Kilim Tours :: Cappadocia :: Live wtih Nomads

	Motifs and Meaning	What is Kilim?
	Hands on Hips : The basic design is a stylized female and it is the symbol of motherhood and fertility. Scorpion: Due to their fear of its venom, people used to carry jewelry in the form of a scorpion or decorated with the tail of a scorpion in order to protect themselves against this animal. Rams Horn : This motif is used as a symbol of fertility, heroism, power and masculinity. Star : The star motif on an Anatolian weaving generally means happiness and does not imply heaven for which a cloud, a dragon or a phoenix is used in many works including miniatures and other textiles. Wolf's Mouth: In Anatolia all press comb weaves except rugs are produced by nomad or seminomad tribes whose basic economic activity is cattle breeding, and the primary threat is the attack of wolves. People use those motifs as a means of protection against the wolves. Tree of Life: The tree is the common theme for all religions believing in a single god. Its fruit which is believed to bring immortality, is forbidden to all mortals when the serpent waiting the tree had convinced Eve to eat it. Mankind, unable to eat the fruit of immortality, put all their hopes on the life after death symbolized by a tree of life. Different cultures have used different plants such as cypress, date, palm, pomegranate, fig, olive, wine, beech and oak to symbolize the tree of life. In Anatolia the prominent figure is a cypress tree.
		Before we begin to address the subject of kilim nomenclature there is one point to be clarified, mainly for those first entering the realm of the kilim. Although at times you may find kilim rugs included in the general genre of "oriental rugs", in more accepted practice kilim rugs are in a class of their own, and it is then generally understood that the term "oriental rug" refers to pile rugs, a category which includes carpets. The difference between a kilim rug and a carpet or pile rug is that whereas the design visible on the kilim is made by interweaving the variously colored wefts and warps, thus creating what is known as a flatweave, in a pile rug individual short strands of different color, usually of wool, are knotted onto the warps and held together by pressing the wefts tightly against each other. In this case the whole design is made by these separately knotted strands which form the pile, and the patterns become clearly visible after any excessive lengths of the knotted materials are shorn off to create a level surface. Having thus differentiated between a kilim rug (pileless) and a carpet (with pile) you might think that's all there's to it. Well, not quite. Kilim, a word of Turkish origin, denotes a pileless textile of many uses produced by one of several flatweaving techniques that have a common or closely related heritage and are practiced in the geographical area that includes parts of Turkey (Anatolia and Thrace), North Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia and China. We believe this definition to be correct though incomplete, because, as all kilim lovers know, no words can convey the romance of the kilim. We try to fill this void by teaching you making kilims with the traditions, culture and heritage of kilim-making to make the romance live - and we hope you enjoy it. To get information about our Kilim Tours please go to Kilim Tours page
		Vegetable Dyes
		The wool in Oriental rugs are colored with dyes made from natural sources; mostly plants and insects. Cochineal is obtained from the Dactylopius coccus insect found in cacti, but the bulk of the reds were derived from the root of wild madder, blue from the indigo plant, yellow from saffron, isperek (milkwort), vine leaves and pomegranate, and also from buckthorn. Green came from turmeric berries, blacks and greys from brazil or logwood, brown from nuts and tree bark. These materials, carefully blended according to closely guarded recipes handed down from generation to generation, produced colors the hues of which cannot chemically reproduced even today.

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