At the meeting point of Europe and Asia, Turkey gathered the crafts of both — and gave the world the knotted carpet, the tulip tile, and silks fit for a sultan.
✨ Fun fact: The fiery red in classic İznik tiles came from a clay called Armenian bole, so prized and difficult that the exact secret of making it was eventually lost.
The Turkish carpet
Turkey’s most famous craft is the hand-knotted carpet. Using the symmetrical Turkish knot — the Gördes knot — weavers across Anatolia have for centuries tied rugs of wool and silk, from the bold flat-woven kilims of the villages to the grand medallion carpets of Uşak.
So many of these carpets reached Europe that the painters there could not stop putting them into their pictures — and today whole types are named after the artists who painted them. A Lotto carpet takes its name from the Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto; a Holbein carpet from Hans Holbein the Younger. The rugs travelled first, and the names followed.
Grandest of all are the silk carpets of Hereke. The imperial factory there was founded in 1843, under Sultan Abdülmecid I, to furnish the Ottoman palaces — and its weavers tied silk with gold and silver thread at knot counts so fine the pattern reads like a painting.
İznik tiles and ceramics
In the sixteenth century, under Süleyman the Magnificent, the town of İznik produced the most beautiful ceramics of the Islamic world: white pottery painted in cobalt blue, turquoise and a glowing coral-red, with tulips, carnations and curling saz leaves — the long, feathered leaf that is the signature of Ottoman ornament.
The great architect Mimar Sinan sheathed his mosques in them. The little Rüstem Paşa Mosque in Istanbul is lined wall to wall with İznik tiles; the Süleymaniye, and his masterpiece the Selimiye at Edirne, glow with them still. When İznik’s kilns finally declined, the recipe for that coral red went with them.
The silks of Ottoman Bursa
Closest to our own heart are the silks. Bursa, the first Ottoman capital, sat where the caravans of Persian raw silk came to rest, and it grew into the empire’s great weaving city. Its looms produced kemha — brocaded silk shot with metal-wrapped thread — crimson çatma velvet, and rarest of all seraser, cloth woven with flattened gold and silver. That last one is the Ottoman cloth of gold, and the closest cousin we know to our own kamkhwab.
Hundreds of the sultans’ kaftans survive in the Topkapı Palace — one of the greatest collections of woven cloth anywhere in the world, and proof of how seriously an empire could take its cloth.
One motif, two crafts
What we find most beautiful about Ottoman design is how freely a pattern moved between the kiln and the loom. The clearest case is the çintamani: three spots and a pair of wavy stripes, read as the leopard’s coat and the tiger’s, and worn as an emblem of power by the sultans themselves.
Here it is twice — once painted on a dish, once woven into a Bursa velvet. Same motif, same empire, two entirely different sets of hands.
We know this feeling well. In Banaras too, a motif is never the property of one craft — it passes from a carved stone screen to a painted border to a weaver’s graph paper, and finally onto the loom.
The thread we love
The brocades of Bursa and the kamkhwab of Banaras grew from the same idea — and often enough from the same road: silk and gold, woven together by hand, the proper dress of celebration. Explore our Brocade Fabric collection.
Frequently asked questions
What is Turkey most famous for in crafts?
Its hand-knotted carpets and kilims, the blue-and-red İznik tiles that line Ottoman mosques, the silk brocades and velvets of Bursa, and the marbled paper art of ebru.
What are İznik tiles?
Sixteenth-century Ottoman ceramics from İznik, painted in cobalt blue, turquoise and coral-red with floral motifs, used to decorate the great mosques and palaces of the empire.
What is kemha?
The brocaded silk of Ottoman Bursa, woven with metal-wrapped thread — the Ottoman counterpart of Banarasi brocade. Its grandest relative is seraser, woven with flattened gold and silver.
What is the çintamani motif?
A pattern of three spots with a pair of wavy stripes, understood as the leopard’s spots and the tiger’s stripes. The Ottomans treated it as a symbol of power, and it appears on tiles, carpets, velvets and the kaftans of sultans.
What is a Hereke carpet?
A carpet from the imperial factory at Hereke, founded in 1843 to supply the Ottoman palaces — famous for silk carpets woven with gold and silver thread, and for extraordinarily fine knotting.
Why are some Turkish carpets named after European painters?
Anatolian carpets appear so often in Renaissance paintings that whole types came to be named after the artists who depicted them — “Lotto” carpets after Lorenzo Lotto, “Holbein” carpets after Hans Holbein the Younger.
Sources & further reading
On İznik ceramics, Anatolian carpets and the silks of Ottoman Bursa, see the open-access collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
