Reid & Robie

I bought a rug from you two days ago. What makes you think I need more rugs?

– Roll playing tactic in the Turkish Rug Funnel

Rounding a corner, I felt the tall buildings of Istanbul fade and the busy traffic melt into the background as I peered down Byzantium’s historic heart.

At the tip of the Fatih peninsula where the Bosphorus Strait meets the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara at the literal edge of Europe, I entered Sultanahmet Square. From the southwest corner, I saw the long, narrow contours of the ancient hippodrome, a place where emperors held chariot races and decorated the Circus Maximus with their plunder. Making my way onto the paved stones of the massive, open-air courtyard, I walked toward the Walled Obelisk, a monument erected to proclaim Constantinople’s dominance over new provinces in the East.

Constructed from limestone blocks, the pillar once recounted Byzantine victories in glittering bronze relief linking the new capital with the grandeur of Rome. After Constantine chose the banks of the Bosphorus to build his capital, he turned his “new Rome” into a mirror of the original—from its political structure and architectural designs to dividing the city across seven hills.

Behind the obelisk, rooted among a row of trees, I spied six slender minarets surrounding the Blue Mosque. Between them stood the massive central dome flanked by other, smaller cupolas cascading downward in a flow of silvery-grey light shimmering in the noonday sun.

Built after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the Blue Mosque was meant to show the supremacy of a new religion, but when Sultan Ahmed I dared to match the number of minarets on his mosque with Islam’s holiest site, he resolved the controversy by paying for a seventh to be added at the Great Mosque in Mecca.

My stroll through the city’s cultural and spiritual past was interrupted by a man sidling up beside me. “Welcome,” he said smiling.

I nodded in acknowledgement while redirecting my steps slightly.

“If you’re going to the mosque, it’s closed now,” he offered.

“Yeah, I heard the call to prayer,” I replied as my pace quickened and we passed the corkscrew-like Serpent Column. Cast from melted bronze taken from the Persians at the Battle of Plataea, the statue, originally raised at the Temple of Apollo, was later removed from Delphi and brought to Constantinople as another symbolic tie connecting the city with glories of its Greco-Roman past.

“Where are you from?” the man asked as he maneuvered to keep up.

“Texas,” I replied.

In 2026 I no longer said I was from America or the United States. Too many ugly connotations in the news lately. Fortunately, the image of cowboys riding horseback in wide open plains still resonated with people.

“Texas!”  the man exclaimed, falling in step with me. “Where? Austin? Houston?”

“Dallas.”

“Ahh, Dallas,” came the reply as I braced for the line I knew was coming. “You and J.R. Ewing,” he stated as if I’d grown up at Southfork.

In the 1980s the city of Dallas couldn’t have conjured up a better figure to escape the long shadows of a dead president killed on their streets than everyone’s favorite bad boy from Dallas. Even Larry Hagman claimed his character helped bring down Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceaucescu and topple the Berlin Walls, so forty-six years after the show’s famous cliffhanger gave birth to a question that defined a decade, I no longer wondered why J.R. held such lasting appeal. I simply smiled and continued my walk.

Sensing my indifference, the man offered, “Don’t’ worry. I’m not a guide,” information I already knew. Tourist guides might have been aggressive in the past, but in today’s Istanbul they no longer congregated at sites trolling for customers. Instead, they posted rave reviews and pictures of happy tourists on TripAdvisor, Viator and GetYourGuide.

“No, you want to sell me a carpet,” I interjected hoping to change the course of the conversation, one I knew was leading where it always did. Down the same, timeworn path. Not for a rug, but a carpet. Always a carpet.

“Yes,” the man beamed.

“I know,” I said. “We had this conversation yesterday.”

I didn’t know if it was true. It might have been since I rarely noted the difference between peddlers. I only knew a carpet salesman approached me yesterday with the same introduction. And last Tuesday, and the Saturday before that. Today’s encounter in Sultanahmet Square wasn’t unique. I’d had this identical interaction dozens of times with touts over the past two months.

“No, I wasn’t here yesterday,” the man protested as we passed through the shadow of the Obelisk of Theodosius made from a single piece of pink granite quarried from the banks of the Nile in Aswan. Initially positioned on the south side of the Temple of Karnak, the towering column erected to celebrate Thutmose III’s victories was moved to Constantinople to legitimize the new seat of imperial power through spoils of war.

“It must have been someone from your carpet shop then,” I said hoping to dismiss the man.

“Maybe, perhaps,” came the reply. “Because my shop is special.”

I wanted to explain how I already knew his factory fed dozens of families who had limited opportunities to find work elsewhere. I could recite the tale about an employee who went blind from stitching an elaborate carpet by hand over the course of a year. I already knew the stories, the ones repeated for hundreds of years by carpet makers across North Africa and the Middle East.

I was familiar with the man’s job, too. As scout, he was the key to the Turkish Rug Funnel, a sales strategy designed to turn unsuspecting tourists into new carpet owners. Trolling the major sites, he was responsible for picking up out-of-towners using friendly, casual banter and inviting them to see the rug-making process. At the factory, he would then ply happy holidaymakers with complimentary tea and baklava while showing them an array of carpets, each one more beautiful than the last.

Their defenses eroding, many vacationers hit decision fatigue just as their host pulled out the most expensive carpets in the shop. Exhausted and desperate for an escape, innocent visitors were then perfectly poised, happily parting with thousands of dollars for a rug they didn’t need or want.

Now I was the target. Or so this man hoped.

While I always tried to remain friendly and smile, after two months in Istanbul I found it increasingly difficult to extricate myself from these interactions. Not because I had any intention of buying a carpet, but because the persistence of the peddlers was astounding. The evening before I’d been grabbed by the arm and pulled into a stall in the Grand Bazaar by a shop owner intent on giving me a gift.

“No, really. I can’t,” I objected.

“Do you know my country?” he asked.

“A little.”

“And what do you know.”

“I know hospitality is a tenet of Islam,” I smiled wresting my arm from his pudgy fingers.

“Yes!” the shop owner practically shouted convinced he had me in his clutches. “You can’t turn down my gift. It would be an insult to me and my––.”

Grinning broadly, I backed out of his stall with two words that stopped the sales tactic mid-sentence. Knowing the current interaction on the grounds of Constantinople’s ancient hippodrome was headed in the same direction, I decided to end it quickly. “I have no need for your carpet,” I explained. “I’m homeless.”

Sensing the rug getting yanked out from under the man, I added a little salt to his wound. After weeks of feeling pestered every time I stepped outside our rented apartment, here was my chance at payback. “I’m a fulltime nomad, you see, with no place to put one of your rugs—I mean, carpets.”

Though he had been matching my quickened pace step for step, the man’s footfalls suddenly faltered. Passing the ornate, green-domed German Fountain inlaid with gold, a gift of friendship from Kaiser Wilhelm II to the Ottoman Empire, I no longer saw the scout in my periphery. Yet just because he’d ceased keeping up with me didn’t mean his sales pitch was over.

A heartbeat later from somewhere behind I heard him suggest, “Perhaps a flying carpet…?”

Stopping in my tracks, I turned and for the first time looked the man in the eye. We stared at each other for an instant as I agreed. “A flying carpet I could use. Let me know when you invent one.”

Turning, I continued my stroll toward the large fountain spewing graceful arcs of water. Behind the dancing drops, silver domes emerged atop a coral Hagia Sophia, the former Eastern Orthodox cathedral of Constantinople, epicenter of the Byzantine Empire and the world’s largest cathedral for more than a thousand years. Today, the church-turned-mosque-turned-museum was again a mosque, beaming against a bright blue sky.

The refusal worked, and I was no longer bothered by carpet sellers in Sultanahmet Square once word got around the peddler grapevine. From that moment on, the scouts merely nodded to the homeless lady who wanted a flying carpet.

But when they weave one, I promised to be their first customer.