Red Anatolian Medallion Loom-Woven Wool Rug, Tempus Series

Eight sizes: the smallest is 80 × 150 cm, the largest 300 × 400 cm — that is 9'10" by 13'1" — and an 80 × 300 cm runner sits between them. What they all carry is an Anatolian medallion drawing in wool over a cotton warp, red throughout, with the symmetrical figure at its center worked in white and blue, woven on Aegean looms in Türkiye. Around the medallion the field fills with flower motifs of the Anatolian kind, mirrored across both axes so that the halves answer each other exactly — the symmetry is the point, and it is what lets a busy pattern stay orderly at four square meters and at twelve.

01After the color

White is doing the drawing, blue is doing the cooling, red is doing everything else. In a room of dark wood and older furniture the rug looks like something that came with the house. Put it on pale boards under steel and glass and the red becomes the only warm thing in the space, which is a harder and better trick. Wool in the surface over a cotton warp, in a district whose grandmothers knotted by hand and whose workshops now do the structural work with mechanical help.

02From the hand of the weaver

Medium thickness, packed tightly, so the piece has real weight in the hand without the year of knotting behind it — and it sheds very little. Halıcızade has been deciding which patterns stay in Tempus for twenty years, and this is one of the survivors rather than one of the additions. The house tree of life goes into every piece.

03Where the Medallion comes from

At the largest size it takes two to move it. Loom-woven in the Aegean region of Türkiye. Wool surface on a cotton warp, medium thickness, densely packed. A symmetrical Anatolian medallion in white and blue on red, with flower motifs filling the field. Very low lint release in daily use. Bears the Halıcızade tree of life. Eight sizes: 80 × 150, 100 × 150, 80 × 300, 130 × 190, 160 × 230, 200 × 300, 250 × 350 and 300 × 400 cm. Professional washing; the salon size is a two-person lift. Symmetry is what makes an old pattern legible from a doorway, and this one was drawn to be read from the far side of a big room.