“Opium,” said Ali, pointing to the sprinkles on top of a large pastry I’d just eaten a chunk from. The pastry was a specialty of Afyon, where he was from. Well, I thought, his English was very good, but maybe he was pulling my leg; he did have a sense of humor. But no, the label clearly said Haşhaşlı Çörek, meaning “tea cake with hashish/opium.” He urged me to eat some more and I said I’d better wait and see how it sat with me. As if the tea itself wasn’t psychoactive enough; sitting and talking and drinking glass after glass of very strong black tea seemed to be a national pastime in Turkey1. And since an invitation to tea isn’t meant to be refused, I’d been drinking a lot of it. Once, I was sitting at a restaurant when a guy at another table invited me over, paid for my dinner and then tea, then when the restaurant closed, took me to the tea house next door for more tea. Another time I was working on a park bench on Alaaddin Hill when the maintenance guys took a break from sweeping leaves and invited me to tea. We sat cross-legged on a plastic carpet they spread on the pavement, poured from the ingenious double teapots they use here, and stirred in sugar scooped from a plastic tub. So it seemed there was no way I was going to leave Turkey without a serious caffeine addiction… best to just roll with it. The tea house Ali and I were sitting at wasn’t on Google Maps, so he’d just told me that it was near a certain sweet shop and a certain hotel. I got there early and found an alleyway lined with little low tables and stools, almost all of them occupied. “I think I found it,” I texted Ali, “all the old men are here so it must be good.” He replied, “You are in the right place!”
Ali taught social work and public policy part-time at one of the local universities, but I soon discovered that his real passion was carpets. He would buy them and sell them, mostly not for the money so much as for the fun of it, although good bargains were part of the fun, and so he always mentioned the buying and selling prices when he showed me a picture of a rug. He had arrived at the tea house carrying a bag containing a small one that he’d just sold online, ready to be shipped to the customer. Ali greeted his friend Mustafa who was at another table across the alley from us. “He sells rugs,” Ali told me. “He has a place right over there. Let’s play a joke on him and make him think you want to buy a really big one.” He told Mustafa I was in the market, but Mustafa wasn't biting. Ali insisted that I had money and Mustafa replied that everyone had money, it was interest that was the problem. “He doesn't believe you,” I said. “No,” said Ali, and explained that although Mustafa could barely read, he was an extremely clever man. “Tell him in Turkish,” he said. I struggled to compose a serious face and a roughly grammatical sentence. “Büyük halı alabilir miyim, abi?” Well, almost grammatical, but it got the point across. Mustafa came over and showed me a picture of a big rug on his phone. Okay, I thought, this had gone far enough; I didn’t really want to buy a rug. I explained in Turkish that I didn’t have a house or even a car, all I had was a small backpack. Mustafa showed me a picture of a smaller rug.
But here I was with two hardcore carpet geeks, and maybe I could learn something from them. I was pretty interested in a sort of rug that didn’t require a floor to put it on. In the TV show I’d watched about dervishes that inspired me to come to Turkey, everyone carried a certain style of bag. These bags seemed to be made from a skinny piece of wool carpet about two and a half meters long and half a meter wide or a bit more. The ends were folded back toward the center and the sides sewn up to form two pouches with a short space in between. This could then be slung over a horse, donkey, camel, or the shoulder of a person on foot. It struck me as an incredibly simple and practical design, so much so that I’d actually sewn one myself for my recent walking trip, although using the materials and style of modern tactical equipment. Ali told me that this kind of bag was called a heybe, and that Mustafa probably had a few handy over at his place if I wanted to see what they were like in real life. Ali also explained to me that it was a good time for buying rugs. The recent currency and debt crisis starting in 2018 had kicked off hyperinflation in Turkey, officially about 70% in the past year, but Ali told me that in reality it might be twice as much. Many of the conversations I’d been overhearing were about rising prices, particularly the price of bread and kahvaltı (a standard breakfast selection). So in this environment cash-strapped people were buying industrial carpets and selling off their handmade ones at low prices. And lately it had also been a good time to sell rugs, because of the online shopping boom kicked off by the pandemic, although this was starting to taper off as people shopped more in person. Guys like Ali and Mustafa were making money off the arbitrage, buying up rugs from remote villages and selling them on Etsy or social media.
So we finished our tea and ambled over to Mustafa’s place in the next building down the alley, up a dark and winding staircase to an upper floor. Because he was selling online and because he was mainly in the wholesale game, there was no reason to pay for street frontage. It was just one small room, with all the seating being covered with rugs and wool bolsters, and something like half the floor space devoted to tall and colorful stacks piled most of the way to the ceiling. Ali kept some of his inventory in a corner, and he pulled a few pieces out to show me. He also looked through some of Mustafa’s piles to see if there was anything he might be interested in. He asked the price of a small rug with stunning colors and expressed surprise when Mustafa said he would sell it for only 100 lira (about $7.50 USD), then noticed the chunk torn out of one side and put it back. Meanwhile, Mustafa had begun to rummage and was laying down saddlebags for me to look at. Between the two of them, they explained the various kinds. This one was in the new cheaper style, with simple stripes; that one was made for a camel. But one of them jumped out at me right away, both for its beauty and its practical features. Ali told me it was from the village of Obruk, woven in the soumak style, which is so difficult and time consuming that nobody does it anymore. The bag was evidently very old but in perfect condition; someone must have kept it stored in a cabinet. The colors were dark reds, greens, and blues, and the sides were hung with a myriad of tassels that seemed to be both decorations and maybe a way to tie on small items to keep them handy. At each opening, there was a row of vertical slits on the outside, about an inch long and an inch apart, and on the inside a corresponding row of loops. Mustafa demonstrated how the loops could be passed through the slits and made into a chain, and then the final loop could be secured with a padlock. There was a slit across the middle which we puzzled over the purpose of. At first we all thought it might be for the head to go through, but I tried and it was far too small. Then I theorized that maybe it helped keep the bag’s shape from distorting when it was full. But Mustafa solved the mystery when he stuck his arm through the slit and crooked it to hold the bag in place on his shoulder. The bag’s features even covered the spirit realm: small blue beads had been sewn on in a few places to ward off the evil eye.
Mustafa kept pulling out more saddlebags, but none of them were as nice as that one. I rarely buy anything I don’t need, but darned if I didn’t find myself getting caught up in the carpet fever. I had been wanting a real heybe, and I probably wouldn’t get a better chance. But I knew that as soon as I asked how much Mustafa wanted for it, the game would be on. I couldn’t help myself. I asked. The price seemed a little high, but on the other hand it was a special piece; even I could tell that much just from my limited experience in fiber arts. Mustafa claimed it would go for five times as much in Istanbul, or three times as much at any other shop in town, if I could even find one like it, and I said I didn’t doubt it. Ali acted as interpreter for our negotiations, although he threw in his own opinions here and there. We don’t have that kind of money, man, he told Mustafa. But the problem was I absolutely did have that kind of money. Mustafa said he didn’t care if he sold it or not, and in fact, it wouldn’t be for sale at all except that his daughter was getting married and he needed cash. We went back and forth a bit, Mustafa complaining that Ali was taking my side. I didn’t have enough lira on me to cover it, but I had some emergency money in dollars, so I proposed a combination of the two. The number of lira gradually worked toward a compromise position. As we drew close to a deal, Mustafa folded up the bag like he was packing it away, as if to indicate that he was keeping it if the price went any lower. But finally he reached out a hand and we shook. I extracted bills from my waistband, and he complained that they were wet. I explained that it was my emergency money and the weather was hot, so it got sweaty. He suggested that in that case I should wrap it in plastic. “Yaş para paradir,” I replied, wet money is still money.
We hung out in the shop for a while longer, and Mustafa pulled out a hardback book about the arts and crafts of Obruk, in which he himself was credited in many of the photos of rugs and other woven articles. There in the book was a picture of a bag that looked just like mine, but he said that mine was a more beautiful example. He wanted me to promise that if I sold it, I would ask a lot more than I’d paid for it, and I reassured him that I had no intention of selling it. We returned to the tea shop to hang out, but carpet fever followed us there: during lulls in the conversation, Ali and Mustafa would scroll through pictures of rugs on their phones, occasionally holding one up to be admired. Ali said he was trying to sell off his collection so he had more time to pursue other things, maybe some research or a post-doctoral position. Mustafa teased him, asking why, in that case, was he still looking at rugs for sale? But clearly it was in Ali’s blood: his father had been obsessed with rugs too, which he’d never understood until it happened to him, and now one of his daughters seemed to have caught the carpet fever. He even wanted to pass it on to me. “You can make good money doing this,” he said. “When you come back next year, you can stay at my house for a month and sell rugs!” I told him maybe if I got really tired of my job for some reason, but that he shouldn’t get his hopes up. “I’m just not a businessman,” I said, “not like you guys.”
It was the hottest part of the afternoon, and every so often one of the waiters from the tea shop walked backwards down the alley with a watering can, wetting the paving stones in a neat succession of arcs. In the dry breeze, it was an inexpensive and highly effective form of air conditioning, no doubt going back thousands of years. I reflected on how I was getting a taste of the old way of doing business, with lots of tea and conversation, price trends and market information being exchanged by word of mouth, building trust, bargaining, making deals. It was an intensely social way of life, and sales on social media could never replicate it. On the other hand, the old ways were limited in time and space, and not everyone in the world who wanted a nice handmade rug could come to this back alley in Konya. When I got back to my hotel room, I tried to figure out what to do with the bag. I had the idea to just replace my backpack with it, and although all my things did barely fit, the bag felt awkward with such a load, as if it had been made for smaller things, for smaller journeys, or for people who packed lighter. So just before I left town, I went to the post office to mail it home. The guy behind the counter asked what I was shipping. “Heybe,” I told him. “Kilim mi?” he asked, is it woven wool? “Evet, kilim,” I said. “Kilim arıyor musunuz?” he said, are you looking for rugs? Aha, clearly I had found yet another victim of carpet fever!
It turns out the numbers back me up here. On average, Turks drink over three kilos of tea per person per year, making them the biggest tea drinkers in the world by far. Ireland, Iran, and the UK are left in the dust at around two kilos per person per year.
Hope y'all all (miss the South yet?) have
Such Fun in Istanbul!
Loved this one. I'm excited for Cynthia and Ken to be visiting you, and I have indulged in the fragrance and flavor of Turkey vicariously through you, them, and Yunus Emre! I'm wondering what kind of tea that might be available here would be closest to the kind they drink in Turkey.
Thank you, Jesse.