Red Hand-Knotted Wool Ayvacık Prayer Rug

Ayvacık is a district of Çanakkale on the Turkish Aegean coast, across the strait from Lesbos, and village weaving there never stopped. This is one of its rugs: a hand-knotted wool prayer rug in red, dyed with madder and the other root dyes, its yarn spun on a hand spindle, 81 × 132 cm (2'8" × 4'4").

01Reading the motif

Halıcızade keeps it with the rare pieces. A prayer rug is built around one asymmetric figure — the mihrab, a niche that comes to a point at one end and shows the direction of prayer. Everything else on the rug, the borders and the spandrels at the shoulders of the niche and whatever hangs inside it, is arranged around that single direction. It is why a seccade never looks right laid sideways.

02What Wool does

Eighty-one centimeters is the width of one person kneeling, and that is the measurement it was drawn to. The wool was spun on a kirmen, the hand spindle Anatolian women use to turn fleece into yarn.

03At the loom in in Türkiye

It is slower than a wheel and never perfectly even, which is why hand-spindle yarn gives a surface that takes light in bands rather than flatly. Root dyes behave the same way: two lots of madder from two seasons are never the same red, so the ground steps in horizontal stripes from one end to the other. In the trade that is called abrash, and it is read as evidence rather than as a fault. Wool above, cotton beneath, every knot tied by hand in Türkiye.

04What the yarn is

Wash it professionally and improvise nothing on a rug dyed this way. Hand-knotted in wool in Ayvacık, Çanakkale, on the Turkish Aegean coast. Yarn hand-spun on a kirmen spindle rather than machine-spun. Madder and other root dyes; the red steps in bands where the lots changed. Prayer-rug drawing, built around a mihrab niche that points one way. 81 × 132 cm (2'8" × 4'4") — the width and length of one person kneeling. Wool pile on a cotton foundation. Wash it professionally, and nothing else. One of the house's rare listings, and a single piece. What makes a rug a prayer rug? The drawing does.

A prayer rug carries a mihrab — an arched niche, pointed at one end — and the whole composition is oriented to it, so the rug has a top and a bottom. Size follows from use: it is woven for a single person kneeling. What is kirmen yarn? Kirmen is the Anatolian hand spindle, and kirmen yarn is fleece spun on it by hand rather than on a wheel or a machine.

05Coming off the loom

The thickness varies slightly along the strand, so the yarn takes dye at uneven strengths and the finished pile catches light in bands. It is small enough to hang, and a great many rugs of this kind finish on a wall instead of a floor — not what they were woven for, but it is what keeps them.