Multicolor Sivas Zara Handwoven Wool Rug, Anadolu Şal Series

Zara is a district of Sivas province, high in central Anatolia, and it gives this rug its drawing. Handwoven from wool in Türkiye, 121 × 170 cm (4'0" × 5'7"), multicolor, from the Anadolu Şal series — Anadolu Şal means Anatolian shawl, after the woven shawls the series takes its patterning from. Sivas sits high and cold, and its weaving is correspondingly firm: angular motifs, strong outlines, colors used at full strength rather than blended.

01Up close to the pattern

The Zara drawing works in repeated bands and small filled forms, the shawl logic of a pattern that has to work at arm's length on cloth as well as at walking distance on a floor. Reds, greens and blues sit directly beside one another without a transitional tone, which is how Anatolian village weaving has always handled color and why it survives being copied badly so often. Wool throughout, and the knots were set by hand.

02Choosing the size

At 121 × 170 cm it is a bedside or a study size rather than a sitting-room one, and a small rug carrying this much color is best given a plain floor and left alone. Because it was worked by hand rather than from a printed cartoon, the motifs drift slightly out of alignment from row to row — that drift is the identifying mark of a hand-woven Anatolian piece and the first thing to look for.

03Knot by knot, by hand

Professional washing, and no household attempt at it. Handwoven from wool in Türkiye. 121 × 170 cm (4'0" × 5'7") — bedside, study or entrance. The pattern is named for Zara, in Sivas province. Anadolu Şal — Anatolian shawl — is the series the drawing belongs to. Full-strength color with no transitional tones between fields. The motifs drift row to row; that is hand weaving, not a defect. Professional washing. One piece. Where does the Sivas Zara pattern come from? Zara lies in Sivas province, in the central Anatolian highlands.

04The mark of slow weaving

Rugs woven there use angular, repeated motifs and unblended color, and the drawing sits closer to the geometry of Anatolian shawls than to the floral field of a workshop rug. What does Anadolu Şal mean? Anadolu Şal is Turkish for Anatolian shawl. Halıcızade uses it as the name of a series whose patterning is drawn from woven shawl cloth rather than from classical rug design, and the series name is never translated on the product itself. Small Anatolian rugs move around a house for fifty years and end up wherever they are needed, which is not true of most furniture.