Turkey
Hello, I'm Hafize
Kaya
I am a yazma master from Tokat. 600 years of wood-block printing — carved linden, natural dye, silk. The technique has not changed because it does not need to.
Hafize Kaya is a third-generation yazma master from Tokat — a city that held a royal monopoly on block-printed textiles during the Ottoman period. She learned to carve linden-wood blocks from her grandmother, who learned from hers. The technique has not changed in six hundred years: carved wood, natural dye, silk. Her hands carry the memory of every pattern she has ever pressed.
People always ask me: why linden wood? Why not something harder, more precise? Because linden breathes. When you cut into it, it gives a little. The grain resists in some places and opens in others. The imperfection that comes from this — that slight trembling at the edge of a line — that is the signature of a hand. Machines do not tremble. My grandmother’s blocks are still in my workroom. I cannot use them — they are too old, too fragile. But I hold them sometimes and feel where her thumb has smoothed the wood. Her body is still in the wood. When I heard about kelaghayi, I went immediately and bought potatoes from the market. Large ones. I carved the Tokat beşlisi pattern into four different potatoes in one evening — just to see if the logic was the same as linden. It was almost the same. The resist was different. The dye behaved differently on silk than on cotton. I am going to Şeki. I want to stand in Narmin Hasanova’s atelier and press a galib into Şeki silk with my own hands, just once, before she presses mine.
— Hafize Kaya, Tokat, Turkey
Motif
Tokat beşlisi — five-point wood block
Tokat, Turkey · 600 years · linden wood stamp
How a collaboration works
Each artist here drew a pattern, and a master in Şəki turned it into cloth. Those are two separate skills and neither one substitutes for the other: the drawing decides what the piece says, and the block-cutting and dyeing decide whether silk can be made to say it.
The artists were not asked to imitate Azerbaijani ornament. They were asked for their own — shibori from Japan, adire from Nigeria, the block-printed vocabulary of Rajasthan, the wool figures of a Kyrgyz shyrdak — and then that drawing had to survive being cut into pear wood and held under hot wax. What comes back is neither the artist’s tradition nor Şəki’s. It is the argument between them.
The signature
Every artist page carries a signature, and every piece is published under the name of the person who drew it rather than under a house style. That is deliberate. A kelaghayi is anonymous work by tradition — the stamps in Basqal have outlived the names of everyone who cut them — and putting a name back on the cloth is the one thing Navohi does that the tradition does not.
Some artists have a full collection here. Some have a single concept piece that was never made. Both are on the page, because the record of what was proposed is part of the record of what exists.
Reading the pattern
The ornament is not decoration that happened to settle on the cloth. Each motif carries information, and the literature of the craft calls the whole system a book of life for anyone who can read its signs. Borders and centre take different stamps: pomegranate flower, crescent, grapevine and sun around the edge; small flowers, coins, quince flower, gazelle eyes, cat’s paw and leaf across the field. Plant motifs run to rose, narcissus, carnation, poppy, lily and iris, and they are set against straight and broken lines, zigzags, rhombuses and stars.
Colour is read the same way. Blue, red and ochre gold are the healing colours, credited with turning away the evil eye. Age and standing govern what is worn: dark, quiet tones and sparse ornament for an older woman; bright colour for a young one, who by tradition would not put on a black kelaghayi even at a funeral. The seven-colour work — red, blue, yellow, green, white, pink and dark brown on a single cloth — is held to be the ceiling of the craft.