"Echoes of Holbein: Karakeçili Carpets and the Question of Tribal Emblems" with Ahmet Balkan, a carpet and architecture scholar and researcher, Munich.

The Karakeçili are a Turkmen tribal group documented in Ottoman sources since the 1450s and known for a distinctive tradition of pile carpet weaving in northwest Anatolia, particularly in the nineteenth century. Many of these weavings feature striking star-centered octagonal motifs that recall the famous “Holbein” patterns of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. What can such similarities—spanning four centuries—tell us about how designs travel, persist, and transform within tribal traditions?
In this talk, Ahmet Balkan presents a focused case study of a core Karakeçili group of carpets whose compositions consistently preserve a paired göl system: a Holbein-like star göl and a second star-and-hooks göl with strong Central Asian resonances. Through close visual analysis and comparison with related Bergama rugs around 1700–1800 and classical Holbein carpets, the webinar offers a strengthened argument for tribal transmission and visual memory as key forces behind the long life of the Holbein göl in western Anatolia.