THE WORLD OF KILIM
Our Kilim World
For us at Ararat Rugs, kilim has always been part of how we understand textile culture. Studying old kilims, handling them, repairing them, and reading the structure, color, thread, and motif logic is foundational to everything we do.
Each kilim carries regional memory, traces of use, and the decisions of the weaver — and we have learned enormously from this material over the years. Collecting is not an end in itself, but a way of building the eye and the knowledge needed to work seriously in this tradition.
Learning from Old Kilims
We have always learned about materials, composition, color layering, and regional weaving character through old kilims and rugs. What textbooks cannot show, the physical objects contain in abundance.
How the yarn is twisted, where reinforcement appears, how pattern repeats and where it intentionally breaks — reading these details makes clear that kilims are not decorative objects but crystallizations of life and technique. Each piece is a compressed archive of material knowledge.
Building the Collection
Our engagement with kilims began from the earliest years of the business. Beyond common market pieces, rare and well-preserved old works, and unusual fragments with strong regional character were collected with care, building piece by piece.
These works were not inventory for sale but a standard for developing visual judgment. Continual contact with outstanding pieces trained the eye for color quality, thread quality, weave density, and what truly makes a kilim valuable — a judgment that cannot be learned from photographs alone.
Expanding to Caucasus and Turkmen
After the end of Soviet-era closure, we expanded our attention beyond Anatolia to include Caucasian and Turkmen kilims, bags, and textiles. This broader view deepened our understanding of how even within the same flatweave tradition, different regions develop entirely different principles and sensibilities.
Caucasian geometric clarity, Turkmen repetition and tension, Anatolian powerful softness — comparing these revealed both the difficulty and the richness of understanding kilim culture as a shared yet profoundly diverse world.
The Kilim Wonder Book
The knowledge accumulated through years of collecting, handling, and repairing old kilims eventually took shape in the book Kilim Wonder (2024). It is not simply a catalog but an attempt to articulate the regional culture, domestic life, technique, and aesthetics visible through kilims.
Writing it helped put into words what daily contact with the collection had taught — how to see kilims, and how to carry that tradition forward in a way that is both grounded in history and alive to the present.
Knowledge Through Restoration
Istanbul has always had exceptional restoration craftspeople, and we have worked closely with them on our own collection and on pieces belonging to other collectors. Through this repair work, we learned a great deal that study alone cannot provide.
The wear pattern reveals where stress concentrates. The unraveling reveals thread structure and technique. Restoration is not simply fixing old objects — it is a way of understanding them from the inside. Our view of the collection deepened significantly through this hands-on repair experience.