Your image of a rug merchant is probably from 1001 Arabian Nights, where every third night Scherezade told of some scheming rug merchant cheating his brothers out of an inheritance, tricking a beggar, or trying to cheat the sultan who was dressed as a pauper and inspecting his realm. The caricature has been modernized as the greasy mobster whose rug store exists solely to give the Family something in which to wrap inconvenient bodies. I can state that these are entirely reasonable examples of the character of the rug merchant.
I was in Arahova, a large village on Mt. Parnassos, looking for the locally made flokati rugs. These rugs are made only in central and northern Greece because only this region has the waterfalls and fast-running mountain streams necessary for their production.
A flokati is started with a loose base of woven wool yarn. Tufts of half-spun wool are pulled through this base, producing a ragged looking and entirely unattractive rag. These are then hung in mountain streams. The cold water frays and weaves the wool, producing a thick bed of tawny white. They’re sold by weight and are sometimes dyed.
The locals bring their flokati and other textiles (the region is known through greece for its weavings and cloth) to Arahova because it is on the main Delphi—Athens tour bus route. The main street is thus on one side a convoluted strip of shops selling sheep bells, ouzo bottles shaped like Greece, antiques (the Greek law banning export of antiquities doesn’t apply to ‘junk’ less than a few hundred years old) and textiles of all sorts. The other side of the street looks over a vertical drop into the valleys at the base of the mountain, and as far south as the sea of Corinth.
The routine on stepping into a rug store quickly became familiar.
“Hello my friend. You want a rug? I have excellent rugs.”
“Do you have flokati?”
“Excellent flokati. Hand made right … “
“… here in Arahova, yes, I know.”
“All …”
“… natural, I bet.”
“Best…”
“… wool, best sheep.”
A few had cheap rugs with a less dense weave. Most had identical rugs, and all found something unique about theirs to the discredit of their neighbors and my own good fortune. Nevertheless, they didn’t have the proverbial leg to stand on. I was the only one in any shop I went into (it was admittedly during siesta, but tourism is down.) Someone should clue these folks in to the fact that they’d have better luck if they removed the old price tags that show prices in drachma. When I see a rug that’s been sitting on a shelf for three years, I suspect the price may be flexible.
Prices varied surprisingly widely, for identical merchandise. One store would have prices about a quarter of their next door neighbors. They were universally volatile, though. A rug marked 70 Euro might be offered to me for 40 by the time it became clear I was going to walk the street and compare prices.
I finally lost my temper when the attempted graft became obscene. I asked for a bigger rug, “twice as big”, than the one I was examining, and the shopkeeper was pulling rug after rug out of his stock, extolling the virtues of each. Finally, he pulled one down. “Twice as big. Very good rug.”
It was indeed twice as big as the 30 euro rug I was looking at. It was, in fact, two rugs crudely sewn together. The stiching was hidden in the thick pile of the wool but not hard to find.
“Poso kani, how much?” I asked.
“130 euro,” he responded without hesitation.
In case that wasn’t clear, he was charging me an extra 70 euro for the wool yarn holding these two rugs together. This is war. I feigned interest in another rug across the room.
“That rug,” I said, pointing. “Is this a kilim?” A kilim is Turkish rug.
He blinked. “What?”
“That rug—is it Turkish?”
His face set. “No.”
“Wow, it looks Turkish. Do you have any Turkish rugs?”
“No.” He chewed his moustache. The game isn’t as fun anymore for the poor fellow.
“This one under all the others—it isn’t Turkish? The patterns, the leaves—they look Turkish.”
“No.”
They’d always recover enough to shout a lower price at me as I walked out the door, though.
I worked my way down the street, accusing each shop owner who tried to cheat me of owning Turkish rugs. In front of the last shop was a grey old man. When I approached his store he turned the interior lights on (times are hard) and turned on a tape recorder with traditional Greek music for my shopping pleasure.
He didn’t have much English, but his prices weren’t any worse than anyone else. I think he’d seen me coming out of every store on the street. I got a decent price, and I got to walk back past every rug merchant in the city carrying a bag full of rugs on my shoulder.