But “one way or another,” as the saying goes (the Turkish expression translates literally “If not through the door then via the chimney”), and during the past year a striking exhibition of the material was held at Topkapi Palace by Selcuk Gürisik, a designer in love with felt. Thanks to his apprenticeship with the feltmasters of Afyon 17 years ago, this designer’s visual memory—shaped by a Western education—made the acquaintance of the primitive motifs found in nomadic culture. Like a psychoanalytic process, as he researched and delved into his visual memory Mesopotamian motifs and flavors began to appear in his work. The idea behind the exhibition was to “achieve communication between the object and the spectator while changing his or her way of perceiving,” and it featured combinations of felt with silk, wool fibers and even denim, the felt sometimes taking on a new personality thanks to an Ottoman technique of cutting known as kat’ı. Gurisik says, “In the caftans my starting point was the cocoon-like quality of felt—I think of pods and sculpture—and when this accent was supplemented by a turning movement the result went all the way to the celestial language of the Seljuks,