İskilip's Fading Handicrafts
İskilip is one of the few Anatolian towns that still partly preserves the old craft-guild tradition. Photographer Haluk Uygur, in his book Az Gittik, Uz Gittik, described İskilip as “a natural ethnographic town museum” and proposed it be placed under UNESCO protection and turned into an open-air ethnographic museum. Behind that assessment lies the fact that four handicrafts now lost in much of Turkey — basket weaving, saddle making, woodcarving and shoemaking — still survive in İskilip, even if only in the hands of a small number of masters.
Saddle Making (Semercilik)
As the use of pack animals has declined, saddle making has become a craft living out its final period, both in İskilip and across the country. Only a handful of masters still practise it in the district. Saddles are traditionally made from goat leather and reed (kamış), and come in several forms — palan, çatal semer, sele semer, and the kara semer fitted to mules.
Woodcarving (Oymacılık)
The finest examples of woodcarving are found among the masters around İskilip’s Salliler neighborhood. Passed from father to son, the craft still produces a striking range of household objects on hand looms: spoons, ladles, pine dough troughs, pine water vessels, various baskets and cups, trivets, rolling boards for opening yufka dough, the “bisleeç” used for baking yufka on a griddle, rolling pins (oklava), handles, marbles, spinning tops, sugar bowls, mallet-toy carts, and the small “kağnıcak” cart used to help toddlers learn to walk. İskilip’s best-known wooden product, the İskilip cradle, is itself a branch of this larger woodcarving tradition.
Basket Weaving (Sepetçilik)
Basket weaving, more commonly associated with hazelnut harvesting on the Black Sea coast, is also kept alive in İskilip, a district with intensive agriculture. Known locally by names such as “he, çit, zembil, el sepeti, sele, sepet, kadın sepeti, çocuk sepeti,” these baskets are woven from hazel branches and a willow variety called “aksöğüt.” The traveler Tschihatscheff, who visited İskilip in 1849, described the town as “surrounded by the fresh green of fruit and vineyard gardens” — a richness of vegetation credited with helping the district’s wood-based handicrafts flourish.
Shoemaking and Yemeni-Making (Ayakkabıcılık ve Yemenicilik)
Among the “arasta streets” of İskilip’s old bazaar, named for the trade practiced there, stands the Ayakkabıcılar Arastası (Shoemakers’ Arasta) — alongside the Saddlers’ Arasta and Chickpea-Roasters’ Arasta, one of the district’s traces of the old Ahi guild tradition. Shoemaking, including local yemeni (soft leather shoe) making, is the fourth craft the municipality lists among İskilip’s fading handicrafts; unlike the other three, however, no detailed source (number of masters, production technique) could be compiled on this trade for now — this point awaits further research.
Why It Matters
These four crafts are tangible remnants of İskilip’s guild culture reaching back to Ottoman times. That most of the remaining masters are elderly, with no apprentices to succeed them, echoes the picture described for tinsmithing in the Çorum Tinsmiths article: a shared fate in which the last practitioners of a trade try not to abandon the benches they gave their lives to. Visitors curious about the district’s historic bazaar fabric and arastas can also find a fuller picture in İskilip History.