WEST ANATOLIA, 17TH/18TH CENTURY

In contrast to single-niche prayer rugs, safs were laid on the floor of mosques to mark out space during communal prayer. The commissioning of a carpet like this seems to have been integral to the construction of a sacred space in early modern Ottoman mosques: while Sinan was busy with the construction of the Süleymaniye mosque, a firman was sent to the Qadi of Küre to order a number of carpets to be woven. Though we cannot know what form those carpets would have taken, the Vakiflar in Istanbul preserves fragments of saf carpets from the 16^th and 17^th centuries which – like the present lot – were woven in Ushak.

This fragment is taken from a known saf which is said to have been woven for the fourteenth-century Ulu Cami in Bursa, much of which is covered by a large saf to this day. The largest known fragment is in the Linden Museum, Stuttgart (inv. no. A40.196), which has two complete rows of five niches, as well as part of the bottom outer border. The present lot, however, preserves part of the left hand border which is a convincing match for that on the Linden fragment. Connecting these two may be the fragment published by W. B. Denny from the Marshall and Marilyn R. Wolf Collection (The Classical Tradition in Anatolian Carpets, Washington DC, 2002, no.50, p.115) which seems to have been taken from the bottom left-hand corner of the carpet. Another part of the same saf was sold in these Rooms as part of The Christopher Alexander Collection, 10 April 2008, lot 106, and further examples were sold by Sotheby’s London, 10 June 2020, lot 253, and by Austria Auction Company, 30 January 2021, lot 46.