In December I have Daniel Erk from the Tagesspiegel magazine "Berliner" gave me an interview. This resulted in a really nice 5-page portrait about me and my work with my kilims. Obviously it reached many kelim-enthusiastic people! Many readers have visited me at Kilim Temple or written to me. It is wonderful to be able to share your passion with others! Many thanks also to Patrick Desbroses for the beautiful photos.
Turkish carpets as a cultural asset
"When a kilim gets wet, it smells like sheep's wool and sun again".
Turkish rugs are insanely trendy. But for Beyza Özler, they are more than just cozy furnishings - she preserves them as cultural heritage.
Beyza Özler prances across the carpets. It's a sunny autumn day, the leaves still hang golden and wine-red in the trees of Sredzkistraße in Prenzlauer Berg, the wind still has something distantly late summery, melancholy about it, and not yet this biting, wet cold. Özler, dark blond hair, large, green-grey eyes, is a bit chipper, pacing from her desk to the window front and back, sipping the lavender tea that fills her small store, drenched in warm colors, with a gentle scent, and looking at her phone: In a moment, it should be time. In a moment, once again, a shipment of eleven square-meter sacks full of kilims is due to arrive from Turkey, 450 kilos, a total of 300 pillows, 300 beanbags and 50 kilims. Desk, window front. Then finally - finally! - a white van pulls up in front of the store, the door bursts open, and there they are: "My babies!" exclaims Özler.
Delivery comes not a day too soon, if Beyza Özler has her way: soon it will be so uncomfortable outside that you'll be turning up your collar, pulling your scarves really tight and thinking about how you might make your home a little cozier. It's the best time ever to sell colorful, cheerful rugs. And that goes for both the season and the zeitgeist.
The ultimate in modern coziness
Just a few years ago were carpets from Turkey was either something for philistines or, sorry, for idiots. Because either you had come to one because your idea of a presentable living room was still a somewhat gloomy and always wine-red patterned rug . Or they had bought one on a package holiday. turn on through Anatolia at the end of a so-called factory tour.
For some years now, however, kilims have been the ultimate in modern coziness: the colors radiate bright and bold red, purple, yellow, ocher and orange. The shapes are rough and clear, yet playful. They show the Elibelinde, a highly abstracted woman with her hands on her hips. They show Kurt Agz and Akrep, wolf's mouth and scorpion, ancient protective signs of shepherds. Or Göz and Musaka, the eye and the amulet, small
Triangles and squares that promise protection from the evil eye and luck in general. Above all, the kilims that Özler now excitedly pulls out of the bags look like Mark Rothko, Paul Klee and the Navajo Indian rug weavers put together, topped off two bottles of bubbly and designed together.
In fact, Özler recounts, Kemal Pasha Atatürk once sent an expedition to America to investigate where the similarities between the patterns of the carpets of the Turkish nomads and those of the Aztecs came from. and Mayans would come - with an unclear outcome.
Nonetheless, the old Turkish weavings fit amazingly seamlessly into what is called California Style in the world of interior design: white walls without wallpaper, large-leafed plants, large bowls, lots of pillows, kitsch from India and Africa, decorations made of macramé and branches - and just brightly colored carpets like the ones Özler sells.
Turkey? Far away
However, the fact that Beyza Özler, whose parents in the 70s emigrated from Turkey and came to the Stuttgart area, selling Turkish carpets, well, that wasn't as foreseeable as it seems from today. "My parents came to Germany to start a new life," Özler says with a slightly Swabian twang. "That definitely shaped me. My mother always told me not to marry a Turkish man under any circumstances."
Özler's relationship with Turkey remained ambivalent: On the one hand, she went to a Turkish afternoon school, but on the other hand, she says, "the loud boys sitting in the last row of the bus were always a bit embarrassing. Her parents were already running three fashion boutiques in Stuttgart, and Özler's future path seemed to be mapped out: After school to, of course, Paris, then to study textile business in Nagold in the deep Black Forest, and then to join the small but exquisite fashion fair "Ideal" in Berlin. Turkey? Far away. Now and then she put on Turkish psychedelic rock in the legendary King size bar or in the small booth of Club Picknick in Dorotheenstraße. That's it.
Özler's small store in Prenzlauer Berg is also a bridge between cultures, beyond politics, racism and clichés
PHOTO: PATRICK DESBROSSES
Özler's path led further and further away - from her parents, who would have liked to bequeath their small Stuttgart fashion empire to their daughter, also from fashion, whose vanity and ruthlessness Özler was increasingly disappointed and annoyed by, and even more so from Turkey, which in all these years attracted attention at best through political grandstanding. Özler trained as a yoga teacher in India, then got pregnant. "At the time, my Turkish was really catastrophic. I couldn't even count properly, didn't even know the days of the week - because I wasn't really interested in it until then," she says. "But I realized that if I didn't learn it, I wouldn't be able to pass it on to my children and the thread would break.
A door opens here
Özler recovered, enrolled in Turkology, attended lectures with her newborn daughter, learned Turkish, read up on literature, began to study Sufism and mysticism. But it was all not enough. In the summer, Özler traveled to Turkey, to a friend's home in Kas - but when the vacation was over after two weeks, she knew: This is home. This is a new beginning. A door opens here.
So she rented an attic apartment in Çerçeler, a village above Kas. In a carpet store in the village, she bought her first own kilim. On a hot day in the summer of 2013, after Özler had already bought several rugs for her apartment, the dealer took her to the mountains of Gömbe, where the rugs are woven. Özler instantly fell in love with the stony yet powerful landscape.
But above all, she fell in love with three small shepherd's huts made of natural stone and wood, which the carpet dealer had expanded and, Özler suspects, would have been happy to sell to her. "I can still remember that exact moment when I entered: that scent of cedar and juniper!"
The stony, mighty landscape of the mountains of Gömbe. PHOTO: BEYZA ÖZLER
Özler immediately had the next step in mind: a spiritual retreat in the mountains of Anatolia, a bit of relaxation, a bit of Turkish cuisine, especially for mothers with small children looking for a bit of peace, a bit of relaxation and a lot of nature. The name: "Wild Heart, Free Soul", Özler's motto in life. To this end, she invited friends and acquaintances, gave yoga classes - but as enthusiastic as the visitors were about nature and relaxation: They were even more enthusiastic about the cushions and carpets with which Özler had made the meager huts homelike.
Yörük means nomad
Özler toured the villages, bought the kilims that seemed the most beautiful to her with her trained taste, and organized the first bazaar in Berlin in April 2014, which was an immediate success. And she began to take a closer look at the carpets. With their history. Began to buy no longer in stores on the Turkish coast, but directly from the women in the mountains who weave the Kilims. Began buying even old and broken rugs at markets, delivering them to Istanbul, cleaning and restoring them, and having the unsalvageable rugs re-sewn into pillows. "What's special about kilims is that they were traditionally woven by women for their own families," Özler says. "The design is unaffected by customer wishes, by zeitgeist or politics."
The Kilim weavers make art without seeing themselves as artists. PHOTO: BEYZA ÖZLER
And the rugs turned out to be a piece of heritage that fits perfectly into Özler's life. "When a kilim gets wet, it smells like sheep's wool and like the sun again," she says. "It reminds me of summers with my grandparents in Anatolia."
Slowly, piece by piece, Özler built her own idea of home: from her parents' aversion to Turkish machismo. From her love of fashion, fabrics and patterns. From spirituality, from yoga, tea and pillows. From Turkish Sufism and the millennia-old patterns and traditions of kilims, which were woven by women even before Islam and Turkey existed. And from Turkish terms that she keeps weaving into everything she says and writes: Yolcu means passenger. Nur means light. Sevgilerle means tender. Öpücükler means kisses. And Yörük, that's how Özler refers to herself. It means nomad.
Long ago the furniture giants offer similar patterns
But the search for home has long since become a race against time for Özler: Fewer and fewer women in the mountains north of Kas sit down at the large looms; carpets have become cheap, and work in the fields is more profitable. For Özler, however, the women who have always woven carpets between Gömbe and Mount Akdag are not simply manual laborers. They are artists whose work is not sufficiently appreciated only because they are simple women from peasant families.
For Özler, the small replica of "The Carpet Dealers" by Iranian painter Jafar Petgar epitomizes her family and... PHOTO: PATRICK DESBROSSES
Özler dreams of one day opening a school for kilim weaving. Perhaps compiling a coffee table book, a collection of the great art of kilims. To be on the safe side, she is having all the kilims she sells in her store extensively photographed. She is already working on a documentary film about kilim weavers. Perhaps, says Özler, she will manage to make the kilims more lucrative for the women of Anatolia than the fields again someday. But that will be difficult: The large furniture stores have long had similar patterns in their assortment. The carpets come from factories, so who looks that closely?
Sometimes, says Beyza Özler, she has the feeling that she is no longer interested in selling the carpets. It's more about saving these works of art before they disappear or, as happens, end up in the trash. "My father told me that my grandmother and my aunts still wove rugs themselves," Özler says at the very end of the conversation, when the little glasses of lavender tea are empty. "I looked for them. But it was all gone."
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/themen/tagesspiegel-berliner/tuerkische-teppiche-als-kulturgut-wird-ein-kilim-nass-riecht-er-wieder-nach-schafwolle-und-sonne/23733624.html
