This Transylvanian prayer rug was recently included in The Charm of the Orient in the Heart of Transylvania: Carpets from the Heritage of the Brukenthal National Museum, an exhibition held at the Brukenthal Palace in Sibiu in summer 2026. Bringing together Anatolian and Caucasian carpets, Central Asian textiles and Balkan kilims, the exhibition showed the variety of woven objects preserved in Transylvania and placed this rug within a wider history of collecting, craftsmanship and cultural exchange.
Prayer rug, West Anatolia, mid-17th century, 1.32 × 1.75 m (4 ft 4 in × 6 ft 2 in), 1,330 knots per square decimetre. Inscribed 1720 D. Mays. Before 1910, it was in the Evangelical Church in Sibiu, Transylvania. Brukenthal National Museum, inventory AD 377.
Detail of Transylvanian prayer rug showing the upside down animal in the border
It is a classic mid-17th-century prayer rug, remarkable for its exceptional colour and its pinched niche, or head-and-shoulders design, probably derived from Ottoman court prayer rugs. One of its most striking features is the dark green-blue of the kilim ends, a colour that has penetrated the warps. The rug was woven from the top in order to centralise the position of the prayer arch, and it is clear that the transition from the horizontal to the vertical border caused the weaver some difficulty in maintaining the rhythm of the border design. Her improvisation appears in a small animal in the upper left border, a detail I have not seen on another rug of this period. Viewed according to the prayer arch, the animal is upside down, but it would have appeared the right way up to the weaver. Her idiosyncratic spirit is also shown by the small flowers growing around the lower edge of the field. These are not consistent, but change character and turn into dots as they reach the shoulder of the arch. This rug was one of the pieces featured in my article on improvisation in HALI 211. These small details made me think of the improvisation of jazz musicians such as Miles Davis.
