"Su Yao's Dazzling Counterattack Chapter 120"
The Bosphorus glinted like a ribbon of silver between Europe and Asia, where minarets pierced the sky and wooden yali mansions clung to the waterfront. In a workshop tucked behind the Grand Bazaar, its walls lined with bolts of silk and wool, a group of weavers sat cross-legged on the floor, their fingers knotting threads into bold geometric patterns that seemed to dance in the light.
Their leader, 63-year-old Fatma Usta, looked up from her loom, her headscarf a vibrant mosaic of red and gold that matched the carpet she was creating. She held up a section of kilim—a flat-woven rug in emerald, sapphire, and terracotta, its surface a tapestry of diamonds and medallions that told stories of caravans and conquests. "This is our miras (legacy)," she said in Turkish, her voice rich as the spices in the bazaar. "It carries the dust of the Silk Road, the wisdom of our grandmothers, the colors of our land."
Kilim weaving, a craft honed by Turkic tribes for over a millennium, is a language of symbols encoded in wool. The wool comes from Anatolian sheep, raised in the high plateaus where summers are scorching and winters bitter. It's sheared during the Kurban Bayrami (Eid al-Adha), when the fleece is thickest, and washed in the waters of the Golden Horn, said to have "the touch of Hagia Sophia." "We beat the wool with copper mallets to soften it," Fatma's apprentice, 27-year-old Emine, explained, showing a pile of fleece being prepared. "My dede (grandfather) said the mallets sing stories of the steppes—too light, and the wool stays coarse; too heavy, and it turns to dust. It's like taming a wild horse: firm but gentle."
Dyes are brewed from plants and minerals gathered across Turkey: pomegranate rinds for yellow, walnut husks for brown, and indigo imported from Iraq for blue. The recipes are guarded by usta (master weavers), passed down in rhymes that help remember proportions. "The indigo needs a pinch of salt from the Black Sea," Emine said, stirring a vat of deep blue liquid with a wooden spoon. "We recite the rhyme while stirring—'Bir deniz tuzu, bir gökyüzü mavisi' (One pinch of sea salt, one sky full of blue). Forget the words, and the color turns gray."
The weaving is done on vertical looms strung with cotton warp threads, with weavers working in pairs to create the flat-woven patterns. Designs include gül (roses) for love, elibelinde (hands on hips) for fertility, and kale (castles) for protection, with each region's kilims bearing distinct motifs. "That diamond pattern? It's from Konya, the home of Rumi," Emine said, pointing to a repeating geometric design. "We weave it so the carpet holds the spirit of poetry."
Su Yao's team arrived after their Ethiopia project, drawn to the kilim's bold colors and its role as a bridge between East and West. They brought samples of seaweed-metal threads blended with wool, hoping to create a fabric that retained the rug's vibrancy while adding resistance to the damp Bosphorus air. But when Lin displayed a machine-woven sample with printed patterns, Fatma's husband, 67-year-old Mehmet Usta—a master dyer with hands stained indigo for 50 years—let out a sharp laugh. "Your machine weaves without hunar (craftsmanship)," he said, kicking the sample aside. "Our kilims are made with 10,000 knots per square meter, each one a decision. This thing is a photograph—it has no soul."
Tensions erupted when a minor earthquake shook Istanbul, rattling the Grand Bazaar and collapsing the workshop's storage room. The weavers' bolts of wool, dyed and undyed, were buried under rubble, and their copper dye vats cracked, spilling indigo and pomegranate juice across the stone floor. "The earth rejects your metal thread," Mehmet muttered as men dug through the debris, their hands bleeding from sharp splinters. With the Kirkpinar (oil-wrestling festival) approaching, when new kilims are laid in the wrestling arena to honor champions, the community faced disaster. "Without kilims, we have no honor to offer our wrestlers," Fatma said, staring at the ruined wool.
That night, Su Yao sat with Fatma in her apartment above the workshop, where a copper tray of borek (stuffed pastries) sat on a kilim-covered table and the call to prayer echoed from a nearby mosque. The walls were hung with kilims collected from across Turkey, each one labeled with its village of origin. A small shelf held a photo of Fatma's grandmother, a weaver in a headscarf posed beside her loom. "I know these carpets aren't just decoration," Su Yao said, sipping çay (tea) from a tiny glass. "They're your history, your art, your connection to the past. We want to help them live on."
Fatma smiled, passing her a piece of lokum (Turkish delight) dusted with powdered sugar. "My nine (great-grandmother) used to say that even torn kilims can be rewoven, if you remember the pattern," she said. "But your metal—maybe it's a sign. Young people buy machine-made rugs now, not kilims. They don't know the stories in the patterns. We need to show them our miras still has power."
Over the next three weeks, the team worked alongside the weavers. They helped rebuild the storage room with reinforced beams, their hands blistered from mixing mortar, and joined Mehmet in collecting new dye materials—pomegranates from Antalya, walnuts from Kastamonu—chanting the old rhymes as they worked. "'Bir nar, bir kirmizi, bir hayat dolusu' (One pomegranate, one red, one life full)," they sang, their voices blending with Turkish until the rhythm felt like the pulse of the city.
Lin experimented with coating the seaweed-metal threads in olive oil and beeswax, a mixture used to preserve wooden looms. "It needs to move like wool, not against it," she said, showing Fatma a swatch where the metal threads added a subtle shimmer to the terracotta wool. Fatma ran her fingers over it, then nodded: "This would make a champion's kilim."
Fiona collaborated with Emine to design a new pattern: kale (castle) motifs with towers merging into ocean waves, with metal threads outlining the castles to make them glint like sunlight on domes. "It honors your land and our sea," Fiona explained, and Mehmet traced the pattern with a calloused finger. "The Bosphorus connects two seas, just as this carpet connects two worlds," he said.
On the day of Kirkpinar, the weavers carried their collaborative kilim to the wrestling arena, where it was laid out like a mosaic of color. The castles blazed in terracotta and gold, their towers flowing into waves of blue wool shot through with metal threads that caught the sun like the Bosphorus at noon. Fatma draped a corner over Su Yao's shoulders—a castle tower and a wave, woven together. "Now you're usta (master) of two worlds," she said.
As the team's car crossed the Bosphorus Bridge, they could hear the cheers of the wrestling crowd and the call to prayer from the Asian side. Through the window, Emine was teaching a group of girls to tie knots, the seaweed-metal thread spooled beside her. Su Yao thought of the new dye vats, bubbling with indigo, and the way the metal threads had learned to enhance the kilim without overshadowing its spirit—how innovation, when rooted in respect for a craft's heritage, becomes part of its evolution.
Her phone buzzed with a message from Ethiopia: Tsion had sold their collaborative shimma to a church, funding a weaving school for girls. Su Yao smiled, typing back: "We've added new patterns in Istanbul—your turn to weave something that bridges continents."
Somewhere in the distance, the muezzin's call merged with the honking of ships in the Bosphorus, a harmony as old as the city and as endless as the sea.