This time I put more light on the rug and my iphone has a variety of photo settings, of which this one seems to be the most realistic. But it still does not capture the colors correctly. I was reading about a cell phone camera that will have 9 lenses. 8 in a circle around a center lens, and the computer will stitch the images together. But that one is not available yet, so this will have to do.
Here is a picture of one of the purple flowers in the border. The photo settings make the pale, wheat-yellow look orange, and the reds look like the stop light at an intersection, but the purple is fairly close to real. Note that at the bottom half inch the purple turns a bit lighter. This is the color on the flowers in the lower section of the border. One other note of some importance is that there is black tracery around each of the diamonds around the edge of the flower. These delineate petals. I believe that this is an earlier version, and later rugs do not have this tracery.
This picture of the back shows one of the lower border purple flowers, with the yellow showing up a bit more realistically than the photo above.
I suspect that this rug is around 1875 or earlier, because there are no synthetic dyes (to my eye) and with the black tracery and delightful abrash in the inner-field border from light green at the top to yellow, then back to green and then yellow again. Also, one quarter down the white border on the right, two of the rosettes become squares. Odd. Perhaps a "signature" of the weaver.
All in all, a charming rug in a design perhaps derived from the much earlier "Transylvanian" style rugs from this same region of Anatolia.
You just never know what the sled dog will drag up.
Patrick Weiler
