Vadas József (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 10. (Budapest, 1991)
BATÁRI Ferenc: Az Iparművészeti Múzeum három oszmán-török „Memling-szőnyeg"-e
wool, 2Z, 2 red, 2 brown, blue, green, yellow, beige (8); knots: gardes, horizontally appr. 20/10 cm, vertically appr. 25/10 cm, appr. 500/dm 2 . Pattern : in the red central field three squares, each standing on a corner, with stepped sides and hooks, composed in octagons, with a star in the centre. Border: made of two strips; in the strip closer to the centre on brown background squares with stepped sides and hooks, in the outer strip s-shaped motifs on crimson background. Condition : faded, moth-eaten, the edges are fraying, conserved. Acquisition : purchased in 1973 from a private collector in Budapest. The "Memling göl", the rhomboid with stepped sides and hooks of our carpets, is a typically Anatolian ornamental motif. A fifteenth-century analogue 8 (Plate 7) of our two earlier carpets can be found in the Mevlana Museum of Konya. Memling göls are especially frequent on the conservative, nineteenth- and twentieth-century yörük and village carpets. The Adil Besim Company introduced a mid-nineteenth-century bergama carpet 9 decorated with 4x4 Memling göls at their 1978 exhibition in Vienna (Plate 7). In 1981 London's Lefevre and Partners auctioned an early nineteenth-century Memling carpet originating from Konya 10 . In the book entitled Teppiche der Bauern und Nomaden by W. Brüggeman and H. Böhmer there are several depictions of East, Middle and West Anatolian Memling carpets, including the göls of the No. 59 Kütahya work 11 which, similarly to our yörük carpets, are not arranged in a square-rule pattern, but stand freely. Memling göls are still being used as ornamental motifs: Dr. Neriman Görgünay has published the photograph of a Memling rug made in 1969. 12 Outside Anatolia, Memling göls are found in great numbers in the Caucasus region. However, the structure of the carpets reveal local specifics. There is a nineteenth-century Gendje in the Dzhanashia Museum of Tbilisi and an Armanian carpet in the Folk Museum of Yerevan, the designs of which closely resemble the designs of our carpets. 13 Memling göls can be found on Shirvan carpets, the same way as they turn up on Chichi carpets, or the works of the Kazakh, Derbent, Karabag and the Leshgi peoples (Plate 9). Less frequently though, Memling göls are also found in Central Asia and Iran. Halis with Memling göls have not been recovered in Central Asia, which suggests that in recent times there was no sovereign tribe in the region whose symbol was the Memling göl. The Folk Museum of Leningrad owns a Tekke-Turkmen carpet-bag, or torba (Plate 10), and the cover of a Karakalpak bag used for storing domestic utensils 14 which are decorated with the Memling design (We cannot talk about a göl, since these objects are not halis). Memling göls can be discovered on the carpets of a Turkic tribe called the Kashgai, who live in Southern Iran. One such carpet was auctioned by Lefevre and Partners in 1983, with three rhomboids in the middle, each containing four Memling göls. 15 It cannot be a coincidence that, although Memling göls might turn up in areas separated by as much as a thousand miles, they only turn up on the works of Turkic peoples. If not a coincidence, then it is reasonable to assume that the Memling göl once must have been the emblem of a great tribe, in the days when the majority of the Turkic tribes were still living together in Central Asia. Presumably when this tribe lost its sovereignty for some unknown reason, it also lost the right to use its emblem as a göl. The families were assimilated by other tribes ; still, they fondly remembered the glorious past, as symbolized by the old göl which they readily used as a secondary ornamental motif. And when their new tribe moved on to the Caucasus region, Iran, or Anatolia, they brought along these motifs. Later, the heraldic meaning of the göl was forgotten and became dissolved in the local ornamental thesaurus.
