Vintage Denizli kilim rug – 170 x 138 cm

There are kilims that carry, in watermark, the entire vocabulary of a woman's life. On this one, woven in Denizli some 60 years ago, three large grey hexagons follow one another along a red column, each ringed with vivid saffron yellow and enclosing at its heart a midnight blue and white diamond, like three stages of the same journey. At the very bottom, two yellow combs answer one another, an ancient symbol of femininity and hearth that the weaver slipped into her kilim like a discreet signature.

Against the red ground, small grey silhouettes settle like birds on tree branches, a motif drawn from an ancient Anatolian belief, that the hand that plants a tree receives in return the prayer of the birds that will come to rest in it. On either side, two columns of medallions ringed with red and yellow complete the composition across its 170 x 138 cm (5'7" × 4'6"). A kilim woven like a silent prayer, where every symbol calls for protection, and which seems to have been waiting for you for sixty years to continue watching over a home.

One of a kind.