways every few rows, and every outline becomes a diagonal or a staircase. Knotted pile has no such limit and can draw curves.

Do kilim motifs really have fixed meanings?

No. The standard readings were assembled in the twentieth century by collectors and ethnographers rather than recorded from weavers at work, and the same figure carries different meanings in different districts. They are a well-documented body of interpretation, not documented weaver testimony.

What is the slit in a slit-woven kilim?

It is the narrow vertical gap left where one color's weft turns back on its own warp instead of crossing into the next color. Held up to a window, a handwoven slit-woven kilim shows these openings as thin lines of light along the pattern edges.

What is the difference between a kilim and a knotted rug?

A kilim has no pile. Its pattern is made by the colored weft itself, packed down over the warp, which makes it thin, light and usable on both faces. A knotted rug carries individually tied lengths of yarn that stand up as pile on one side only.

What does the elibelinde motif mean?

Elibelinde means "hands on hips" and shows a standing female figure reduced to a triangle with crooked arms. It is conventionally read as motherhood and fertility, and it is the most frequently woven figure in the Anatolian kilim repertoire.

What is the sandık motif?

Sandık is the dowry chest, drawn as a stepped rectangle. It is usually read as a young woman's trousseau and her readiness to marry, though several districts read the same drawing as death instead. The contradiction is normal in this vocabulary.

What makes one kilim cost more than another?

Technique first, since cicim, zili and sumak take far more labor than plain slit-weave. Then the yarn, because hand-spun wool and natural dyes cost more than industrial yarn. Then age, rarity, the number of colors and the condition of the weave.

Related reading: the full Turkish rug and kilim motif glossary · handwoven kilims · Anatolian kilims · the Pazyryk rug