Multicolor Burdur Handwoven Wool Cicim Kilim

The name Burdur on a cicim is not loose description — the district holds a registered geographical indication for its kilims, so the word is legally tied to the place. This handwoven wool cicim kilim measures 196 × 354 cm (6'5" × 11'7"), is multicolored, is forty to fifty years old, and spent nearly all of that time folded in a chest. What comes out of a chest after half a century looks wrong at first, because it looks new.

01After the color

The reds have not gone to rose, the greens have not gone gray, and the cicim motifs still stand off the ground the way they did on the loom. Burdur drawing is dense and small in scale; the raised threads carry it in rows and the ground barely shows between them.

02From the hand of the weaver

The age is in the record and in the wool, not on the surface. Handwoven in the Burdur district, in wool, by weavers working the cicim technique — a plain ground with the motif laid over it in an added yarn. The geographical indication is an intellectual-property registration rather than a quality grade: it governs where a piece may be woven to carry the name, and says nothing about any individual kilim. What is unusual here is not the age, which is common enough in chest-kept weaving, but the size.

03The rule of care

Send it to a professional washer and leave it at that. Why does a fifty-year-old kilim look new? Because it was never used. In Anatolian households a woven piece often went into the dowry chest and stayed there, out of sunlight and off the floor, so neither light nor feet ever reached it.

04Knot by knot, by hand

The wool ages, the dyes do not fade, and the piece arrives with its original colors intact. Handwoven in the Burdur district of southwestern Türkiye, in wool. Cicim: motif threads added above a plain flat ground, so the drawing stands proud. Burdur kilims hold a registered geographical indication tying the name to the district. Forty to fifty years old: vintage in trade usage, which has no issuing body behind it. Multicolored and unfaded, having been stored instead of walked on. 196 × 354 cm (6'5" × 11'7"): long and wide enough for a whole seating group. Washing by a specialist in old flatweaves. One piece. The next fifty years are the ones it was actually woven for, and they start whenever it comes out of the wrapping.