3'6" x 5'1" Turkish Kayseri Pure Silk Prayer Rug | Kum Kapi Style with Real Gold Thread | Blue Mihrab, Calligraphy Border
This is a Kum Kapi style prayer rug from Kayseri in central Turkey, woven in pure silk on a silk foundation at about 900 knots per square inch, with real gold thread brocaded into the vases and the cartouches. Kum Kapi is the name of the Istanbul quarter where Armenian master weavers made the finest silk and metal-thread rugs of the late Ottoman court, and this piece follows that tradition line for line: a mihrab niche with a hanging lamp cartouche, a pair of vases, birds in a flowering garden, and a wide border of calligraphy panels. The pile measures 3'6" x 5'1", and with the long ivory silk fringes it runs 5'8" (173 cm) end to end. It has never been used, the silk is bright and unworn, the gold thread is intact, and it is as much a piece for a wall as for a floor. A certificate of authenticity from Rugs.net accompanies the rug.
Design and Motifs
The field is a prayer niche. A cornflower blue mihrab rises from the bottom of the rug and closes at the top in a lobed ogee arch, and the arch is outlined by a yellow band carrying a continuous line of black Arabic script. Inside the niche, just under the point of the arch, hangs a gold lamp cartouche, the mosque lamp of the classic prayer design, drawn here as a lobed gold plaque with script on it. Below the lamp the blue ground is filled with a symmetrical vine of cinnamon brown scrolling stems, drawn thick and curling like ribbons and studded with black dots, and between them sit large fan-shaped palmettes in yellow, ivory and olive, a central lotus with a burgundy core, 2 sunburst rosettes, tulips, and dozens of small white and pink blossoms on hair-thin ivory tendrils. The 2 spandrels above the arch are salmon pink and read as a garden: a footed vase stands on each side, drawn in black, white and burgundy with a gold-thread body and a bouquet of blue and ivory flowers, and above each vase a white dove perches while a small yellow bird flies beside it, with 2 more white birds meeting at the top center under a canopy of wine red flowers, white blossoms and olive leaves. A narrow ivory guard with a pink and olive leaf vine and a gold inner stripe frame the field. The main border is cinnamon brown, and it is built from 6 ivory calligraphy cartouches on each long side and 2 on each end, every panel carrying yellow Arabic script outlined in black, separated by round gold and pink rosettes on olive scrolling stems. A lilac gray outer guard with a floral vine and a plain gold selvage close the design.
Colors of This Blue and Gold Kayseri Silk Rug
Silk changes color with the light, and the photographs show it: the mihrab is a cornflower blue that reads as a soft steel blue from one end and as a bright royal blue from the other, and the same shift runs through every color on the rug. The spandrels are a salmon pink, warm and slightly dusty, and the pink and blue together are the two grounds you see from across the room. The gold is the third: a clear buttercup yellow in the arch band, the lamp cartouche, the selvage and the script, and a true metallic gold in the brocaded thread of the vase bodies and the border cartouches, which glints rather than glows. The main border sits on a cinnamon brown that reads as a warm caramel in silk, and the calligraphy panels are ivory, so the script stands out as yellow on white inside brown. The drawing is done in olive green for leaves and stems, a rust and terracotta orange for the ribbon vines and palmettes, burgundy and wine red for the flower cores and the vase decoration, ivory and white for the blossoms and birds, a small amount of powder blue in the bouquets, and black for every outline, which is what gives Kum Kapi work its crisp, inlaid look. The back shows the same colors in a deeper key, the knot rows almost invisibly fine.
Kayseri Silk Weaving and the Kum Kapi Tradition
Kayseri sits in central Anatolia and has been a silk weaving center since Ottoman times, second in Turkey only to Hereke, and its best workshops produce silk-on-silk pieces that rival the finest in the world. The Kum Kapi style it follows here was born in the 1890s in Istanbul, where Armenian master weavers such as Zareh Penyamin and Tossounian wove silk prayer rugs with gold and silver thread for the Ottoman court and for collectors in Europe, reviving the Safavid and Ottoman court designs of the 16th century: the mihrab niche, the mosque lamp, the vases and birds, and above all the calligraphy borders. Those original Kum Kapi rugs now sit in museums and sell at auction for the price of a house. A Kayseri piece in the same manner at 900 knots per square inch, with real gold thread and never used, is the closest a buyer can come to that tradition today, and it is an Oriental rug that belongs on a wall, in a study or in a collection rather than under a coffee table. Among 3x5 rugs in pure silk it is the rarest kind we handle.
