The Turks are Coming!

Okay, so we got this weird phone call the other day.

It was a woman from Yuksel Carpets, which is the outfit that sold us our carpet in Turkey.

Interesting followup, I thought.

Anyway, according to the lady, it seems that Yuksel is in a jam. They were selling carpets at the big January carpet show in Atlanta, and a shipment of carpets got stuck in customs and never made it to the show. It would cost a lot to send them back, so they started calling everyone in the States who had bought a carpet from them to see if maybe they’d like another one, or two, or three. The upshot is this: a large truck full of Turkish carpets and kilims is going to turn up our driveway this Saturday at 2pm. Yes, our driveway, here in our humble rural paradise. They will be offering hundreds of high-quality carpets and kilims for knock-down prices. (And by “high-quality carpets,” we mean hand-knotted wool-pile carpets with 200,000 double-knots per square meter, dyed with natural dyes and woven in traditional patterns. Except of course for the ones made of pure silk)

I’m inviting friends. We’re not getting paid for this, though I may try to cadge a commission.

It occurred to us that this might be a scam. We have discovered that there really is a big carpet show in Atlanta every January, and that googling “Turkish carpet scam” provides plenty of links to scams going on in Turkey, but none here. I have emailed Yuksel to see if this is genuine, and got no reply so far, but I think it’s legit. Whoever got our address and phone number from Yuksel could also have got our credit card number, so they wouldn’t have to drive a truck into our driveway to steal from us.

If I had the tech handy, I’d broadcast the whole thing live, so that you could see and maybe buy a carpet or two.