Turkish rugs — a tradition stretching back nine centuries.
Turkish rug weaving traces to the Seljuk period of the twelfth century and produced some of the most influential carpet traditions in history. Oushak, Hereke, Konya — village and workshop, wool and silk, geometric and floral. Distinguished from Persian weaving by the Ghiordes (symmetric) knot, bold-palette dyeing, and a design vocabulary that found its way onto every Renaissance painting that wanted to show a fine carpet.
What is a Turkish rug?
A Turkish rug is a hand-knotted carpet woven across Anatolia — the peninsula of modern-day Turkey — using the Ghiordes (symmetric) knot. The tradition includes village, workshop, and imperial weaving from at least the twelfth century, and produced names that any collector knows on sight: Oushak, Hereke, Konya, Kayseri, Bergama, Milas.
Turkish rugs are distinguished from Persian rugs by knot structure (symmetric vs. asymmetric), by a typically bolder palette grounded in coral and ivory, and by a design vocabulary that ran from the geometric prayer rugs of central Anatolia through the floral medallion workshops of Oushak to the imperial silk pile of Hereke. The Anatolian rug was the carpet of Renaissance painting — appearing in Holbein, Lotto, Bellini — and remains one of the most collected categories in the trade.
From village floor to Ottoman court.
Six families of Turkish weaving. Each one a separate hand, a separate palette, a separate place.
Oushak
Soft-palette western Anatolian workshop weaving. Bold central medallions on coral and ivory grounds. The carpet of Renaissance painting.
Read the guide →Hereke
Imperial Ottoman silk workshop on the Sea of Marmara. Sometimes more than 1,500 knots per square inch. The finest Turkish weaving.
Read the guide →Konya
Central Anatolian village weaving. Geometric prayer designs, warm reds and ivories, one of the oldest continuously woven traditions.
Kayseri
Cappadocian wool and art-silk weaving. Floral and prayer designs, often woven in finer counts for the export market.
Anatolian Village
Village weaving from across Anatolia — Yagcibedir, Milas, Bergama. Geometric drawing, mountain wool, tribal palette.
Kars & Ezine
Eastern Anatolian weaving traditions with Caucasian influence. Geometric medallions, lustrous high-altitude wool.
Nine centuries on the loom.
Seljuk & early Anatolian (12th–14th c.).The earliest Turkish carpets that survive — the Seljuk fragments at the Mevlana Museum in Konya and at Istanbul’s Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts — are large-scale geometric rugs woven for the mosques of the Seljuk sultanate. They establish the symmetric knot, the bold palette, and the geometric repeat that define Anatolian weaving.
Ottoman court & Oushak (15th–18th c.). The Oushak workshops of western Anatolia rise to dominate European export from the fifteenth century onward, woven into Holbein, Lotto, and Bellini paintings as the carpet of choice for Renaissance interiors. The Ottoman court patronizes specialist workshops; prayer rugs, garden designs, and the great floral medallion compositions are codified in this period.
Hereke & the modern revival (1843–today). Sultan Abdulmecid founds the Hereke imperial workshop in 1843, producing silk rugs of unmatched fineness for the Ottoman court and for state gifts to visiting heads of state. The late nineteenth century brings a European revival of Oushak weaving for American interiors; village production continues across Anatolia in Konya, Kayseri, Bergama, and Milas. Turkish rugs remain among the most collected categories in the trade.
The Ghiordes knot, the Anatolian palette.
Every Turkish rug is hand-knotted using the Ghiordes — the symmetric, or Turkish, knot — wrapped around two warp threads and locked tightly. Foundation is wool, cotton, or, on the imperial Hereke silks, silk on silk. Wool is the high-altitude Anatolian fiber: lustrous, lanolin-rich, durable.
Dyes are vegetable across the village and antique-workshop tradition — madder for coral and red, indigo for blue, walnut hull for brown, oak gall and pomegranate for yellow. The Anatolian palette tends bolder than the Persian: more coral, more ivory ground, more contrast.
Caring for a Turkish rug.
Turkish rugs are hand-knotted from vegetable-dyed Anatolian wool (or, on Hereke pieces, silk) and ask for the same conservation discipline as a fine Persian. We hand-wash every Turkish rug in our atelier — inspected, dye-tested, washed individually with pH-balanced soap and temperature-controlled water, then dried flat on slatted frames. Antique Oushak and silk Hereke pieces receive the antique wash; restoration work — reweaving, fringe binding, moth treatment, color restoration — is hand-done by the Cohen family on the bench.
Other rug-weaving worlds.
Persian Rugs
Tabriz, Kashan, Heriz, Isfahan, Bijar, Sarouk, Nain, Kerman, Qum. The asymmetric-knot tradition from Iran.
Read the guide →French Rugs
Aubusson and Savonnerie — the two royal-manufactory traditions of seventeenth-century France.
Read the guide →Caucasian Rugs
Kazak, Shirvan, Kuba, Karabagh. Mountain weaving from the Caucasus — bold geometry, lustrous wool.
Letters from across the Northeast.
A few of the rugs we've cared for — and the families who trusted us with them.
“They returned an heirloom Tabriz — the colors look exactly as my grandmother described them.”
“A 1920s Heriz I thought was beyond saving came back better than the day my parents bought it.”
“Our clients trust us with eight-figure homes. Horizon is the only atelier I send their rugs to.”
More from Horizon.
Other ateliers, every service we offer, and the rest of our story — a few directions to explore.
Bring us your Turkish rug.
Antique Oushak, imperial Hereke, village Konya, Kayseri silk — whichever Anatolian tradition you own, we hand-wash by the Cohen family in our atelier with the process appropriate to its construction. Complimentary pickup from Manhattan, the Hamptons, Westchester County, Greenwich, and Stamford.
By hand · By the Cohen family · By appointment