Clearly a companion volume to the author’s Tablet Weaving from Anatolia and the Ottoman Court (2017), this volume complements it in a thorough treatment of the flatwoven tradition of band-weaving in Turkey without tablets: what is generally spoken of among nomads and villagers as kılıca ‘with a sword’. In actual fact, a beating-in ‘sword’ is used in tablet-weaving too, but that is generally quite small, not more than 30 cm long, compared with that for these bands, which may be up to 50 cm. Atlıhan explained in Tablet Weaving how that technique had almost disappeared from Turkey when she set about recording it, just in time. So it is, unfortunately, with these bands, which were once so essential in nomadic life. They were used widely as reinforcement bands for the structure of the Türkmen trellis tent, topak ev (the so-called yurt), for transport ties, sack straps, girdles, and cummerbunds, even supports for pregnancy, and at their simplest, in plain-woven reinforcement bands for the black tents of the Yörük, where they take the strain across the roof cloths. The mats (yaygı) referred to in the title are simply made of bands stitched edge to edge. Bands might be in plain stripes, elaborately patterned, or even inscribed with writing, and their decoration might be on one face or both. They were not, though, woven in a single technique, so the variety of warp-faced bands, in all its detail, is the subject of this book. Underlying it is the considerable skill of the women who until very recently practised it and their rather astonishing ability to memorise the sequences and pass them on from generation to generation, without recourse to notes.
The book can be taken in several ways. For the general reader, it provides an unrivalled inventory of the designs to be found throughout western and central Anatolia, especially in the excellent colour plates (pp. 111–158). This is the author’s stated aim (p. 104). Here the lack of a translation is not really an impediment to appreciation of the pieces themselves. For readers interested in local ethnography, it provides regional data and allows comparisons through its catalogue. Primarily, though, it emerges as a teaching manual for weavers who wish to reproduce these designs: Professor Atlıhan, now retired, taught traditional weaving techniques at Marmara University for some 18 years. She has woven all these designs herself and is therefore able to give clear and exact instructions on how each one is made.
Hitherto, books specifically on bands have tended to be strictly local in their scope. For Turkey, we had Kenan Özbel’s Kolonlar ve Kuşaklar from the Halkevleri Bureau (1948), in its time the only record, but cheaply produced and long out of print. Then for the Türkmen of Iran and Türkmenistan, with a few Central Asian additions, we have Richard Isaacson’s Tent Bands of Central Asia, from the fine collection he gave to the Textile Museum, Washington, DC (2007). Fred Mushkat offers Weavings of Nomads in Iran (2020), with technical analyses and a chapter by Naheed Darreshuri, herself a Qaşqay weaver. Only Gerhard Foitl has attempted a comprehensive treatment, in the very substantial catalogue of his own collection, Straps and Bands, which he gave to the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna (2008): though this ranges from Mexico to Bhutan, it does contain a number of bands from Anatolia, as well as from the Hakkari Kurds. None of these, however, begins to approach the technical exactitude of Atlıhan’s work.
Atlıhan divides her book into two, the first part dealing with the nature of the bands, their nomenclature, their historical context, and the scope of their use. It contains a useful glossary of weaves, giving the sources. The second part deals with weaving methods, that is the apparatus needed, the principal techniques, including the fringes at band ends, designs and colours, and 10 colour plates of representative examples in good detail, with a catalogue of 27 more, including two modern applications at the end. Here she gives some unexpected details, such as the use in Fethiye of a board pierced by two rows of holes, as a sort of lease.
It is the 60 pages of the section on method which are the core of the book, with photographs of weavers at work, and close-up pictures of pieces in each technique or design, front and back, of the rigging of the loom, its manipulation, and numbered charts of the warp layout, which Atlıhan calls a çözgü dizi (warp index). She starts with the familiar paired-warp, single-face designs, then extra-warp designs, followed by those showing on both faces, and the method of calculating the warping required for double cloth. She then explains the use of four heddles, one by one, taking a Yüncü girdle as an example, followed by a Türkmen chevron motif. She concludes with an exceptionally complicated technique from the Black Sea. The means of braiding the warps at the band ends are given a further five pages.
The instructions for each of these techniques are admirably consistent in their method, stage by stage, and easily followed with the aid of the charts, so that once one has mastered the vocabulary, one can proceed from one to the other without trouble. The author thus provides us with a truly accurate record of this craft for future reference by anyone who wishes to reproduce the designs. She does, however, cause a little confusion by straying from ip to iplik and tel for ‘yarn’. Besides the ethno-historical importance of this record, it allows essays in employing these weaves to create modern artefacts, as her last two plates demonstrate, one a variant of a traditional form from Trabzon, and the other an attractive bag by one of her students.
Undoubtedly, this core of the book is of fundamental importance in itself. Atlıhan has achieved her goal with a skill that matches her mastery of craftsmanship. I could have wished, however, that its ethnographic aspect had been more strongly emphasised. Although the reader is constantly aware from the photographs that these artefacts originated in villages and tribes, too little information is given on the range of locations for each of the patterns and their variations, or the variety of names for them, and even whether they still survive. It is plain that the author, with all her experience in the field, has information she has not yet given us. Admittedly, she may have wished to protect her informants. Admittedly, too, such information, viewed historically, would be bound to be incomplete, as so many of the traditions have already been forgotten and local records are so inadequate, but even for those examples shown, a simple map of distribution could have been attempted (cf. D. Pinkwart and E. Steiner, Bergama Çuvalları, Wesel, 1991) and tables showing the variations in nomenclature for weaving apparatus and motifs. She does explain that she has given the names for designs only when she could learn them; but where illustrations are from particular localities, the local names of the patterns she has learned should surely have been given in their titles. For the apparatus, terms for the loom garnered in fieldwork might have been augmented from existing surveys of local vocabulary such as the Derleme Dergisi and the Derleme Sözlüğü and the few available articles she cites on local techniques. As von Gabain insisted, our understanding is built on the relationship between word and thing.
I am also disconcerted by the apparent disconnection between her use of modern technical terms in her descriptions and the traditional craft she is recording. This is most simply shown in her use of çözgü and atkı for warp and weft in lieu of eriş and argaç, which in my experience are widely used throughout Anatolia, and not only there, but in Azarbaijan and Türkmenia, besides slight variants among the Central Asian Turks. The same is true for other terms. In this, she seems to hesitate, as she often places a local term in brackets after her modern one. As both eriş and argaç are present in Ancient Turkish, as erüşi arkağı, there seems no reason to replace such basic terms, unless this were insisted upon by an academia fixated on yeni türkçe. In this particular instance, I have, in the field, been given a derivation of argaç as ara geç, ‘that which passes between’, which, of course, fits the case very well, even if it is folk etymology. Occasionally the modern jargon is opaque: türleşme (p. 65, title) even in Tureng is given only one interpretation, and that is ‘speciation’—hardly helpful here. Occasionally she does not distinguish between what is Turkish and what is Kurdish. Sometimes, too, she is insufficiently critical in citing former authors: Durul (pp. 22–23) is wrong in saying that in Persian a flatweave is called pelas: the word is palās.
When Atlıhan cites Mallet and Mushkat (p. 48) as stating that the single-face warp-patterned bands are not so strong as either tablet-woven or double-cloth bands, it would have been interesting if she had put that to the test (cf. The Ashley Book of Knots). Given the primacy of this type among Türkmen, Qazaq, and Qırğız nomads in their tent bands, which are intended to take considerable strain, the claim seems unlikely: they must have been used in Central Asia for centuries.
I could have wished, too, to see better photographs of the use of bands in the Anatolian Türkmen topak ev to demonstrate their use (cf. p. 27) and some more of costume. The publisher should note that a list of contents at the beginning would be helpful and that the bibliography, rather hard to find on p. 105ff, would be better placed at the end, as usual. These small blemishes, however, detract only a little from the value of the book. As a record of a range of traditional designs, and a manual for weavers, it is wholly successful and provides a model of how such information should be offered in future.
