Navy and Red Yağcıbedir Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

A column of heart forms runs down the middle of this rug and stars and flower shapes fill in around them: a hand-knotted Yağcıbedir in navy and red wool, 171 × 245 cm (5'7" × 8'0"), pile and foundation both wool, woven in the Sındırgı hills of Balıkesir. Its proportions sit outside the standard rug sizes, and that is part of why it looks the way it does.

Red rises off the deep navy rather than sitting on it, because almost nothing stands between the two tones to soften the meeting — cream appears in small quantities only, and where it does it sharpens a motif instead of lightening the field. Symmetrical figures repeat through the borders the whole way round, so the field is closed on all four sides and the eye stays inside it. This is drawing that was memorized rather than drafted, and the symmetry is approximate in the way memorized things are.

The pattern travelled from the Taurus range to Sındırgı with Yörük herders, and women have knotted it there in the same fixed vocabulary ever since. Wool on wool gives a dense, flexible fabric that lies flat without a pad underneath it, and the knot count here is high for the class. What a rug like this will not do is disappear into a room. It is the strongest thing on any floor it goes on, so a space that already carries pattern will fight it.

• Hand-knotted wool on wool, in Sındırgı, Balıkesir.
• 171 × 245 cm (5'7" × 8'0") — narrower and longer than the usual rug proportion.
• Hearts in a central column, with stars and flower forms around them.
• Deep navy ground, red motifs, cream used sparingly for definition.
• Symmetrical border figures on all four sides.
• Knotted from memory, which is why the repeats are close rather than exact.
• A high knot count, in the Yağcıbedir manner.
• A single piece. Washing by a rug specialist.

It was made to be walked on for fifty years, and it is at the beginning of that.