I was still walking along the road out of Aksaray and hadn't even propped up my thumb, when a car pulled up to my side, with a five-headed family infecting me with their white-toothed smiles, and the silver-haired man at the stirring wheel speaking to me in accentless Austrian German: "Are you going to Sultanhanı? That is where our house is, come and jump on in!" I marveled once more at how easy my traveler's life had become and took a squeezed seat in the back with them all.

It was a curious assemblage of a family. There were granddad and grandma, grandma's spitting image of a younger sister, as well as grandma's and granddad's daughter-in-law with the twin grandchildren. The kids names were Rabia and Menderes, same as were the grandparents'. Calling one's kids after one's parents is a common practice in several cultures. For example Russians traditionally do it, Georgians sometimes do it, and I have even heard the same about Icelanders. Jews apparently do it only when the grandparent is not alive anymore. It is a bit old fashioned way of showing respect I believe. Only about a month earlier I had been invited to have lunch in the company of four generations of an Arabic Alawi Imam family in Antiochia, from the two-year-old grandson Sefid to the bespectacled grand-dad Adnan, where there were two names for the four males, alternating generation-wise.
As for the kids in the car right now, what pretty names they had! Menderes like the sinuous river on the Egean sea coast whose name is at the origin of the English verb "meander", Rabia like Rabi`a al `Adawiyya, the famous 8th century Sufi princess whose spiritual powers were so potent she could fly her carpet through the air, and when in prayer, the room around her alit. On her first hajj the Ka'aba came to meet her half-way through the dessert. She was a cool chick who once said she wanted to "douse the fires of hell, and burn the gardens of heaven", because morality should need neither punishment nor incentive.

It was not a long drive through the desolate Central Anatolian landscape. On our right flitted past sad, decapitated fields of sunflowers, to our left were heaped up small desert dunes of their kernels. The white ones are generally to roast and be eaten, the black ones are better to make oil out of.

Once we arrived in their village, the family duely made me see the 12th century Seldjukid caravanserai that had made this place such a tourist trap to begin with. It was a pleasant enough visit: The high, dark and shady camel stable ressembled a cathedral from the inside, with bright sun rays entering only through narrow apertures that were hewn into the stone in lieu of windows. Fear of thieves climbing in, you see.
In the kitchen, the stones were still blackened from smoke 800 years ago.

Afterwards, I was to take a look at the family's carpet shop. The granddad was just turning the key in the door to his shop, when his neighbour walked by, advising him: "Kandırma"- "Don't rip her off". I chuckled at the notion, because I was certainly not going to buy anything. Still, it was fairly fun to look at different kinds of carpets and learn about them.
"In the 60's people still made kilims for their own houses, that's why you will find the best quality from those times", Menderes the elder said, rolling out some stunning exemplaries in front of me. I learnt to distinguish the really good ones from the merely tape-à-l'oeil ones. You have to look closely: Quality is determined by how tightly the carpet is knotted (a halı) or woven (a kilim), as well as by the quality of the material utilized.

Presently we were looking at a large and very expensive halı from the region. The colour was a velvety dark green from one angle, and a much lighter cottony turquoise from another. Knotting carpets is an art. "At the end of the 90's there were only four women in the entire city of Konya (a metropolis of 1,000,000 inhabitants), who could knot like that. Very soon, their eyes are going to fail and they are going to be too old to still practice their mastery. Then, this great old art will die out with them", Menderes told me.
Today, no young people accept to work under such hard conditions and earn so little.
Before it took one month to cut off the long threads by hand in order to finish off a newly knotted halı. Today it is done with a clipping machine usually used for sheep within two days. Machines can weave much quicker and more efficiently today.
But of course, true beauty is achieved by the small irregularities only human hands create.

Later on that day we went to visit some women knotting at their home. They were working 8 to 10 hours a day to finish the piece they were working on, and after three weeks of such work would receive the equivalent of 200 Euros, for the both of them. A few months later, the merchant paying them however, might make between 3,000 and 4,000 Euros out of the finished product.

By what magic this price difference was to come about I was to learn only a little later, by accident, when we rode across town. "Why are these carpets lying there?", I asked with astonishment, since our car was going over one lying smack in the middle of the road. To me, this seemed a rather strange place to put one of these beautiful and expensive pieces.
"Oh, I'll show you more", Menderes said enigmatically and turned round his car at the following corner. We drove a bit closer to the outskirts, and for sure there were more of them there, lying outside of houses in the dust of the street, straight under the sun. "It takes about a year to make an antique one out of a perfectly acceptable new carpet. You lay them out in the midday sun, or wetten them and let cars drive over them. If you use chemicals, it goes even faster. American traders come and ship home several containers at the time. You can make thousands of dollars for one 'antique' carpet. Americans especially love those carpets where the colours have faded away almost completely. Then they feel like they really own an antiquity, one several hundred years old."

Another way of making "antique" carpets is using genuinely old thread to knit or weave a new one. Old saddlebags or flour bags still abound. You can unravel them, then dye the threads any colour you want to weave a kilim. In this case, even in a laboratory test, the newly woven carpet will prove positive as a truely antique one. Menderes acknowledged one thing: "I left school when I was 12 years old, and since then I have been trading carpets. And yet, not even I can tell the difference most of the time between a real Ottoman carpet, and a fake one".