Museum honors goats' central role in Ankara history

“View of Ankara,” a huge painting in the permanent collection of Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, is one of the rare landscapes that show Ankara before it became the capital of modern Turkey. Drawn in the 18th century, the artwork uses hues of brown to capture daily life in Ankara’s citadel, featuring the famous Angora goats, mohair weavers and caravans of tradesmen.

The painting is currently on loan to an exhibition called “Weaving History: Mystery of a City, Sof” at the Rahmi Koc Museum of Ankara. The exhibition, which focuses on “sof” — the local word for mohair, made from the wool of Angora goats — is organized by the Vehbi Koc Ankara Research Center. Both the center and the museum are a homage by the Koc family to the city where the family’s patriarch, Vehbi Koc, started building his business empire in the young republic in a simple grocer’s shop. The family is one of Turkey's largest industrial dynasties and a determined patron of the arts.

The painting, which was brought through the initiative of the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Ankara, is the centerpiece of an exhibition on “sof,” a soft fabric that has been admired by locals and Western travelers for centuries. Pierre Belon, a French naturalist, writer and diplomat, wrote of mohair in 1555, “The soft wool of the Angora goats could easily be taken for silk … just as fine and soft.” Evliya Chalabi, the Turkish traveler and diarist of the 17th century, attributed the softness of the wool to the goats’ diet. “This is a fabric fit for sultans,” Chalabi wrote in his "Travelogues."

Indeed it was. The exhibition includes two floor spreads that were used in the Ottoman Empire. The first, in red and green, dates to the height of the empire under Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century. The other one, dark blue, dates back to Murat IV, the grim, pious and authoritarian ruler of the 17th century.