From Cocoon to Carpet: The Divine Magic of Silk

Did you ever wonder how a basket full of cocoons is formed in the first place — and then transformed into one of the finest Turkish hand-knotted carpets?

A caterpillar's cocoon is a pupal stage of metamorphosis — the transformation a butterfly undergoes before reaching adulthood. During this time it changes radically, evolving from a caterpillar into a butterfly. In nature, most caterpillars spin their cocoons from tree branches, while others tuck them away in places they know they won't be disturbed.

In my childhood, I witnessed the whole process firsthand. We were visiting relatives in Gemiç village, near the city of Bursa — world-famous for its mulberries. In the month of May in 1957, we went out to pick leaves from the mulberry trees with Uncle Necati. It was my first and only experience of it.

Three times a day, he loaded three bundles of mulberry leaves onto his donkey, brought them home, and laid them out on trellises covered with caterpillars. And they were big eaters. Over the course of this evolution — some forty-one days — they kept consuming until they were as big as my little finger. Then Uncle Necati placed tiny branches beside them, and the caterpillars began to climb up and weave their cocoons. It was breathtaking, and unforgettable.

Years later, when I researched how much pure silk fibre could be drawn from a single healthy, good-sized cocoon, I was amazed all over again. Can you believe that as much as one mile of filament can be unravelled from each cocoon?

From there, we started working out how many cocoons it would take to make a pure silk carpet measuring 2.17 m² — that's 4 by 6 feet, or 24 square feet — with 645 double knots per square inch. The answer was beyond imagining. A talented weaver needs two years to finish a carpet that size.

Twenty-five thousand cocoons, unravelled, yield twenty-five thousand miles of silk fibre — just enough to wrap around the equator once. People often talk about magic flying carpets, forgetting that the real divine magic starts with the caterpillar: and if it succeeds in piercing its cocoon, it ends up a butterfly.