Glasgow, tapestries, and Nan’s East Kilbride

We have hopped, skipped and jumped from Istanbul to London to Glasgow in this modern way that grinds up the human experience of physical space. Tom’s energies are being sapped by something awful – hopefully just a cold – in a November Glasgow that is much cooler, damper and drearier than we found it in August. Nevertheless, short of time we ventured out for the day, first to the Burrell Collection (with its famous tapestries, mostly from the 14-16th centuries) situated in a large estate park south of Glasgow, then further south to East Kilbride where Betty’s grandmother (her mother’s mother, Nan) lived as a girl around the First World War, just before her family emigrated to Vancouver Island.

The collected tapestries, mostly created to hang in convents and churches and the grand houses of the nobility, are impressive in their details, colour and especially their depictions of natural features – birds and other animals, flowers, foliage – some naturalistic, some fantastic like unicorns, and some imagined to exist in unknown regions well beyond Europe. Pinks and wild strawberry blossoms, still familiar to us now, are two recurrent features.

One especially large tapestry, The Camel Caravan, some eight by ten metres, displays a regal-looking cavalcade of brightly festooned camels (towering like great curvy seahorses over everything else) with West Indians and Europeans of various classes moving through an equatorial landscape which itself is a mix of the naturalistic and fantastic – all probably inspired, we read, by Vasco da Gama’s voyages to the Indies. Another tapestry depicts lovers on horseback pursuing a stag; another a family of rabbits scurrying in lush foliage, one crawling into its burrow, only bushy-tailed rear-end showing; still another includes a tropical seashore landscape, perhaps on the Indian Ocean, a dhow and European three-masted ship in the bay, heavy-beaked, great-winged tropical birds flying between the trees.

Outside, walking across the estate grounds, the bitterly damp November air and black leafless trees come as a shock. It is dusk when we arrive in East Kilbride, one of Scotland’s so-called New Cities, a completely planned place and now one of Scotland’s fastest growing cities, launched several decades ago to encourage people in crowded central Glasgow to move out. We are in search of whatever remains – if anything – of the old town, and possible records of Nan’s presence here. Passersby seem uncertain hearing our enquiries about the original old village. With some help, though, we make our way past 20-year-old row houses and shops into an out-of-the-way parking lot where we come upon the local parking meter man. "Is anything left of the old village of East Kilbride?" we ask. "You’re here!" he says. "Just around that corner." We’re in luck. The man’s full of good humour and historical information and soon offers to show us around. "I’ve got plenty of time. No one wants to see me in this lot anyway," he says, chuckling.

Now dark, the three of us enter a cobbled square enclosed by several-hundred year old stone shops, a pub and houses and, through a narrow short lane, a church and cemetery – the whole magically lit with white Christmas-like lights and streets lamps, giving us glimpses of the atmosphere of the older town, apart from the few cars parked down side streets. Standing in the chilly air, we ask more questions and hear more stories about the history of older place, including the nearby loupin stane or leaping stone, a block of steps set in the square for people to climb into carriages and carts, now hollowed buttery smooth in its centre with centuries of use.

"Have a visit to the pub," the meter man says. "There’s sure to be people there who can tell you more. Maybe even someone who knew your family." Inside there’s a blazing fire, men leaning on the bar and seated at the tables (a few women as well) and a nothing-has-or-will-ever-change-here feeling. We hear a little more about the village’s history (and the surrounding large city), but more about the pub we are in. It is one of the rare independents left, the owners, several generations deep, hanging on to the old artefacts, wood and stone work, and traditions (the free lemonade on the counter), but having to give up, by law, the tradition of a men’s-only haunt, although we are told it is still mainly a men’s hangout – which, by the few women here tonight, looks like the case.

We are then sent off to the city’s library where "They’ll be people who will look up your family records for you" – as there was. Off again into the dark, frigid evening, asking our way each block through a tangle of crossroads and walkways … past row housing and little strip malls, across a busy thoroughfare or two, more housing, down a main street, through an underpass, into a mall parking lot, Hey, there’s a door, into the mall itself, vast empty concourses, papered up shops, a florescent dead spaciousness, then, surprisingly, an ice rink at the corner of which we climb upstairs and There it is! – the East Kilbride Library. Within moments Betty and the indeed helpful librarian-cum-village-historian are looking at microfiche and web archives and data files, printing out what they have found, gathering local history books – the librarians, two now across a shift change, responding with such interest and enthusiasm you would think they are a family uncle or niece.

Even tucked into the cold end of a long day, the visit is a success. Certainly the beginning of being able to discover more. Then off we go, past the ice rink, soon lost in the mall’s dead bright spaces, but finally finding someone who helps us escape, picking up a guide who knows the fast way to the commuter station. "No worries. It’s on my way." The fellow has a brother in Hamilton, Ontario who he has just visited. "They watched a lot of baseball and … football you call it. You know … you’re kind of football. Couldn’t bear it. Boring. Really boring. Nice country but I couldn’t never do that again …." Soon, there it is, the station. "You should be okay now. Train’ll be here in a few minutes. Good to meet you. Have a good trip."

"Thanks so much," we say as we vanish from one another in the dark.

Just like those kindly, helpful strangers in Turkey, we realize later.

Our carpet journey with Mehmet

I had been convinced that it’s Turkey’s carpet dealers (root: vermin … c.1300, "noxious animals," from Anglo-Fr. and O.Fr. vermin, from V.L. *verminum "vermin," possibly including bothersome insects, collective noun formed from L. vermis "worm". Extended to "low, obnoxious people" by 1562.) who have given leeches, snakes, roaches and rats their bad name. They’re even quicker at provoking mistrust and cynicism than your average politician.

At least these were the modest conclusions I had come to after weeks of strolling the streets of many Turkish cities, especially the narrow, inescapable laneways and passageways of Istanbul’s Sultanahmet district.

And then – feeling trepidation, wary – we met Mehmet, the carpet dealer.

Perhaps it was being surrounded – as you are in many carpet shops – by those warm earth tones in his showroom, spread across the floors, up the walls, layered and piled in each corner, every imaginable design so tastefully framed within the edges of each carpet, the visual and story-telling traditions of ages but made beautiful by each woman artisan at her loom, the carefully focused carpet gallery lights now bringing alive the diamonds, hexagons, prayer arches, abstracted leafs and scorpions and wolf’s mouth in their many reds, ochres, yellows, creams, ambers, blues and greens.

Perhaps it was that no one, ever, seemed at all eager to actually sell us a carpet at Mehmet’s. Perhaps it was Mehmet’s own patient manner, his soft but clear voice, his many digressions into personal tales, his self-consciousness over his French-Turkish English ("My English, you know …. Can you understand?"). Perhaps it was the sensation of comfortably wandering with him, curiosity heightened, through the old exoticism of the lands and traditions bound up with carpet weaving. Perhaps it was how, down on hands and knees, he would examine the weave of a particular carpet, wonder at the dyes, look at the maker’s label, tell what he could about its probable making, all with a quality of thoughtfulness, interest, even tenderness that made him seem almost like a brother or partner to the weaver herself.

Whatever it was, and it was at least all this, Mehmet made looking at, learning about, choosing and eventually buying a kilim a rich, complete-feeling, unforgettable experience. – Yes finally 'buying', although that element of the experience, especially the payment, signing an export form and credit card receipt, hardly seemed to resemble much that I have come to associate with 'buying'. What I mean is that although we finally left with our favourite carpet, Mehmet made it feel that he hadn’t 'sold' us anything, rather was sending it off with us, as if he had said, "Just try it out for a while back in Canada. Enjoy it. Let me know how it works. No. No. On the contrary. It’s my honour to do this."

Of course it is possible to say that we had met the most effective carpet seller in all of Turkey. Perhaps. But that’s not what either of us feel, even now, months later.

On the first visit we peel off layer upon layer from several piles of carpets, spreading six, ten, fifteen across the floor at one time, setting some aside, putting some of those ‘some’ back onto the floor then, stumbling on a new style, we begin again, then again. When we apologize for being so undecided or fickle in our tastes, Mehmet says, as he has opportunity to say many times, "No, no, it is my great pleasure to show these to you. I have so much time. Would you like a cup of tea …." An hour later, more apologies, more "It’s my great pleasure." And it’s true, he makes us feel, along the meanderings of every anecdote, memory, digression and piece of carpet lore, as if it is.

This is how it goes: - As we lay out the carpets, walk around, catch the light off the colours and designs from new angles, Mehmet tells stories about how he, although Turkish, was raised and educated in France, had had various commercial jobs, some dissatisfying, until a friend of a friend introduced him to another carpet dealer, pension owner and tour business operator who, he said, had given him "this comfortable home" to work and grow in. More kilims are laid out, we stand back, kneel down to see the weave, ask questions, then Mehmet kneels down too, bends his face to the carpet, expecting us to take a closer look as he explains a dye or fabric ("That is wool." "That could be goat or horse hair."), a knotting technique, design figure, pattern, proportions, what’s that on the border, various traditions and adaptations of these … all the time feeling the fabric, turning it over, standing back, making sure you are following his French-Turkish English, which is more considered and articulate than many people in their mother tongue … hearing along the way, as if these are more threads that must be made part of the pattern, about his month-long romance, then wedding ("Yes, so sudden," he agrees, still with a beam of infatuation on his face), then the birth of their son, he and his wife’s so far unsuccessful determination to stop smoking, his travels and long hours of work, his wife’s busy schedule as a travel agent downstairs, the difficulties of all this for the family ….

By our second visit we have narrowed our choices down to three possibilities, kilims and combinations of Persian kilims and saddlebags made by nomads, likely shepherds. "How long would this, the combination piece, take to make," we ask. "It depends. It would be worked on while the woman is settled in camp. Work might be interrupted by illness or a need for materials. Or the family is moving on. They are made gradually at different times … over time, let’s say." Later we are talking about carpet making and gender roles. "Women weave, men repair. That’s just the way it has been," Mehmet says, smiling. "But only men trade and sell," I add. "Yes, ah yes, that’s true," he agrees. Then we talk about changing gender roles in Turkey and Canada … among nurses, teachers, industrial workers. With only three carpets remaining on the floor, we agree it is late, say our goodbyes and promise to think about our choices and return in a day or two.

We’re back in a few days, setting out our choices, then I begin digging into another pile and find yet another beauty! Mehmet, wisely, leaves us to our own discussion, but he’s never far away, checking in, answering questions, telling another story, seemingly a man of immeasurable patience for the decision to happen. Finally we eliminate one, then another. Two remain. Can we afford two? Definitely not. We circle our choices again, then again. Then finally, yes! this is the one, and a very happy decision at that … a Persian kilim with saddlebag pieces woven into a end pattern made up of slightly wavy horizontal bars of deep tans, browns, reds and indigo blue. It feels alive with its own desert travels and stories, the voices that must be there in the knots and weave, the aesthetic eye watching/making the whole emerge. It reminds me of paintings I especially enjoyed in Australia (done by Helicopter Tungurrayi, raised in his nomadic Aboriginal family in the western Australian desert) … the long, narrow dune-like waves of colour seeming so rooted in a similar sense of place, created by a kindred spirit.

The decision finally made and the carpet given to a repair man to adjust the length, we take another journey that Mehmet had been promising …downstairs to one floor above an excavated tiled floor mosaic, likely from Byzantine Istanbul, perhaps 1500-1700 years old, then down another flight of stairs until we are on plexiglass a mere metre above the same mosaic, then lower still into a dank stone and brick chamber, thought to be a vaulted church or burial room off of which is a small opening into an underground cistern system (Istanbul is built over a maze of these ancient channels and cisterns) over the arch of which is the remains of a barely decipherable early Christian image of Mary painted on stone.

Then up we climb, past the mosaics, through a painting and carpet exhibition room, up through the tourist office, then out and up a wrought-iron spiral staircase to views of Asian Istanbul and the Sea of Marmara (where Mehmet discretely but quickly takes a cigarette from a brown and silver embossed case and lights up, as we talk again about the need to stop smoking), then up another staircase until we seem at the very edge of the Blue Mosque’s domes and six towering minarets, white seagulls circling around and between, others resting contentedly on the domes’ sooty cornflower slopes.

On the way down, I spot a bin of carpet patches and ask if it is possible to have a small kilim piece stitched over the logo on my shoulder bag. Of course, certainly … and right away we are rummaging through kilim scraps, the eye of the carpet repairman finding just the one and on it’s sewn, just like that. No, no, it’s our pleasure, when I insist on paying for the work.

Then we’re down another floor, and Mehmet begins the purchasing (and export) paperwork, explains how prices are established and points to an added discount because of a refundable export fee we won’t be charged. It all feels so civil, so reasonable that we find ourselves not quibbling, nor even wondering whether we’ve agreed on too high a price to begin with, all the while thinking how generously we are being treated. The act of making the actual purchase has somehow been made small, incidental, like another natural element in the surrounding flow of stories and digressions, somewhere so deep in the weave of all this that we hardly notice it.

And then there we are, with the prized little carpet now folded and safe in its own carrying case, saying our thank-you’s to Mehmet and he to us, the whole experience feeling as pleasing, colourful and complete as the carpet we carry out of his shop.

Karagőz the trickster

For every Atatűrk, Turkey needs at least one Karagőz (black eye, after his one large black pupil). Karagőz is the main character in a tradition of shadow puppet theatre (itself named ‘Karagőz’) unique to Turkey and, in earlier times, to the areas influenced by the Ottoman empire. Although there is debate about how the shadow puppet technique began in Turkey, it most probably arrived from India with performers and traders who also introduced it as far east as Indonesia.
Because I can’t resist a puppet show, one of my Turkey journey regrets will be to have just missed a Karagőz performance in Bursa, where there is a small and declining community of shadow puppet affectionados. The closest we came to Karagőz was to visit this community’s small museum, with its samples of shadow and other puppets, and its celebrations of the theatre tradition, its practitioners and historians.
The first shadow puppet performance we saw was in Jogyakarta, Java – there called wayang (shadow) kulit (skin or hide, from which the flat puppet figures are cut). The puppets there were generally larger than in Karagőz, and the stories based largely on episodes adapted from Hindu epics like the Ramayana, itself a sprawling narrative that includes satiric elements but whose overarching narrative moves in opposite directions from Karagőz’s anti-establishment, satirical playfulness. The displays at the Bursa museum, including Indonesian puppets, brought back memories of that dimly-lit room in Jogyakarta, the semi-circle of gamelan players, the Javanese attention to ritual and ceremony, the women’s chorus, the puppeteer whose story unfolded as he lifted each puppet so deftly from hand to hand behind the screen, the characters’ argumentative-sounding chatter (we didn’t understand a word so are by no means fair to performance) that rose and fell in intensity but still seemed exaggerated and melodramatic to our senses … the whole like some ancient prophecy of the earliest forms of cinema.
Here in Turkey, I have read, Karagőz has been a theatre of laughter and subversion, even through the Ottoman Empire. Verbal comment and counter-comment, gesture, slapstick, concealment and disguise, the surreal and magical: all these things are vehicles for how Karagőz repeatedly undercuts pretence, hypocrisy, fake learning and appeals to the status quo and official authority. The stories, which apparently were once well-known and much repeated, seem to have their origins in folk-oral performance traditions where the precise characters might change but the core of the action remained constant: the ‘little’ man questioning, undercutting, deflating the powers that be, even if sometimes unintentionally or while becoming a fool himself. Within the world of the Ottoman empire, Karagőz continued as an independent folk tradition and sometimes puppeteers were persecuted. Apparently the tradition was also co-opted into acceptable courtly forms and sometimes used as a weapon in court politics.
In Karagőz two characters stand at the centre of the action, with a variety of stock characters also appearing, depending on the story. There’s Karagőz himself: pug-nosed, bushy-bearded, impulsive and free-speaking (sometimes apparently naively and stupidly so), always unemployed, always on the lookout for some new scheme to provide for his family, physically dynamic and expressive, open to new possibilities and the uncertain, almost always (eventually) able to outwit others, made of flesh and blood and not infrequently a target of physical abuse from which he always, magically, rises intact. Vulnerable and seemingly powerless – and often the object of audience hilarity – Karagőz unclothes pretence and assumed authority, making them the targets of even greater laughter.
On the other side is the smooth-tongued, seemingly erudite, calculating Hacivat, reciter of poems, a shallow but wide well of facts, like someone who’s starred in a Trivial Pursuit training course, and a character who routinely sides with the status quo. In story after story, so I understand, the subversive spirit of the narrative rests with Karagőz, whatever he might do or not do to achieve such an outcome.
A footnote: Now back in Istanbul, we have today visited the Great Blue Mosque and are again surrounded by monumental palaces, Sophia’s great dome and vaults, ever-grander mosques, each emperor and sultan and their architects evidently needing to outdo their predecessors’ towering erections. Yes, they do get me: I do feel awe, and an appealing attraction, in the face of such beauty and grandeur. But I have also imagined joining Karagőz and Hacivat on a walking tour through these same structures – it would be boisterous, argumentative, and joke-filled – and wonder how these same celebrated erections might then be experienced and understood with such characters as guides.