Turkish Craftmanship

We stayed for two days in Cappadocia.
On the second day, after the hot air balloon ride we went to visit three places.
The first one was hand made carpet factory. The carpets were made either from silk, cotton or wool.

The silkworm cocoons(left- the white round thing inside the container) had to be 'processed' in a certain way in order to get the thread ( I can't recall how it was).
Yes, the poor worms were inside that white cocoons.
This lady(right) was showing us how to make the double knots, the method used only by Turkish in hand made carpet making, hence you will have a long lasting high quality carpet. Unlike machine made carpet, a genuine handmade carpet takes a long time to finish. That carpet there(right) should be ready in may be two years time.

Then, in the show room, after being served with apple tea and Turkish coffee, it's time to show the carpets. The carpets were absolutely beautiful!
And the ones made with 100% silk were not just beautiful, but they were very very soft.. and silky..of course.
But, just use your own imagination to estimate the prices.Fully hand made, and it took months to complete. Not cheap I must say.


After the carpets, we were taken to see the jewelry. Precious and semi precious stones wrapped in silver. Blue, red, black, green stones... they were all there.
The special one is turquoise. Now I know that turquoise actually originated from Turkey and the word turquoise means Turkish stone or Turkish blue.

Not only the stones were special, the designs were very unique as some of them were fully imitated from ancient Anatolian jewelries.
I was there just to "cleanse my eyes" (cuci mata, that's what we, Malay called it). And yes.. my eyes were totally cleansed all right...

The last one for the day was ceramics.
Before we arrived at the place, I was just thinking that, it's just ceramics, nothing special.
But, once I saw the finished products, I was so impressed. The intricate designs were simply amazing.

The place that we went to belonged to a family, it was a family business which has been around for many generations (eight, if I am not mistaken). It was located in one of the cave houses.

From the carpet, then jewelry and lastly the ceramics.. what I saw was people who took pride in their work. Their meticulous and delicate work requires deep passion. Without passion, it's just not possible to produce such immaculate work.

I felt honoured to have met these people. They've not only shown me their exquisite works of art, but they have taught me about passion, patience and perseverance.

Alhamdulillah...
All praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds.