‘It’s my house and I live here
There’s a welcome mat at the door
And if you come on in
You’re gonna get much more’
(Diana Ross, ‘It’s My House,’ 1979)
Sometime in the early 2020s, the ‘potato Europe vs tomato Europe’ meme migrated from Reddit to Instagram, reaching new fans. The concept is self-explanatory: Tomato Europe is an overarching term for someplace you would like to go for vacation – delicious food, blue skies, perhaps some wine. Meanwhile, potato Europe is, like potatoes, down to earth, reliable and even humble. Tomato Europe gave us Casanova, Marquis de Sade and Sofia Loren. Potato Europe? Schrödinger, Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt.
A similar distinction could be made between ‘carpet cultures’ and ‘non-carpet cultures.’ Although the main purpose of carpets is insulation, not every cold-weather civilisation produced them. In former Habsburg lands, weaving is limited to a handful of tiny mountain villages you’d expect to find in an Olga Tokarczuk novel. In Scandinavia, carpet-making became more popular after fourteen centuries of using ‘Oriental’ carpets, and had a renaissance with mid-century modern styles after the 1950s. Historically, in the Low Countries, they appear as tapestries on the walls, not tickling one’s feet from below. If my friends’ icy Rotterdam homes are any indication, they are still very slowly making their way down to the floor around these parts. Meanwhile, the oldest known intact carpet, the Pazyryk rug, was found within the borders of present-day Russia, where, until recently the gifting of carpets was part of a matrimonial ceremony (a common practice in Central Asia, Iran and parts of Turkey). The Pazyryk rug is about 2500 years old, but the design could be called contemporary. Multiple horse-riding figures circumambulate a herd, and in the centre of the rug there are what could be tents or a valley. The pattern is called ‘Origin of Man’ and relates to multiple genesis mythologies from different cultures.
Like a good tomato in the summer, carpets are immediately sensual: while they are younger than the history of mating itself, they probably share the same age as human knowledge of using the most basic tools. So, it’s fascinating that a rug, still present in our lives, exists while the wheel has evolved into a Tesla. When produced with wool or cashmere, rugs can provide the warmth of a cuffing-season bedfellow. In my experience, a culture’s insistence on perfecting lustrous, soft, gigantic carpets often translates to the kitchen in the form of layered and laborious dishes: I’m thinking Iran, India, Georgia, Morocco and China. Not to reproduce orientalist tropes here, but walking on a soft rug and being fed with care – it’s that root chakra love that gets you not just warm and ‘fed,’ but truly satisfied and cared for. And not unlike a female orgasm, a carpet is too elaborate of a thing to ‘just’ come into existence by itself: the making of it requires a certain desire, stubbornness if you will. Even after the yarn is made, dyed and dried, individual knots have to be tied around the warp (tight vertical threads). The knots are then trimmed, and once the carpet is complete – a process that can take multiple years – the surface is shaved, and edges secured. Carpets then get washed and dried and go to wherever they will be sold. And in a way that goes up against the individualistic values of the 20th and 21st centuries: all the hard work that goes into carpet-making remains anonymous.
Perhaps I have a feeling for all this, as I was born in a ‘carpet culture’ – the one that curiously hasn’t been mentioned yet (and has many idioms about rugs): the decoration of the apartment I grew up in Istanbul leaned on both the East and West, not unlike Turkey itself. Seven years before the first IKEA opened in our city, the giant carpet in our drawing room – the largest room in the house, which was only used to entertain guests – was a handmade brown-and-beige affair with flowers and geometric patterns, which I found endlessly boring. It was a Bünyan carpet from Kayseri, the name indicating the region where carpets had been handwoven for centuries. The patterns on it predated the Ottomans, extending back to Seljuk symbols – and my grandmother always made a point that it had cost a fortune. Checking the internet as I write this story, I see that similar items are sold for upwards of 1,000 euros, and believe her now. Other famous carpet hubs in Turkey are Usak (known for the Lotto pattern), Hereke and Bergama, among others (at least 27 different regions in Turkey have licensed their weaving techniques with a geographical indication pattern).
Not everything about the drawing room was as frumpy, though. The chandeliers, made of actual crystal, screamed desire, as did the heavy crystal-cut, 1970s-style vases, and bowls with foreign cigarette packages resting inside them. Moreover, the drawing room was always empty and had a key on the lock, making it a perfect refuge to hide in whenever I found an illustration of people doing it in a newspaper supplement or comic. The Western part of the country was in a liberation frenzy, with weeklies like Tempo and Aktüel making a point to talk about sex in every other issue.
If our drawing room carpet was ugly, the one in the living room was uglier, and, even worse, ‘rustic.’ It was a pinkish red and must have once been new. Like our heavy satin duvets that weighed as much as my childhood self, my parents had inherited it before new household items became widely available through the global mass production network. Both ugly carpets disappeared into a storage unit in the late 1990s, when the entire apartment got covered with a purple, wall-to-wall, patternless carpet. The promise was the unthinkable – that you could walk barefoot in the apartment even in the winter. The outcome was unforeseen – some of us, namely my toddler brother, made a habit of pooping in the same corner of the living room over and over. ‘Anal stage,’ Freud, himself a carpet-lover based on the decor of his London and Vienna consulting rooms, would have said.
Merely a 25-minute car ride away from my childhood home stood Topkapi Palace, home to antique rugs as well as cis-hetero, colonial, white-male fantasies dating back to the 1800s. Painters like Jean Leon Gérôme (The Great Bath of Bursa, 1885), Giulio Rosati (The Favourite, 1880), Ernst Rudolf (The Harem Bath, unknown date) and Fabio Fabbi (Dancers in the Harem, 1902) depicted the harem as a fantasy, where stunning young women languished, ate and danced in various stages of undressing, accompanied by silky carpets, exotic animals and the occasional opium pipe (it is important to note that the artists who depicted these scenes had never been to a harem). According to some art historians, the painters used the carpet as a direct signifier of the Orient, something to send the viewer to the East in their minds immediately. While the idea of a Dionysian harem is titillating, the day-to-day reality of it was more likely a crossover between an all-girls boarding school and a family home. The harem also housed the sultan’s family and was where he would retire to play music, read poetry, paint and, in a later sultan’s case, peruse detective novels.
Long before I read Edward Said’s take on the ‘reclining’ pose and stupor that mark these paintings (according to him, the strange pose serves to further otherize the East), I saw them on the cover of a historical bodice-ripper series, Ann Chamberlain’s Ottoman Empire trilogy (1996–98). Sofia, the first book in the series, aptly subtitled A Castrated Love, depicted the unlikely love story between a eunuch and a concubine. More than two decades after reading these books, I remember a scene in which a concubine has sex with a eunuch who has ‘only a piece of’ his penis left (what I couldn’t understand then but know now: penises don’t matter that much, and the sex could still be pretty amazing). Other than the life story of Safiye Sultan, an actual consort to Ottoman sultan Murad the Third, a terrible castration scene detailing how the many eunuchs in the Ottoman harem were ‘made,’ a lesbian healer-witch named Ayva, and ruthlessly murdered babies are among the other plotlines and characters I remember. Needless to say, the book tantalised and traumatised my thirteen-year-old self in equal parts. Just like Twilight (2005–8) author Stephanie Meyer and 50 Shades of Grey’s (2011) E. L. James, Chamberlain also grew up Mormon, which kind of makes Sofia a predecessor to the former two.
Other than Sofia’s Turkish edition covers, carpets regularly make appearances in consummation scenes. While the entire list is too extensive, scenes of intimacy famously take place on a carpet in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). In Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), all of Daniel Cleaver’s sex scenes with women other than Bridget take place on a carpet. Vladimir Nabokov wrote a carpet sex scene in Spring in Fialta (1936) and Jan Wolkers wrote another one in his polarising novel Turkish Delight (1969). Diana Ross sings ‘There’s a welcome mat on my door,’ in her song ‘It’s My House’ (1979) and mesmerising icon Minnie Riperton poses with one on the cover of her album Adventures in Paradise (1975). Recently, I found myself at the edge of my seat watching Babygirl (2025), in which two of the film’s steamiest scenes take place on the carpet. (One of the carpets is expensive and ‘clean,’ like Romy, while the other is rugged and a little ‘dirty,’ like Samuel.)
Formative years in the east – and by that I mean any place to the right of Vienna – give you a lifetime of carpets to remember. Take the seven-floor apartment we lived in when I was still a teenager. Owned and occupied by a big family with Albanian origins, no one except us, the renters, closed their apartment doors during the daytime. Instead, a narrow and long carpet of a type named ‘yolluk’ covered the hallway between the two apartment doors on each floor.
Then sometimes you can get the girl out of the east, but you can’t get the east out of the girl. During the years I lived in New York, I carried around a miniature Turkmen carpet through a series of mice-infested apartments as a reminder of the fact that I had once been not so hungry and desperate and could, potentially, one day, return to that point – which I’m sure other migrants before me also did. The larger version of that same beautiful carpet covered the floor of my living room in Istanbul after eventually moving back.
Yet, even after finding these perfect specimens, I found myself frequenting carpet stores as I moved into a new apartment right before COVID-19. The first one was on one of the most high-end shopping streets in Istanbul, with exorbitantly expensive carpets. My mother observed that the owner had no wedding band on, and suggested I should marry him – or someone like him – as then I could have any carpet I fancied. He was around my age but with that bland, buttery quality some people just seem to have. I visualised myself getting in bed with him and felt squeamish.
After further investigation, we were referred to a ‘carpet palace’ for good-quality carpets within a budget. They did wholesale and retail. When we arrived, it turned out to be two different seven-storey buildings, connected in the middle like Siamese twins, filled to the brim with carpets from all over the world. After asking me what I was in the market for, the manager started taking us from floor to floor, zigzagging between the buildings. The cavernous building was almost entirely dark, and we moved around with nine or ten men, who acted like bodyguards, turning on the lights, carrying heavy layers of carpets like crêpes, and turning the lights off again as we left the umpteenth room. It resembled a fairy tale, something like the Princess and the Pea, except there was no pea, it was strange to be in a giant, empty building with ten adult men, and the princess had a case of extreme overstress. In the end, I bought three carpets, one of which was a reproduction of the Pazyryk.
One of my favourite carpet scenes in literature is from a novel called Ali and Nino (1937), a love story sometimes compared to Romeo and Juliet. In the scene, one of the main characters, Ali Khan Shirvanshir, sits in his room shortly before the imperial Russian army invades Baku in 1806 and his life changes forever. In the scene, he tells the reader about the ‘dark carpets’ covering the walls, and their symbol-laden patterns and delicate colours. Finally, his eye arrives at his high-school books: ‘Among all this, very disturbing and very unnecessary, books of Western knowledge: chemistry, physics, trigonometry – foolish stuff, invented by barbarians, to create the impression that they are civilised.’
Throughout the novel, Ali keeps comparing the East and the West, presenting a compelling framework. It is as if one of the figures from the 19th century’s orientalist paintings came to life from among the rugs and spoke for himself. Like Shakespeare, the book’s author, Kurban Said, uses a moniker and is anonymous. We don’t know about their gender, we can’t tell where they are from. All we know is that the manuscript surfaced in Vienna in 1937, possibly within walking distance of Freud’s own collection of rugs. In my head, ‘carpet cultures,’ the magnetism of Said’s prose, Freud’s rugs and the Origin of Man pattern get woven together in a perfect line or five: there is nothing sexier than being alive, even if anonymous like a carpet maker, and even if all that will be left of us is a shredded fringe.