Sabancı University Sakıp Sabancı Museum (SSM) hosted the exhibition In Praise of God - Anatolian Rugs in Transylvanian Churches between April 19 - August 19, 2007. 41 Western Anatolian rugs dating from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries were selected primarily from churches and museums in Romania and Hungary to be displayed in this exhibition sponsored by Yünsa.
The exhibition, which brought together at SSM a selection of rugs for the first time since the exhibiton in Budapest in 1914, was a collaboration between the Romanian Institute of Culture, the National Brukenthal Museum in Sibiu, the Evangelical Church A.C. of Romania, the Romanian Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs, the Bucharest Museum of Art Collections, the Hungarian National Museum, the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest, the Berlin Museum of Islamic Art and SSM.
With this exhibition, several types of "Transylvanian" rugs, of which few survive in Turkey, were temporarily returned to the land where they were originally woven. The use of rugs made for Muslim prayer to decorate the walls of Christian churches, and the preservation of large numbers of these rugs in Transylvania, creates an interesting example of fusion and also presents an indication of the universality of art, which recognizes no borders, languages or religions.
Another textile art, Kaitag Embroideries at SSM
The exhibition Kaitag Embroideries, Textile Art from Daghestan, with 47 embroideries unique to Kaitag, a particularly rugged region of Daghestan, ran concurrently at SSM. The art of Kaitag, produced in one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse regions of the world, speaks to people of diverse cultural traditions, with its embroideries decorated with symbols from a myriad of cultures including those of the polytheistic pagan world of the remote past. The Ottoman-influenced Kaitag embroideries, dating from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, were presented in 1994-95 at L'Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and the Deutsches Textilmuseum, Krefeld, Germany, met the artlovers in Istanbul in this exhibition.
