A book about the rugs of the Protestant Churches in Transylvania
Transylvania continues to be the repository of the richest and best preserved corpus of small-format Turkish carpets outside the Islamic world.
Almost 400 examples attributable to the golden period of Ottoman weaving from the mid 15th to the end of the 18th century survived here including most of the classical groups such as ‘Ghirlandaio’, Holbein, Ushak, ‘Lotto’, Selendi, ‘Transylvanian’, Kula and Ghiordes.
Attempts to explain the presence of so many Ottoman Turkish rugs in the Lutheran Churches of the Saxon community in Transylvania have so far resulted in theories that range from the incomplete to the eccentric.