Google Reviews

“I had a great experience buying from here! As soon as I stepped into the store, Steven the owner welcomed me warmly and showed me around, taking into account my budget and tastes. He has a great selection of kilims and carpets which should satisfy any customer. I bought two items on the very first visit! More than anything, I loved that Steven has run this store by himself for the past 40 years, even though he has a full-time professor position at a nearby university. He's also a Yale alum - so Yale students should buy only from him!”

“Steven at the Kilim Co was amazing! He had a great variety of Kilims and great stories for each rug! He is someone who is very knowledgeable about rugs but his passion about the Middle East makes for an enchanting experience! His items are all well priced because he does this as a hobby and is very friendly! And bonus he also will deliver!”

“What an absolute pleasure of an experience. Good prices, and the proprietor (who has a PhD in a related field and is a full-time academic himself) even helped me take a rug to my office and drove me home with another.”

Articles

Yale Daily News Feature: “The Kilim Company”

HUDSON WARM 3:06 PM, OCT 13, 2023

Outside a hidden storefront on York Street sits a table, piled with rugs. You’ve probably seen it on your way to the Humanities Quadrangle or Toad’s. Perhaps you linger for a moment as your gaze sets on the centrally displayed Yale bulldog rug, and you continue on your way. These rugs, however, are not merely furnishings; they course with stories and history, and the man behind this operation has a long-standing, rich connection with Yale and the rug trade.

Store owner, historian and Yale graduate Steven Rosenthal ’68 welcomed me into The Kilim Company and led me down narrow wooden stairs into a basement that bursted with color, symmetry and style. Hanging and lying, draped and folded — rugs covered every corner of their room, and their palettes ranged from deep maroons and browns to vibrant oranges and blues. Some depicted mythological scenes; others bore aesthetically pleasing patterns.

“In good Middle Eastern fashion, why don’t you sit on a pile of rugs?” Rosenthal said before we began our conversation.

Steven Rosenthal settled into New Haven in 1964 as a first-year student at Yale, where he would earn four degrees and develop a budding passion for Middle Eastern history. While he was writing for his PhD, Rosenthal conducted research in Istanbul. Every day, the archives would close at 3:00 p.m., so, to improve his Turkish language skills, he would head to the grand bazaar, a huge market. There he became completely enamored with kilims and began to collect.

“I was bitten by the rug bug,” Rosenthal said. “I am blessed with a wife who is smarter than I am, and she said, ‘you have so many rugs you should open a store.’”

He opened The Kilim Company in 1979. The store is one of the last independent businesses that has remained afloat in the area, and it is truly a one-man operation; Rosenthal does his own accounting and purchases and sells all of the rugs himself.

Rosenthal’s perspective on Yale is a unique and informed one. He has experienced the university as a student, nearby business owner and parent — his daughter attended Yale, and his family has collectively earned eight degrees from the university. He reminisced about his Yale experience: weekly road trips, inspiring professors, and a tradition of injecting vodka into oranges.

Rosenthal graduated the year before Yale became co-educational. He said that in many ways, Yale is less exclusionary than it was when he was a student. He reflected that, in his opinion, the recent change has been for the better.

“Yale has always been very good to me,” he said.

When he wanted to learn Ottoman Turkish — a combination of Turkish, Arabic and Persian — for purposes of his archival research, and Yale didn’t offer any courses in the language, Yale paid for him to go to the School of Oriental Studies in London to learn it.

His passion for Middle Eastern studies has only grown since his college years. Rosenthal is a tenured professor and chairman of the history department at the University of Hartford, where he teaches Middle Eastern history. The Kilim Company operates on a loose schedule, with the store hours revolving around Rosenthal’s teaching hours. He considers his rug business a passionate hobby, not a main source of income.

As both a professor and a rug connoisseur, he writes about Middle Eastern history and takes part in the society, as well. The way he puts these cultural engagements in conversation affords him an interesting outlook.

He has spent a lot of time in Turkey, volunteering in the Peace Corps there and routinely visiting during summer and winter breaks for forty years. He would buy most of his rugs from the grand bazaar in the week between Christmas and New Year’s — the week before Turkish taxes were due.

He became very good at bargaining with rug dealers; when they would negotiate at markets, dealers often had their cost prices in Ottoman Turkish, expecting Americans would not understand. Since Rosenthal had learned the language, he earned an advantage in bargaining.

In addition to purchases at bazaars, Rosenthal would often travel by bus to villages in the countryside of Turkey, where he would be greeted with hospitality and excitement.

“But, it would be sort of embarrassing,” Rosenthal told me. “Because at times, they would sacrifice a sheep in my honor.”

Rosenthal said that now, he imagines the scene looks very different, but when he would visit Ankara, the capital of Turkey, fifty years ago, he found cows traversing the streets. Since then, Turkey has undergone a major transformation in wealth.

The rug business, he said, has moved East during his time in the trade: from India to Pakistan, China and Afghanistan. Because of the tense political climate in these places, his acquisitions of the past five years have been through other buyers.

His expertise is on kilims and pile carpets. Kilims, which are flat-woven rugs, were pioneered by peasants and nomads for their own use. Pile carpets have more of a height, and include knots along with warps and wefts. They have always primarily been created for the market.

“They are so human,” Rosenthal said about rugs.

He said that, though the phrase “every rug has a story” is a cliché among rug dealers, many rugs do.

Pictured are three of Rosenthal’s favorite rugs that also double as storytellers.

The leftmost rug is an illustration of the Iranian national myth, the Shahnameh. The Persian hero Rustem slays his enemies, assisted by a magical bird. The rug in the middle commemorates a Turkish soldier in the War of Liberation against the Greeks. The rightmost is also a war rug, patterned with weaponry and military tactics from the Afghan war.

The Kilim Company is unique in its authenticity. Rosenthal said that customers who are acquainted with the rug industry will remark that the store is like a time warp, resembling rug sellers in Turkey thirty years ago.

Some of Rosenthal’s customers come up from New York, some order virtually, and some stumble in when wandering the streets of New Haven.

“I haven’t advertised in 30 years. It’s all word of mouth,” he said.

Not only is Rosenthal passionate about rugs themselves, but also about the friendships he has forged during his time in the trade. He has built relationships with other rug sellers during his travels in Turkey.

Besides rugs, Rosenthal has fallen for other parts of Middle Eastern society, especially the food, which is a center of familial and cultural life.

“I can remember first going to a Turkish house for dinner, and I’d be eating, and I’d say, ‘Oh, okay, that was delicious.’ And I’d discover that was only the first course of six or seven courses,” he said.

In the rug business, Rosenthal has found a spirited community and culture. After being in New Haven over 40 years, Rosenthal remains excited about rugs and about the Yale community.

Daily Nutmeg Feature: Rugged Individual

LINDSAY SKEDGELL, NOV 17, 2022

At the top of the staircase to The Kilim Company, a subterranean shop tucked between Donut Crazy and Toad’s Place, a bulldog welcome sign is framed by a few exotic rugs. It’s barely a hint of what waits at the bottom: a room draped in one-of-a-kind rugs from Turkey, Persia, China, Afghanistan and Pakistan, bearing shades and shapes of every color, hanging on walls and racks and unrolled and folded in piles and stacks.

Steven Rosenthal, owner of the business and a professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Hartford, walks with enthusiasm through the space, calling attention to this rug and that. There’s even a rug on the back of his jean jacket, woven in subtle colors, part of a rug design from Pakistan that shows itself whenever he turns around. “Why don’t you sit down here,” he says, pointing to a stack of rugs. Topping the pile is a deep red pattern with cream accents and a mosque motif. I mention the gorgeous colors everywhere, and he responds, “It’s not just the colors, it’s the textures,” before offering me a cup of hot coffee.

The Kilim Company started in 1979 in the same room where we’re sitting and talking, but Rosenthal’s love for rugs began even earlier, in Turkey. “Do you want the long version?” he asks me before recalling his story. I do.

It began with a sign in the window of a travel agency in Athens: “Airfare to Istanbul, $14.” Rosenthal was studying abroad as a junior at Yale and thought, “How could I turn that down?” After graduating, Rosenthal returned to Turkey to volunteer with the Peace Corps and, eventually, to perform research in the national archives while working on his PhD (also at Yale). The archives closed every day at 3 p.m., at which point he would head to the grand bazaar to improve his Turkish. It was there that he was “bit by the rug bug,” especially the kilim style.

“A kilim is a flat-weave rug,” he says. “If you were older, I could use the analogy of the pot holders you made as a kid, but I’m sure you didn’t make pot holders as a kid. These are made by nomads and peasants for their own consumption and the designs are usually more spontaneous,” as opposed to commercial designs, which are usually copies of copies. My eyes bounce around the room, which contains plenty of unique pile carpets as well, and I begin to notice a kind of storytelling woven into the rugs, depicting people, animals, buildings and environments. “I like the humanity of [them],” Rosenthal tells me, as he begins to share their stories.

“I’m drawn to those that speak to me historically, as a historian of the Ottoman empire… For example, you see the picture of the soldier over there? That is a very special rug and you have to understand history to get it,” he says, pointing to a rug at the back of his shop. He tells me about the War of Liberation—Greece’s four-year invasion of Turkey after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, with the Turks ultimately driving the Greeks out. Of the man on the rug, he says, “That is a soldier from the War of Liberation. His family was commemorating his service, and you can tell because of the particular kind of medal that he has on his chest. The reality of it for me is that until the 1980s in Istanbul, you could still see really old men wearing these medals commemorating their service 60 years before. I would talk with them and get the most amazing tales.” Rosenthal continues to move about the room, showing me saddle bags and more rugs and more stories.

The uniqueness of each rug echoes the uniqueness of Rosenthal’s establishment. The Kilim Company feels like a relic in an era of conglomeration and slick branding. “I’m one of the last of the few non-big box stores,” Rosenthal says. “What makes this place different from most places is that I carry mainly rugs that are art. A normal carpet store will show you a carpet and they will say, ‘Do you want it in 3×5, 4×6, 5×7?’ This is called programmed carpets. They’re handmade but they’re made in a kind of factory framework. Whereas most of the stuff that I have simply has spun out of the mind of the weaver.”

Before I leave, Rosenthal hands me a maroon business card, the back bearing an image of a kilim rug. “I almost added the frays in there, but then thought that’d be too much.” He says he hopes I’ll return sometime but that I shouldn’t feel pressured to buy anything. Rugs are his business, yes, but they’re also his passion, and sharing it seems to be its own reward.