Turkish Rug and Kilim Motifs: A Glossary of Names and Meanings

Turkish rug and kilim motifs are a vocabulary of named geometric figures woven into Anatolian rugs and flat-woven kilims — elibelinde (hands on hips), koçboynuzu (ram's horn), hayat ağacı (tree of life), göz (eye), su yolu (running water), pıtrak (burr), çengel (hook) and a few dozen more. The names are recorded. The symbolic meanings are largely a twentieth-century reconstruction.

This page is a glossary. Each entry gives the Turkish name, what it literally means, what the figure looks like on the rug, what it is traditionally read to mean, and how well that reading is actually attested. That last column is what most writing on the subject leaves out, and leaving it out is how a folk vocabulary turns into a horoscope. For the flat-weave side of the tradition in more depth — regional kilim schools, weave structures and how motifs behave in a weft-faced ground — read our companion article on kilim motifs and their meanings.

How much of the meaning is actually documented?

The names are well attested; the symbolism is a mixture of documented belief, plausible reconstruction and later invention, and the three are worth keeping apart.

Weavers name their patterns, and the names travel. Ask a weaver in a village near Balıkesir what a figure is called and you will get a word — koçboynuzu, pıtrak, elibelinde — and often a note on where she learned it. That layer is ethnographic fact. Most of these names are also plainly descriptive: koçboynuzu really is drawn like a ram's horn, sandıklı really is a chest shape, su yolu really does run in a band like water. A descriptive name needs no theory to explain it.

The second layer is the published meaning, and it has a shorter history than its confidence suggests. The great majority of the symbolic readings in circulation were written down in the twentieth century, by collectors, ethnographers and museum catalogers, and consolidated into printed motif dictionaries from roughly the 1980s onward. When researchers went back to the looms, weavers could reliably name a motif and place it regionally; many offered no symbolic reading at all, having inherited the pattern without the explanation. Semiotic studies of kilim design also find that meaning is carried by the arrangement — which motif sits in the field, which in the border, what repeats and what stands alone — as much as by any single figure. A motif dictionary that gives one word per shape is already a simplification.

The third layer is the deep-prehistory claim, and it is the weakest. Elibelinde is routinely traced to a Neolithic mother-goddess cult, usually by way of the seated female figurines excavated at Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia. The figurines are real and the resemblance is genuine. The transmission is not documented. Between Neolithic Anatolia and a nineteenth-century village loom there is no surviving chain of textiles to follow: the oldest knotted pile rug known anywhere is the Pazyryk rug from a frozen Scythian tomb in the Altai, roughly two and a half thousand years old and now in the Hermitage, and the oldest group from Anatolia itself was found in the Alâeddin Mosque in Konya and dates to the Seljuk thirteenth century. Wool does not last. What survives is a gap.

One more caution before the glossary. The same shape carries different names in different valleys, and the same name attaches to different shapes. Regional variation is the rule, not the exception, and any table — including the one below — is a flattening of it.

The glossary at a glance

Ten motifs account for most of what you will meet on an Anatolian rug or kilim.

Motif	Literal meaning	What it looks like	Traditionally read as
Elibelinde	"hand on hip"	A stylized standing female figure, arms bent out to the waist, often in a repeating column	Femininity, motherhood, fertility
Bereket	"abundance"	A central dot or diamond flanked by paired horn-like arms	The family, protected by the pair around it
Koçboynuzu	"ram's horn"	Paired spirals or hooked scrolls curling away from a stem	Male strength, productivity, heroism
Hayat ağacı	"tree of life"	A vertical stem with symmetrical branches, sometimes with birds in it	The link between earth and sky; birth, life, return
Göz / nazarlık	"eye" / "eye-charm"	Concentric squares or diamonds, most often worked in blue	Deflection of the evil eye
Su yolu	"water course"	A running zigzag or wave band, usually in a border	Water, movement, vitality
Pıtrak	"burr"	A dense, spiky cross-shaped burst, often small and repeated	Warding off the evil eye; also plenty, from the burr-laden plant
Kurt ağzı	"wolf's mouth"	An angular jaw or opposed-triangle figure; the related kurt izi is a paw-print form	Protection of the flock from wolves
Çengel	"hook"	A hooked arm, latched onto a medallion edge or repeated as a border	Averting harm; joining, holding fast
Sandıklı	"with a chest"	A rectangular, boxed compartment, often in a stacked row	The dowry chest; readiness for marriage

The ten, one by one

Each entry below gives the name, the shape and the reading, followed by how firmly that reading stands up.

Elibelinde — "hand on hip"

A standing figure with a triangular or hourglass body and both arms bent out and down to the waist, most often repeated in vertical columns down the field. It is the single most recognizable Anatolian motif, and it keeps its Turkish name in the international kilim literature rather than being translated. The traditional reading is femininity and motherhood, and by extension fertility and abundance. The name and the shape are firmly documented; the mother-goddess genealogy behind them is interpretation, not record.

Bereket — "abundance"

A composite: a dot or small diamond at the center with paired horn-like or hooked arms enclosing it on either side. The published reading is domestic — the center is the household, the pair around it the couple, and the arrangement says the family is guarded. Bereket is often built out of elibelinde and koçboynuzu figures set together, which is why the two are so often confused. The composition is the meaning here more than any single element is.

Koçboynuzu — "ram's horn"

Paired spirals or hooked scrolls springing from a stem, sometimes a single horn, more often two curling in opposite directions. Read as male strength, productivity and heroism, and as the counterpart to elibelinde. This is a case where the descriptive name does most of the work: flocks were the wealth these communities lived on, and the ram is drawn as what it was.

Hayat ağacı — "tree of life"

A vertical stem with symmetrical branches, sometimes rooted in a vessel, sometimes with birds perched in it, and frequently used as the central axis of a prayer rug. Read as the connection between earth and sky, and as a whole life — born from nature, lived in respect of it, returned to it. The tree of life is a genuinely widespread figure rather than a Turkish invention, which is both its strength as a symbol and the reason the specific Anatolian reading is hard to isolate. Our separate article on the tree of life motif follows it in detail.

Göz and nazarlık — "eye" and "eye-charm"

Concentric squares, diamonds or lozenges, worked most often in blue, and placed where they will be seen — in borders, at corners, scattered through a field. The reading is protection against the evil eye, on the same principle as the blue glass bead. This is the best-supported symbolic reading in the whole vocabulary, because belief in the evil eye is independently and continuously documented in the same communities that wove the rugs, and the color choice matches the amulet exactly. The related muska is a triangular amulet figure, drawn as the folded paper charm it is named after.

Su yolu — "water course"

A running band of zigzags or waves, almost always in a border rather than the field. Read as water, and past that as movement, liveliness and life itself. For communities moving stock between pasture and water, the figure needs no elaborate explanation. A related figure, the small scattered dot or comb form, is read as a drop or a spring.

Pıtrak — "burr"

A small, dense, spiky burst, usually cross-shaped with barbed arms, repeated across a ground or run through a border. Two readings travel with it: the burr sticks and repels, so it turns away the evil eye; and a field thick with burrs is a field that has grown, so it signals plenty. The plant is real and common in Anatolia, and the name is descriptive. The two meanings sit side by side in the printed sources without either being decisive.

Kurt ağzı — "wolf's mouth"

An angular, jaw-like figure built from opposed triangles, usually in a border, and often paired with kurt izi, "wolf's track," drawn as a stepped paw print. Read as protection of the flock, on the logic that the drawn wolf keeps the live one away. The reading is coherent with the life the weavers led and is standard in the motif dictionaries — but it is a reading collected late, not a meaning recorded from the loom, and the same shape is called other things elsewhere.

Çengel — "hook"

A hooked arm, either latched onto the edge of a medallion or repeated as a border figure, and one of the most common structural elements in Anatolian design. Read as averting harm, and in a second sense as joining and holding fast. Hooks are also simply what a weaver draws when a curve has to be made on a grid, and part of their frequency is technical rather than symbolic.

Sandıklı — "with a chest"

A boxed rectangular compartment, usually stacked in a row down the field, named for the dowry chest. Woven, traditionally, by a young woman to say that her trousseau is complete and she is ready to marry. It belongs to a small group of motifs that function as statements rather than symbols — the küpe, or earring, carries the same message, and saç bağı, the hair tie, is read as the wish to marry and stay together.

Elibelinde and bereket: the pair that gets confused

They are confused because bereket is often made out of elibelinde, and because both are glossed "fertility."

The distinction that holds up is structural. Elibelinde is a single figure — one stylized woman, repeatable, legible on her own anywhere on the rug. Bereket is a composition: a center with a symmetrical pair enclosing it, and it stops meaning anything if you take one arm away. So elibelinde is read as a quality carried by a figure, while bereket is read as a relationship between figures. If a rug shows a column of identical hands-on-hips women, that is elibelinde repeated. If it shows a small central element held between two mirrored horn forms, that is bereket, whatever the individual parts are drawn from.

Both are commonly translated as "fertility," which is a translation problem more than a weaving one. Bereket in Turkish is closer to abundance or increase — of a harvest, a flock, a household — than to human fertility specifically.

The mythological layer: dragon, deer, eagle, child

A second group of motifs comes out of Turkic mythology rather than household life, and these carry the longest stories and the thinnest documentation.

The ejder, or dragon, is the figure most tied to livelihood. In the nomadic cosmology it begins its life underground and rises into the sky when it is grown, and it is what makes plants grow and pasture green. For herding communities that dependence was not metaphorical — the westward migrations that reshaped Eurasian history were driven by pasture running out. The dragon is what brings rain and therefore abundance, and what withholds it and therefore causes drought; it is respected and feared in the same breath. Dragons appear across most Asian mythologies, but the Turkic version is unusual in being bound this directly to herding and the grazing cycle.

The geyik, or deer, appears from far Asia to Scandinavia and into the Americas, and in Turkic mythology stands for the spirit of the nature that gives life, for inherited wisdom and for the right to rule. In the older belief the game animal is not evidence of human mastery over nature but a gift from it, owed the highest respect. Several Turkic states traced the source of their authority to deer totems.

The kartal, or eagle, comes from the bird totems of the twenty-four Oğuz tribes held to be the ancestors of the Anatolian Turks, each of which traced itself to a bird and used it as its emblem. From the fourteenth century the eagle is the most prominent of these in weaving, and the Anatolian Seljuk state's adoption of the double-headed eagle — Öksökö in the older mythology — carried it into rugs descending from that period. It is read as power, capability, just rule and good fortune.

The çocuk, or child, is among the oldest uses of the human figure in Turkish weaving, and it is usually connected to the mother-goddess narrative — in Turkic mythology Ak Ana, goddess of the waters and of the moon, described as a woman made of endless light, who tells Ülgen to create human beings. The child motif is read as that call to fertility, and as pure life and innocence.

Beyond these sit the rest of the vocabulary: akrep (scorpion), worked into borders and outer edges against a real hazard and, past that, against anything threatening the household from outside; bukağı (fetter), read as union and as the wish to be reunited; muska (amulet), a triangle for protection; el, parmak, tarak (hand, finger, comb), read as plenty, protection from the evil eye and fertility respectively; yıldız (star), the divine reflected in the human and the gifts granted to it; and the artı or cross, read as the four directions and the four elements.

Does the motif change between a pile rug and a kilim?

The vocabulary is shared; the drawing is not, because the two constructions impose different geometries.

A hand-knotted rug builds its pattern from knots tied around pairs of warps, row on row, so a curve can be approximated finely if the knot count is high enough. A flat-woven kilim has no pile at all: the weft itself makes the pattern, packed tight enough to hide the warp, and where two colors meet along a vertical line the weaving has to be slit or interlocked. That structural fact pushes kilim drawing toward diagonals, steps and hooks — which is one reason the hooked and angular motifs are strongest on the flat-weave side. The same elibelinde is squarer in a kilim and rounder in a fine pile rug, and both are the same motif.

Regional design schools cut across the same vocabulary again. Which motifs a rug carries, and in what palette, is often a better guide to where it was made than the motifs alone — see our guide to Afghan, Karabakh, Oushak and Yağcıbedir patterns and, for the flat-weave traditions specifically, the kilim motif reference.

Frequently asked questions

What do Turkish rug motifs mean?

Turkish rug and kilim motifs form a visual vocabulary for nature, fertility, protection, marriage and good fortune. Each figure carries a name and a traditional reading, and the arrangement on the rug — field, border, repeat — carries meaning alongside the individual motif.

What does the elibelinde motif mean?

Elibelinde means "hand on hip" and shows a stylized woman with both arms bent to the waist. It is read as femininity and motherhood, and by extension fertility and abundance. The name and shape are well documented; the link to a Neolithic mother goddess is an interpretation rather than a recorded tradition.

What is the difference between elibelinde and bereket?

Elibelinde is a single figure that reads on its own. Bereket is a composition: a central element enclosed by a mirrored pair, read as the family held between the couple. Bereket is often built from elibelinde and ram's horn forms, which is why the two are confused.

Why is the eye motif woven in blue?

Blue is the color of the glass eye-bead used against the evil eye across Anatolia, and the göz motif follows the amulet. This is the best-attested reading in the motif vocabulary, because belief in the evil eye is independently documented in the same communities that wove the rugs.

What does the ram's horn motif mean?

Koçboynuzu, "ram's horn," is drawn as paired spirals curling away from a stem and is read as male strength, productivity and heroism. Flocks were the wealth of the communities that wove these rugs, which makes the descriptive name and the reading hard to separate.

Are the meanings of Turkish motifs historically proven?

The names are documented and the shapes are consistent, but most symbolic readings were written down in the twentieth century by collectors and ethnographers. Weavers interviewed at the loom could reliably name motifs while often offering no symbolic reading, having inherited the pattern without the explanation.

What is the difference between a rug and a kilim?

A rug is knotted with a pile standing up from the foundation, while a kilim is flat-woven with no pile and its pattern made by the weft itself, so it is thinner and looks much the same on both faces. Most of the motifs in this glossary appear in both.

Related reading: kilim motifs and meanings · the tree of life motif · the Pazyryk rug · Anatolian rugs