Rare rug revival

PHILADELPHIA — George Jevremovic didn’t set out to become the savior of the Oriental rug trade.

He wanted to be a writer until he followed his college girlfriend to her native Turkey in 1979, caught what he calls “the rug bug,” and began scouring the country for Oriental rugs to sell to dealers and collectors.

At first, Jevremovic (pronounced Yev-REM-o-vitch), who traveled back and forth between Turkey and the United States, traded strictly in antiques. That’s because new hand-woven rugs were sorry specimens. Their quality had been declining since the 1920s, when machine-spun yarn replaced handspun materials, and chemical dyes took the place of plant-based colors. By the time Jevremovic came on the scene, dealers could find few new rugs of quality.

Then, in 1981, he spied a small, luminously colored carpet in an Istanbul bazaar. “It stopped me dead in my tracks, and it wasn’t an antique,” he says.

The rug, he discovered, was a product of a Turkish government program, known by the acronym DOBAG, aimed at reviving traditional weaving practices. The carpet’s color came from the efforts of a German chemist named Harald Bohmer. He’d been hired to re-create the long-lost recipes for natural dyes “whose rich hues once made Turkish rugs treasures.”

In the bazaar, Jevremovic was gripped by an idea he’d never considered before: Perhaps it was possible to make new rugs that had the same qualities as old ones.

Over the last two decades, his Philadelphia company, Woven Legends, has turned that epiphany into an industry. The company now employs close to 10,000 people in Turkey.

At least 4,000 wash and hand-spin into yarn the 200 tons of raw wool the company uses each year. Between 4,000 and 5,000 hand-weavers work in studios Jevremovic and his business partner (and former wife) Neslihan have set up in 150 villages in Turkey. The women (in Turkish tradition, most weavers are young, unmarried females) produce the equivalent of 400 9-by-12 rugs each month.

Besides boosting the economy of rural Turkey, Woven Legends’ lush designs and age-old techniques jump-started a worldwide renaissance for modern carpet weaving and helped bring new Oriental rugs into favor again.

“By going back to ancient standards, George helped to rebuild a whole industry,” says James Opie, a rug expert and dealer in Portland.

“He’s perfected the art of making new rugs that genuinely look like antiques and are in all respects equal to antiques,” says Emmett Eiland, a Berkeley, Calif., rug dealer and author of the book “Oriental Rugs Today.”

It was a hard-won achievement, one that has meant near constant travel for the Chestnut Hill resident, including trips to Agra, India, where the company employs 1,500 rugmakers, and to northern China, where Woven Legends hopes to replicate its Turkish operation. This, in between his trips to Turkey every six weeks.

There, he works on color recipes at the dyeing facility in Malatya and new designs with his team of 25 designers, and makes the rounds of the weaving studios, scattered in far-flung villages where telephones are few and e-mail doesn’t exist.

“I am in a permanent state of jet lag,” says the tall, handsome Jevremovic, 48, in a recent interview at his Philadelphia headquarters. Once an assembly plant for the Atwater Kent radio company, the 70,000-square-foot facility houses both the rug operation and the cavernous Material Culture store, another Jevremovic enterprise, which sells the rugs as well as furniture and decorative objects from around the world.

When the Jevremovics, who met as students at Alfred University in New York state and have an 18-year-old son, launched their venture in Turkey, no infrastructure for large-scale rugmaking existed. So they started from scratch, from persuading skeptical provincial governors to let them set up weaving studios in empty public buildings, to constructing looms big enough for the room-size rugs favored by Europeans and Americans.

They needed to find nomadic sheep herders to provide the raw wool and develop growers for plants such as indigo (used for blue dye) and madder root (for red) no longer being raised as commercial crops.

In some of the villages where weaving traditions had virtually died out, they taught the women how to make rugs. Since then, a corps of students has become teachers, who now supervise the studios. (The experienced weavers’ elevated role permits them to work even though they are married.)

Two women sitting at a loom can take eight months to complete the typical rug. Paid by the knot, skilled weavers can earn as much as $200 a month. That might seem modest, but it’s a substantial sum in a Turkish village, says Neslihan Jevremovic, 49, who grew up in Istanbul. A 9-by-12 Woven Legends rug can fetch $3,200 to $8,000.

Though child labor remains an issue in rug-producing countries such as Pakistan, India and Nepal, it does not exist in Turkey, where schooling is compulsory.

“I see what we’ve created as a gain for Turkish women,” says Neslihan. “Now, they are not married off at 12 or 14 because they are no longer a mouth to feed.”

Woven Legends has also stirred up the rug world with its designs. It offers 11 lines, each of which can include a dozen different rugs and range from the minimalist Aktulu, with its broad bands and blocks of bright color, to the elaborate Persian-tile-like patterns of its Euphrates series.

“Their rugs represent the history of Oriental rugs for the last 300 years,” says interior designer Pamela Hughes, who has commissioned 500 custom rugs from Woven Legends for a luxury resort.

“I’m playing with some of their colors and designs with George’s guidance,” says Hughes, whose clients include the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Sarasota and Philadelphia’s Four Seasons Hotel. “He knows more about rugs than anyone I’ve ever met, and I never go against his judgment.”

Among Woven Legends’ best-known designs is its brisk-selling “fish rug,” whose sea and stream creatures swim against a striking blue-green background. Like most of the company’s designs, the original idea came from George Jevremovic and was tweaked by his design team, which creates graph-paper illustrations that become the patterns the weavers follow.

Another innovation is Woven Legends’ Azeri Folklife carpets, which feature lively, whimsical scenes of village life. The rugs, produced throughout the 1990s, grew out of his frustration with how little historical information exists about the weavers of Oriental rugs, traditionally named for market towns.

Jevremovic sent a letter to his weavers inviting them to “make a picture of your life”; the result was one-of-a-kind carpets that offer glimpses of the weaver’s lives: farming scenes, weddings, a house with a TV antenna. One weaver included a windmill seen on a postcard from an immigrant relative.

Most of Woven Legends’ designs, though, are based on patterns Jevremovic finds in old rugs. The kaleidoscopic patterns of the newest line, the Sardis, was inspired by a 15th-century Mamluk rug housed in a museum in Vienna.

Such cross-cultural borrowings have always been a part of the tradition of rug weaving, Jevremovic says. Chinese motifs turn up in 14th-century carpets in central Anatolia, Spanish weavers adapted Turkish designs in the 13th century, and everyone copied the glorious patterns of the Persians.

“All of traditional design I see as sheet music,” he says. “They were designs that were brilliant, and they deserve to be reinterpreted and brought back to life.”