The Virgin's Knot
The Virgin's Knot
Audio MP3 on CD(MP3 on CD - Unabridged)
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Overview
She is called Nurdane, the famed weaver of Mavisu. From her remote mountain village in southwestern Turkey, she creates dowries for young brides: dazzling rugs that are marvels of shape and color, texture and light. Her unique rugs possess remarkable healing qualities that have inspired local legend, but it is her hands that are the heart of her mystery. An artist's hands. A virgin's hands.
An extraordinary series of events drives Nurdane to question the limitations of her faith and culture as she is caught between the cost of remaining pure in body and spirit...or risking everything for the chance to live a loving life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781593351939 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Brilliance Audio |
| Publication date: | 06/10/2004 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Product dimensions: | 5.36(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.57(d) |
About the Author
Bernadette Quigley made her Broadway debut in Brain Friel’s Tony Award-winning Dancing at Lughnasa. She has also made a number of off-Broadway, regional theater, and film and TV appearances, including Macbeth at the Great Lakes Theater Festival, Before and After (with Meryl Streep), Law and Order, and Central Park West.
What People are Saying About This
Infused with poetry and perfume, The Virgin's Knot is that rare thing: a soulful pageturner. Holly Payne is the new Scheherazade! (Laurie Fox, author of My Sister from the Black Lagoon)
The hearts and minds of today's observant Muslim women are as hidden from us as their faces. In her novel, The Virgin's Knot, set in the inaccessible reaches of the Taurus Mountains, Holly Payne unveils a world the casual tourist never sees, a world virtually unchanged for a thousand years. (Jacqueline Park, author of The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi)
Every page of The Virgin's Knot is a tightly woven and bountiful gift to readers. Like all who lived in her Turkish village, and two exceptional men, I fell in love with the remarkable weaver and her magic carpets. (Diane Leslie, author of Fleur De Leigh's Life of Crime)
Interviews
Exclusive Author Essay
Writing teachers have always told me, "Write what you know." Now that I'm a teacher, I tell my students to write what they believe, what they feel. The rest is all research. I tell them this because it's the only way I could have written The Virgin's Knot. I'm not Muslim. I'm not Turkish. I'm not a rug weaver, nor do I have any experience tying knots other than in the laces of my hiking boots. I first visited Turkey in 1995. I had no agenda, no reservations. I met a rug merchant, and the rest is history. I fell in love with a country and culture that inspired me by its grace. I wanted to understand the village life of its women, its artists, its weavers, so I spent six months writing letters to rug merchants in America who dealt exclusively with rug-producing regions in Turkey. My relationship with Serife Atlihan and the DOBAG weavers is the result of that search. I wrote about what I believed my heart understood. The account of this trip was just fact checking. I finally got to the point where I was writing what I knew and believed.
It is early June 1999. I witness the beauty of modern Islam. Hot winds blow dust on the olive trees and breathe the prayers of women. It is inspection day for a select group of weavers from the northern Aegean Coast of Turkey who have traveled by bus from villages to meet with their inspector, a modern woman from a modern city who arrives to return their traditions.
She stands with a tape-measure before the weavers, uncovered, without a headscarf. Her jeans and button-down blouse do not offend them. Only her middle-aged dark eyes can move them to tears or laughter, and they watch her intently as she inspects the rugs. She knows praise is worth more than the money she can give them for tying knots. And they wait, anxious, raking loose wool from the rugs, braiding the tassels, making sure each is trimmed and uniform.
The inspector, Dr. Serife Atlihan, a former weaver herself, travels every two weeks to this renowned rug-producing region on the Aegean Peninsula to meet with the members of DOBAG, a rug cooperative she supervises through Marmara University in Istanbul, where she is a professor.
Founded in 1981, DOBAG (Dogal Boya Arastirma ve Gelistirme Projesi -- The Natural Dye Research and Development Project) was formed to reintroduce the practice of natural dyes in rug production, reinstating an ancient tradition that had been lost to the use of synthetic dyes for more than a century. The self-financing, self-sufficient cooperative employs hundreds of village women, offering them the chance to supplement their family incomes and improve the economy in the impoverished area.
The cooperative encourages self-reliance. Rumor has it that one of the weavers was able to divorce her husband because she could support herself by selling rugs. Another woman, Cennet Deneri, the president of DOBAG, has been able to travel with Dr. Atlihan five times to San Francisco, where I saw her demonstrate weaving at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. Because of the DOBAG project, Cennet has been able to afford to send her daughter Zeyneb to school. The aspiring doctor is the first villager to have an education higher than the customary middle school.
On inspection day, the DOBAG cooperative bustles with activity. Women too nervous to wait inside sit in the shade of walnut trees and spin wool. Others wash rugs, dragging huge rubber squeegees over the knots. The most daring remain inside the building, talking quietly among themselves, comparing each other's work. I glimpse the sense of pride in their eyes, darting around the room, following Professor Atlihan. They have dressed for the occasion, not to impress her, but to pay homage for giving them a voice, an identity, a sense of purpose beyond the traditional roles they play in their villages. They wear shiny black capes, colorful trousers and sweater vests, floral scarves on their heads.
They reach out to touch me, wondering who I am, why I've come so far to meet them. We share a mutual intrigue. Their eyes go wide when they learn I'm traveling as a woman alone. They somehow understand Dr. Atlihan's independence, yet mine perplexes them. They cannot comprehend that I live 3,500 miles from my family, that my lifestyle is comparable to many American women my age, their age. Young. Their hands squeeze mine. The tanned skin is soft from years of lanolin and their fingers are strong, clutching my arm as they wait for Serife's approval.
Dr. Atlihan epitomizes the village weavers' opposite. Divorced. Childless. Financially independent. And yet they admire her, indebted to her for the opportunities that her differences afford them: a sufficient salary and a little more independence than is usual in rural Islamic life.
"They accept me here," Serife tells me the night we arrive. It is pouring outside the 120-year-old Ottoman house she has bought in the village of Erecek, 20 kilometers from the DOBAG cooperative distribution center in Ayvacik. We peel potatoes in the kitchen, where lightning splits the sky beyond the window, the clay roof tiles in technicolor in the darkness. The light bulb buzzes on and off. I'm spooked. I wonder who has lived in the house, if it's haunted. I can feel the spirits in the scrub oak on the hill and I wonder if it's the man who was killed in the storm that night. News travels fast among the village women. Especially when Professor Atlihan arrives.
On inspection day she is too busy to translate for me, so I sit cross-legged on the floor with the weavers and watch her count knots, comparing designs with those on faded graph paper she has tucked inside the folder in her hand. Knot count is everything, and Serife takes her time punching numbers into a calculator, paying each weaver accordingly. Once approved, the rugs are taken to a storeroom in the cooperative until they are exported to the galleries that sell DOBAG rugs.
Dr. Atlihan motions for me to join her. I take off my shoes and walk in bare feet upon the lush merino pile, my eyes lost in the designs, bright and bold like the weavers themselves. Red stars. Blue birds. Yellow flowers.
I recognize many of the designs from the rugs I've seen at Return to Tradition, the DOBAG-exclusive rug gallery in San Francisco. Bill McDonald, the owner, is Serife's biggest buyer. I can't believe the rugs I've seen in Presidio Heights are made here, on the verandas of ramshackle stone houses. I wonder if the weavers will ever see the rugs in the grand houses and halls they will decorate. I wonder if it's hard for them to sell these pieces. But I know better. Survival prohibits nostalgia and sentiment. The women want money and respect. In Turkey, weaving gives them that. (Holly Payne)