PRICES.--Usually from $0.75 to $3.00 per square foot. The prayer rugs are rare and expensive.
REMARKS.--Freest of all from outside influences. Hard when new but most durable and satisfactory. In fact it is the best moderate priced rug now on the market.
OWNER'S DESCRIPTION.--Upon a rich blue ground the Mina Khani design is accurately wrought, and the five-petaled Henna blossoms are symmetrically placed in their customary relation to the dark red, blue and golden yellow floral rosette forms distributed over the field. Three rather narrow borders surround the field, the middle one of which is yellow. The inner and outer borders carry tawny colors and small patterns.
[Illustration: KURDISTAN RUG (MINA KHANI DESIGN) PROPERTY OF THE TIFFANY STUDIOS, NEW YORK CITY]
[Illustration: KULAH HEARTH RUG Size, 7'2" × 4'4" BY COURTESY OF NAHIGIAN BROS., CHICAGO, ILL.
OWNERS' DESCRIPTION.--No rug of any type that has come to our notice has had a color tone that was so subdued and mellow as this rug.
The artist who conceived and created this masterpiece seems to have woven into it a suggestion of his dreamy nature. He used shades where others would have used colors and the result is a beautiful study in browns.
The points at both ends of the field indicate its use as a hearth rug or family rug, an heirloom about which one generation after another gathered and told and retold the tales of their ancestors. It is such rugs as this that were the sanctuary in that turbulent land; strangers were far from safe, and especially members of some opposing tribe, but let them once gain access to the tent in which was spread the hearth rug, and let them place foot upon it, and they became at once the guest of not only the chief but his whole tribe, and the entire tribe was pledged to their safe keeping until they had been safely sped upon their way.
The narrow ribbon stripes on the border of this rug, with the small floral conceits woven throughout them, are typical of the old Kulahs.
The term "Turkey" includes all portions of Asia Minor, the principal rug-weaving districts of which are Anatolia and Kurdistan.
The annual importations of rugs into the United States alone from Asia Minor amount to from $2,500,000 to $3,000,000, most of which are shipped directly from Constantinople. In many parts of Asia Minor, especially in Oushak, Smyrna, Ghiordes, Kulah, and Sivas, nearly every home has a loom, some two or three, and in many places factories have been established by European and American capitalists; the weavers are almost all Armenian women and children, the latter ranging from four to thirteen years of age. Moslem women and children will not work in factories. As a rule these people earn barely enough to clothe and feed themselves, but those who have been able to lay by anything generally invest their earnings in carpets, as people of other countries often do in diamonds and precious stones, handing them down from generation to generation and selling one when hard pressed for money, so that the tourist is often surprised to find in the homes a collection of very valuable rugs.