On Birds and Bektashis: Two Tribal Animal Rugs of Ḳaramān, 1450-1550

Register Now

Despite growing literature on tribal carpets, little is known on early nomadic Anatolian carpets with only scant evidence on their tribal nature. The case of two Central Anatolian Animal Rugs of Karamania from circa 1450 to 1550—the Vakıflar “Bird-Tree” Rug and the Mevlānā Forty-Birds Rug—endeavors to shed light on their socio-cultural background by cross-referencing carpets with historic sources and diverse bird-tree iconographies.

First, Balkan suggests that both rugs can soundly be attributed to Türkmen clans— hypothetically even to the At-Çeken tribe—or the Karamanian Horse Drovers who roamed a large territory from the southern Taurus mountains passed Konya into the northern plains up to Ankara. Secondly, it is argued that the weavers and in-woven bird themes are reflections of early Turkic cosmic understandings, intricately connected to a Bektashi culture then on the rise. Lastly, a rare documentary evidence makes up the female / tribal argument, revealing that with greater certainty both carpets are tribal rugs made by
(semi-) nomadic women.

The tribal Türkmen-to-Bektashi proximity is an understudied area in carpet studies and bears great potential in understanding tribal weaves and their context in premodern Central Anatolia: by reading carpets and iconographies methodologically against historic, sufi, and oral literature, one may only start to unveil the rich mythological and cosmic worlds behind the apparent simple lattice of warps, wefts and knots.

Ahmet Balkan is an architect and historian focusing on tribal Turkic weavings from Anatolia over the Caucasus to Turkestan. He holds an M.Sc. in architecture from Istanbul Technical University (2005) and an M.A. in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (2023) through his thesis Confronting Birds: Central Anatolian Tribal Carpets of Ḳaramān, 1450-1600. Recently, Balkan began his doctoral study on the History and Culture of the Near East at the LMU Munich continuing his work on Anatolian tribal carpets, with particular focus on Turkoman tribes and their adjacency to Sufism. In parallel, Ahmet is leading a large-scale Caucasian flatweave project at the Theodor Springmann Foundation in Heidelberg.