Multicolor Handwoven Wool Konya Akören Kilim

Three meters and ninety-three centimeters long: 158 × 393 cm (5'2" × 12'11"), which makes this a room-length kilim rather than a rug. Handwoven in wool in Akören, a district southwest of Konya, multicolored, flat-woven, and there is exactly one of it. Length like this is the reason old Anatolian flatweaves are so often found folded. They were made for houses laid out along a long room, where a kilim ran the length of the floor and people sat at its edges, and modern rooms are shaped the other way.

01Where it sits in the house

Finding a place for it is the real question, and the honest answer is that it suits a long hall, a wide landing or a big open kitchen better than it suits a sitting room. Nothing else about it is difficult: wool front and back, no pile, light enough for one person to fold and carry. The pattern was counted rather than copied off a sheet, so the figures drift a little from one end of a piece this long to the other, and the color steps wherever a dye lot gave out and a new one took over.

02From the hand of the weaver

Both are properties of hand weaving at length, and on a four-meter kilim they are unavoidable. Flat weaving has no pile to hide a stain and no thickness to absorb one, so whatever goes on it reaches the floor within seconds. Handwoven in wool at Akören, in the Konya region. 158 × 393 cm (5'2" × 12'11") — long enough for a hall, a landing or an open kitchen. Kilim flatweave: no pile, and the pattern legible on both faces. Multicolored, counted from memory, so the drawing shifts along its length. The color steps at every change of dye lot. Light for its size; one person can fold it. Nothing absorbs a spill on a flatweave. Cleaning is specialist work, and worth doing rarely.

03Knot by knot, by hand

One piece, woven to a room rather than to a size chart. Rooms this shape have mostly stopped being built, which is the only real argument against it.