And Then We Meet Arturo...

As we drove along the road toward Cappadocia, Janset got a call on her cell phone.  I had never seen her so excited.  She explained that her friend Arturo owns two businesses, one in Cappadocia and another in Kusadasi and she never knows where he is at one time, as he goes back and forth every couple weeks.  And he is one of her longest and most favorite friends!  He started a coop in Cappadocia composed of women, young girls, mothers, old women -- to weave Turkish rugs.  The women come from the nomadic tribes that have been making rugs for thousands of years.  And, while the women make the fibers and weave the rugs, the men take the money from the sale of the rugs, leaving the women nothing for all their work.  And it can take years to weave one rug, although most of the ones we buy take about half a year.  Anyway, Arturo invented a system of paying the women through the coop where the men cannot get the money.  So he has many women eager to work for him.  

He goes out to the nomadic tribes and explains his system.  Then the young girls with their mothers come to his cooperative center in Cappadocia to learn how to weave the rugs.  The weavers can only weave for 4 or so hours a day, as their fingers cramp and can be permanently harmed.  While it is Ramadan now, there were only half a dozen women weaving when we were there, but he will have 40 or more women weaving there after the holiday.  He then will provide the women with the looms and they can return to their tribes and continue their work.  He sells about 16,000 rugs a year.

The really interesting experience was to go into his small silk room.  He owns 12 acres nearby and 26 acres elsewhere of mulberry trees.  What we didn’t know is that this ancient area is part of the Silk Road, which runs from western Europe to the Far East.  Even those crafty Scandinavians took the Silk Road to find the riches.  I was so in awe that we were traveling the Silk Road in Turkey!!  And Arturo showed us the process.  

Interested?  Well, there was this large vat of water with the cocoons floating in it, hundreds of cocoons.  And there was one Turkish lady, who could not speak English, pulling the silk from each cocoon, a long process that takes a delicate hand.  I really didn’t understand the process, so Arturo explained.  When the mulberry trees put out their leaves, he harvests about a quarter of those leaves.  And he puts the eggs with the leaves and when they start eating the leaves and growing, he divides the worms up between bigger piles of leaves to allow them to grow and reach cocoon stage.  Once they have made the cocoons, he harvests them and puts them in the vat with water, to kill the worm inside.  The reason they must drown the worm is that, if the worm lives, he will break the fibers and the silk will be worthless.  This is all done inside because birds will eat the worms if they are outside.  And watching the woman, by hand, pull the delicate silk threads from each cocoon was astounding.  These are woven into the most valuable rugs and, believe it or not, they are the most valuable!  

Then Arturo took us into his Cappadocian showroom where his men threw out rug after rug for us to see.  Each design comes from a particular tribe and is unique to that tribe.  And he spent a couple hours explaining what each design means.  And how the Turkish weavers use double knots, which he says is better, than single knots done by Iranian tribes.  After that magnificent display, he took us to his silk rug room and had his men again throw out, with a flourish, the silk rugs.  Each rug, whether wool or silk, changes color when you walk around them.  And, while I thought the silk rugs were more delicate, Arturo swore they are stronger than the wool rugs!  Prices:  depends.  But the silk rugs can run upwards of $60,000!

And he has won, for the past 4 years, the international rug competition, quite a feat.  He even had his men throw out the 4 rugs that won the past competitions.  His candidate for 2010 is a rug that appears all black in the center.  When he showed it to us, I was not impressed -- until he turned the rug and an intricate pattern showed up in various shades of grey and black.  Totally blew me away!  

Did we buy a rug?  What do you think??