COFFEE AND CARPETS

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2011-05-11T06:16:00.000-07:00

2011-05-11T05:25:00.000-07:00

A Persian Carpet $12,00

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2010-01-29T01:24:00.001-08:00

ISTANBUL, January 29, 2010 -- Can a single carpet style symbolize the sudden decline of a country’s carpet making tradition

Many European carpet collectors once regarded this carpet – a so-called Mejid rug – just that way.

What Do People Want From Oriental Carpets? It Depends On The Country

2009-01-27T05:06:00.000-08:00

HANOVER, February 6, 2009 -- Many rug dealers say they can tell what kind of rug you will buy as soon as they meet you. If they know your nationality, they feel even more confident.

One such dealer is Khairi Ezzabi, a Libyan who travels the world looking for luxury goods to import back home to Tripoli. He buys and sells in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Along the way, he has learned a great deal about all three markets.

We recently met Mr. Ezzabi in a zimmer frei in Hanover, Germany. The occasion was Domotex, the carpet world's biggest trade show that takes place every January. The show attracts thousands of people, more even than the huge number of hotels in this trade-fair city can accommodate. So, many visitors find themselves taking rooms in private homes, something that leads to impromptu acquaintances.

As the guests come down for breakfast, the lady of the house introduces them to one another. The table is set with all the riches of German hospitality and instantly puts everyone in a good mood. There is bread, rolls, butter, jam, and honey, plates of ham, salami, and different cheeses, soft-boiled eggs, oranges, apples, and slices of kiwi, and then, as if waiting for dessert, an assortment of sweet buns and pound cake.

The conversation flows easily.

"Please tell our guest that the salami is made of lamb, and the ham is made of chicken," Frau Ripphoff says in German. But before anyone can play the part of translator, the well-traveled Mr. Ezzabi waves away the need for words with his hand.

"I was here before, two years ago," he replies in English. "I remember her kindness from before."

Everyone is pleased. The small breakfast corner suddenly doubles in size with the expansive good manners of the East. The windows slowly turn from night-black to gray with the late winter sunrise. Mr. Ezzabi fills a plate with pieces of bread, abstains from everything else, and takes time to talk.

He is a wonderful talker, punctuating with delighted giggles what he knows will be outrageous observations. But he also knows much of what he says will be true. After all, hasn't he seen it with his own eyes?

"What do people want from oriental rugs?" he asks, repeating a visitor's question. "They want different things."

The French, Italian, and Spanish want imperfection, he says. They want to be able to see where the weaver ran out of a particular color here or made a wrong knot there.

"The Parisians pride themselves on being able to recite the whole personal story of the carpets in their home." He giggles.

Visions of tiny, high-priced boutiques that offer just a few nomadic and tribal pieces float before the eyes. The Paris dealers are not selling rugs, they are selling flights of fancy -- like travel agents. Or it that too much of an exaggeration?

But Mr. Ezzabi is too charming to quibble with.

"The Germans," he continues, eyeing the perfect breakfast table before him but taking only some more bread, "want technical perfection."

In Berlin they like a proper relationship between price and workmanship. And they don't like stories that sometimes sound like excuses for a weaver's mistakes.

The Libyan dealer has been all around the world and clearly knows something of human nature. He lovingly pours another cup of strong black tea. He does not want to offend, he likes everywhere he visits. Should he continue?

Arab, Russian, and Bulgarian buyers share a third taste in carpets, he says. They will spend far more for a single carpet than anyone else. And it will be for a big carpet, to fill a big room.

"Prestige," he says. "They like black and gold colors."

It is impossible to know if Mr. Ezzabi has become rich with his formulas. He is dressed in a simple gray suit of light material that looks Italian but has an accent of hand-tailoring in a distant land. He is trim, with impeccably courteous manners, and middle-aged in way that is impossible to pin down.

What are things like in Libya, one asks. After all, one doesn't meet a Libyan businessman every day.

"I only know Tripoli and the capitals of the world," he replies. I am always traveling."

And the desert, with its starry night sky that shines so bright above the vast dark sands?

"The oil men say it is beautiful."

One can only wonder what kind of carpets he has come to Hanover to find. At the fair, there are carpets from everywhere: Iran, Turkey, China, India, Pakistan. What will he choose?

"I don't know yet," he says. "The last time I came I bought just one carpet."

The carpet was from Mirzazadeh, one of the most famous Persian producers from Tabriz. But it was not a classical carpet, it was a pictorial carpet with a scene from Omar Khayyam.

The cost was something over 100,000 euros and the workmanship extraordinary, with some 2,000 knots per square inch (31,000 knots per square decimeter). He took it to Tripoli and put it in the window of his shop in the heart of downtown. Cars crashed into each other on the road when they passed by.

"People suddenly stopped their cars to stare at the window," he says. "They admired it because it was as perfect as a picture, as perfect as a color photograph. No one could believe it was a carpet."

And did he sell it?

"No," he says. "It is to good as advertising for my shop. So, I keep it in the window. And I like it too much myself to sell."

(The photo at the top of this article is of a Mirzazadeh pictorial carpet.)

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Mirzazadeh Carpets

Bespoke Carpets And The Fun Of Designing Your Own Oriental Rug

2008-11-14T12:42:00.000-08:00

PRAGUE, December 5, 2008 -- One way the Internet is changing the oriental carpet business is by giving rug lovers the chance to directly contact producers.

That has not always been so easy.

Traditionally, customers have been separated from producers by numerous other people. The intermediates include wholesalers and retailers who, for their own good reasons, like to keep the names of producers vague or secret.

After all, who wants to be bypassed?

But now, anyone can find the names of rug production houses by simply doing a word search. A little Googling tells who produces Persian, Turkish, and Caucasian carpets, the subtypes they specialize in, and whether they use machine-spun or hand-spun wool.

And that opens a whole world of possibilities for people to directly commission their own carpets. If a producer agrees, one can even design one's own carpet or, more realistically -- because designing requires considerable experience -- modify an existing design to suit one's taste and fancy.

For those who want to play with designs, the first step is choose a model -- perhaps from a favorite rug book. Here is a Karabagh Tree of Life design taken from "Caucasian Prayer Rugs" by Ralph Kaffel (1998).

Now comes the challenging part. That is, finding a high-quality producer who works with the kind of rug type you like and who is willing to accept a single bespoke order.

Usually, bespoke producers will welcome commissions to produce large-sized rugs, but they are less interested in small-sized ones. And it is the smaller scale pieces that may best suit the individual customer because he is also going to have to pay the shipping and customs fees.

One artisan who is reviving traditional Caucasian carpets in Baku, but who is also willing to entertain single rug requests, is Vugar Dadashov of Azerbaijan Rugs. Like many producers with a sophisticated web page, he has become used to attracting the interest of not just retailers but individual rug lovers, too.

In the case of the Karabagh Tree of Life above, Dadashov saw no reason to refuse even a very unorthodox request. That was to let a child modify the design by choosing her favorite color for the background. The color choice? Yellow.

Yellow, of course, is not a color you usually see a lot in Karabagh rugs. But Dadashov and his designer accepted the whimsy of a child's world and in a few weeks mailed a cartoon of the modified design for inspection.

The cartoon flew airmail in an envelope covered with colorful postage stamps -- something as rare for a child to receive in this day of e-mails as, well, a letter from Azerbaijan.

After that, the project was in the hands of a single weaver. The weaver was just one woman because Dadashov believes reviving Azerbaijan's best rug-making traditions means letting weavers work again from their own homes. That restores individuality and, in the case of the yellow Tree of Life, makes one wonder how many design changes over the years came from women entertaining the whims of their own children and friends.

Weaving always takes months and one's anticipation rises steadily during that time. How much will the paper design change as it is transformed into a three-dimensional, pile rug? How different will the colors of the dyed wool be from those of crayons and colored pencils?

For adults commissioning a rug, these questions are entertaining enough. But for children, they are magical as they open the imagination to distant lands and ancient traditions.

And then, finally, there is a e-mail photograph of the finished rug. It is different from the design in many ways, yet also the same. In the upper-right is one more surprise: the child's name and the weaving date of the rug in Persian script.

The remaining step of actually getting the bespoke carpet home offers a quick education in several aspects of international commerce.

That includes the relative per-kilo costs of shipping via a foreign postal system vs. an international courier service. And, more interestingly, it includes learning about customs tariffs and where to collect duty-payable packages -- something that can take you deep into the heart of your own local postal system.

Still, one will emerge wiser and better informed about the rug trade.

One will learn that some imports -- like Afghan goods -- are virtually customs free because of bilateral government agreements to help develop Afghanistan's economy. And this, along with relative labor costs, is another reason why carpets from different countries can vary so greatly in price.

After that, there is only one more decision to make. To follow the trend by ordering more bespoke rugs, or to go back to shopping retail.

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Welcome,

2008-11-07T04:34:00.001-08:00

If you have found this page, you may be surprised that it looks incomplete. That is because it is a draft page for Tea and Carpets, a fully developed blogsite on oriental carpets, carpet collecting, and the wonderful world of East meets West. To be redirected there, PLEASE CLICK HERE

Epic Journey: How A Trio Of 1920s Adventurers Filmed The Bakhtiari Migration

2008-11-05T05:12:00.000-08:00

HOLLYWOOD, November 21, 2008 -- The nomadic tribes of southwestern Iran fascinate rug lovers for their great variety of weaving.

But what is less known is how much they once fascinated Western cinema audiences.

Eighty years ago, people crowded into movie theaters to see a silent film about Iran's nomads that has since became a classic of documentary movie-making.

The film is "Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life," released in 1925. It follows a branch of the Bakhtiari tribe on its seasonal migration to summer pastures. Along the way, it offers an astonishing look at a nomadic way of life which, today, has all but disappeared.

The film was made by three intrepid Western adventurers and begins with their traveling east from Angora (today Ankara), following the caravan routes to Iran. As the trio says at the outset, they are in search of a "Forgotten People" -- the nomads -- whose life is unchanged since primordial times. And they find their subject in the Bakhtiari tribes, which migrate with the rains and grass to survive.

The epic feel of the film comes from the scale of the migration: 50,000 people herding half a million animals on a 500 mile trek. And the drama and suspense grow with the spectacular nature of the terrain. A raging river and a 5,000 meter high mountain range separate the nomads from their goal.

One unforgettable scene is the crossing of the Karun river, which is swollen with Spring snow melt. The tribes have no boats to cross and the racing water is a forbidding sight. But as proof of the age-old ingenuity of man against the elements, they have a solution.

The nomads' answer is to inflate goatskins and use them as floats for rafts to carry across the women, children, and weakest animals. The men paddle across individually, holding onto their own floats like inner-tubes. Whether anybody can swim and, indeed, whether it is even possible to swim in such rough water without drowning, is left to the imagination.

The Karun river, Iran's most voluminous, originates in the high peaks of the Zagros mountain range in Chahrmahal va Bakhtiari Province and flows to the Persian Gulf. The nomads cross it only to face their next and still more daunting challenge -- crossing the mountain range itself.

The difficultly of the task can best be imagined by thinking of the Alps. The crossing point is a snow-covered mountain called Zard Kuh which rises up 4,500 meters, just a few hundred meters short of Mont Blanc's 4,800 meters. There is no visible trail over it and, as the thousands-strong, barefoot tribes march toward it, no hint they will find one.

But, again, there is a solution. The first groups of men unpack shovels and, in the same way one might dig out a driveway, steadily clear a path up the mountain. It is unimaginable work, made possible only by the sheer numbers of men available. And over a period of days, the hordes of humans, goats, and mules zig-zag their way up the slopes and over the range.

Such scenes cannot be seen today on anything like this scale. All over the world, nomads have been steadily settled by governments determined to end the land disputes that arise from herders moving freely over vast territories. And, indeed, as this 1925 movie makes clear, past generations of nomads moved like small armies. The thousands of tribesmen have rifles slung over their shoulders and could both hunt game and fight the authorities with them.

But for anyone who might think that the nomads, once settled, simply become like everyone else, the film is a welcome reminder of just how extraordinarily different the nomads' experience is. And the images can only increase one's interest in the mysterious symbols that even settled nomads continue to weave into their carpets -- the echoes of primal hopes, fears, and strengths.

Who made "Grass," and why?

That story is almost as interesting as the film itself.

The co-directors -- who doubled as cameramen -- are two American soldiers who remained in Europe after World War II. As Central Europe fell into a power vacuum with the defeat of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires and the civil war in Russia, they joined the fight to carve out an independent Polish state.

One of the pair, Merian C. Cooper, was a volunteer pilot in the fledgling Polish air force and flew numerous missions against Russian troops until he was shot down in Ukraine. Taken prisoner, he escaped again eight months later. (He is shown here in Polish Air Force uniform).

The other, Ernest B. Schoedsack, worked with the Polish war relief.

The third member of the team, who appears on camera chronicling the migration, is Marguerite Harrison. She was an American journalist with the Associated Press who also spied for Washington in Russia and Japan. She was imprisoned for ten weeks in Moscow's notorious Lubyanka prison.

The three, who all met in Poland, decided to film the Bakhtiari migration following the box-office success of one of Hollywood's first documentary and ethnographic films: Nanook of the North (1922). Here they pose in Ankara in 1923 at the start of their journey. Their own highly adventurous life imminently qualified them for their work, which included nearly freezing to death with their subjects.

"Grass," was commercially successful and launched Cooper and Schoedsack on lifelong careers as filmmakers. The two went on to make a documentary in Thailand ("Chang" in 1927) and later teamed up again to make the 1933 classic "King Kong."

Harrison, who wrote several books about Russia and Asia, later co-founded the Women's Society of Geographers and the Children's Hospital of Baltimore.

The lives of southwestern Iran's nomads have continued to fascinate film-makers ever since "Grass."

The story of the Bakhtiari migration was retold in "People of the Wind" (1976), which followed the migration in reverse.

And the nomadic Qashqai were recently featured in "Gabbeh" (1996) by Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

All of the films are currently available on DVD.

The whole of "Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life" also can be viewed on the Internet: CLICK HERE

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Related Links

Wikipedia: The Bakhtiari

Wikipedia: "Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life"

Wikipedia: Merian C. Cooper

Wikipedia: Ernest B. Schoedsack

Wikipedia: Marguerite Harrison

Wikipedia: The Polish-Soviet War (1919 - 1921)

Wikipedia: Greater Poland Uprising (1918 - 1919)

Can Modern Weavers Revive The Classical Carpets Of The Ottomans?

2008-11-01T00:26:00.000-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO, November 7, 2008 -- There is one question that probably has occurred to everyone who ever paged through a picture-book of antique carpets

That is: “Why aren’t these beautiful designs produced anymore?”

But only a few people ever take the next step of actually trying to get antique carpets woven again.

One person who has tried is Christopher Robin Andrews, an architect in the San Francisco Bay area. He fell in love with carpets while a student and now, half a lifetime later, devotes his spare time to reviving classical Ottoman designs.

The designs that inspired him to start were Lottos and Holbeins -- patterns one mostly sees only in early Renaissance paintings or in a few museums. So, he has not set himself a simple task.

(Shown here is 'The Alms-Giving of St. Anthony of Padua, by the Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto in 1542. The carpet design is named "Lotto" after the artist.)

Still, he says, there was no other solution. A trip through Istanbul's carpet bazaars in 2001 confirmed that the easier option of simply buying an off-the-shelf Lotto did not exist.

Andrews' passion for classical Ottomans comes from the fact he studied architecture under Christopher Alexander, a teacher who is also a carpet scholar.

Alexander, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, believes buildings and living spaces succeed and satisfy people only when they embody the same harmonious order we see in living things.

And he believes architects can learn a great deal about giving a life-like appeal to inanimate objects by studying, among other inspirations, the designs of the old carpet masters. He has amassed an impressive collection of Ottomans and often requires his students to draw them in detail in order to better understand the designs.

What are some of the lessons the classical masters teach? They include harmony, differentiation through color and geometry, the coupling of opposites to create nodes of interest, the balancing of directional forces, the proper use of randomness, and much more. (For a fascinating summary, see: "The 'Life' of a Carpet: An Application of the Alexander Rules," by Nikos A. Salingaros)

Andrews has made hundreds of detailed knot-by-knot drawings of carpets -- enough to become very knowledgeable about their structure. Enough, too, that when he lost patience with the Istanbul bazaar, he dared to commission weavers himself to turn his drawings (like this one of the center field of a star ushak) into the rugs he wanted.

Initially, he tried producers of "bespoke" rugs on the internet but the results were disappointing. And steadily what began as an Everyman's dream of finding a shortcut to the past became, instead, a hugely complex journey into the rug-making world.

Finally, however, he located a partner in Ibrahim Tekin, a Turkish connoisseur and carpet producer who liked the challenge. But even with dedicated weavers on the project, and an experienced dye master, the results fell short.

The biggest problem turned out to be mind-set. Neither the weavers nor the dyer had ever seen a classical carpet. So, they reflexively adapted the project to what they assumed was the goal: a variation on the design, weave, and colors of a contemporary, commercial rug.

Then Andrews and Tekin discovered the answer.

"We agreed we had to take the dyer and the workshop manager we were working with near Konya to Istanbul to visit the museums," Andrews says. "And we told them these are the carpets we want to revive and once they saw them they said, ah that's what you want! Because their inclination was to make a commercial product and their perception of the commercial market was much different from those classical carpets."

The most striking differences were in the colors. While modern decorative carpets tend towards pastels, classical carpts have deep, fully saturated hues. And while modern carpets often have exaggerated abrash, the colors of classical carpets are always consistent across a rug.

Ultimately, Andrews obtained the results he wanted. He launched his line -- Classical Carpets -- in Spring 2007 and in Spring 2008 opened at the "Double-Knot Gallery" of his New York partner, Murat Küpçü. He has also found a partner in Italy, fellow architect and rug dealer Andrea Pacciani in Parma.

On the left is a Small-pattern Holbein produced by Classical Carpets.

But the story does not end there. Even labors of love must be funded and that means finding consumers who share your dreams.

Andrews says there is a small niche market for classical revivals, and its membership is surprisingly varied.

"I am selling to collectors who can't afford the originals, we are talking about carpets you really see in museums, and even people who can afford the originals are not going to put them on their floors," he says. "So I am selling to collectors who really love these designs and want to have a carpet they can actually put on their floor. And then I am also selling to some people who don't know anything about these carpets but who simply see them for the first time and get excited about them."

He adds that one group which has proven resistant to the revived classical carpets is -- oddly enough -- interior designers:

"In a way the carpet designs are perhaps too powerful. Modern architectural interior design really puts carpets in the background and when you look at the historical context of these classical carpets, they were popular in the 15th and 16th century when people did not have a lot of furniture, so something like a carpet had to make a big statement in a room. And now decorating really doesn't work that way. Most people don't want a carpet that is going to take over a room."

Still, serving just a niche market agrees with Andrews. For him to remain directly involved in all steps of the business, and keep his day job, the operation has to remain on the scale of a couple of carpets a month.

So far, Classical Carpets has reproduced designs ranging from Lottos to Holbeins to Ushaks, including a Chintamani. Many of the carpets are commissioned.

What are the current best-sellers?

In May, Andrews made a trip to Transylvania with Alberto Boralevi and Stefano Ionescu, both experts on the Ottoman collections kept in the area's Gothic churches.

After a lot of study in situ, he has reproduced 4' x 6' (1.22 meter x 1.83 meter) pieces like this one that catch the eye of Transylvanian enthusiasts.

The prices for all of Classical Carpets' weavings generally range between $120 to $200 a square foot, ($1,290 to $2,150 a square meter) depending on carpet size and knot count.

(Note: The picture at the top of this article is a detail of the center of Classical Carpets' Lotto rug.)

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Related Links

Classical Carpets - Christopher Robin Andrews

Links to Photos of 15th to 17th Century Carpets and Their Depiction In European Artwork

Oriental Carpets in Italian Renaissance Paintings: Art Objects and Status Symbols

New York Times: Using Old Masters To Shed Light On Turkish Rugs

"The 'Life' of a Carpet: An Application of the Alexander Rules," by Nikos A. Salingaros

Old Turkish Carpets: Carpets of the Ottoman Period

Barry O'Connell: Notes On Transylvanian Rugs

Welcome,

2008-10-17T05:46:00.001-07:00

Owen Jones' Grammar Of Ornament And The Secrets Of Eastern Design

2008-10-17T05:42:00.000-07:00

Welcome,

2008-10-03T04:44:00.001-07:00

Arts And Crafts Movement Carpets And The West's Longing For Simpler Days

2008-10-03T04:40:00.000-07:00

LONDON, October 24, 2008 -- Is all great art defined by its ability to connect with the soul of a culture?

And, if so, is the soul of Western civilization to be found in simpler times than today -- for example, in the Middle Ages?

We won't presume to debate such points here. But it is interesting to note that one of the more enduring design trends of the modern age was founded on just these principles.

That, of course, is the Arts and Crafts movement of 1870 to 1910. Its designers drew on Medieval art to launch their own style of furnishings ranging from wallpaper to chairs to textiles. Incorporating influences from eastern art -- equally known to the Middle Ages -- they also created their own carpet patterns.

Many of those designs, originally woven in England and Ireland, continue to be popular in the West today. They are faithfully reproduced every year by European carpet producers whose weavers are now in Turkey, India, Nepal, and China.

The founding father of the Arts and Crafts movement was William Morris (1834 to 1896), photographed here at age 37. An architect, artist, and poet, as well as a social reformer, he devoted his life to battling what he saw as the dehumanizing effects of the machine age.

His enemy was real. In the late 1800s, the industrial revolution had already swept away much of traditional life in the West, including artisanal culture. Hand looms were being overtaken by power looms and individual craftsmen who made furniture were being replaced by factories that assembled it from machine-made parts instead.

The products the new industrial processes were ugly –- much less finished than they are today – but highly affordable and omnipresent.

Morris organized a coterie of like-minded artists and friends from his time as a student at Oxford to try to hold back the tide. They described themselves as “Fine Art Workmen” ready to “undertake any species of decoration.” And they took the Medieval Guild system of independent artisans as their model for rescuing workers, including children, from being cogs in the new machines.

The Arts and Crafts movement, as it came to be called, was obviously at odds with its era in every way. It idealized a bygone time when the consumer age was just beginning and full of confidence. And it idealized simplicity and fair artisan wages when Victorian homes were full to bursting with new and ostentatious manufactured goods thanks to labor that was intoxicatingly cheap.

But, amazingly, the movement was commercially successful almost from the start. Delving into Medieval art and other handicraft traditions for inspiration, the Fine Arts workmen created a rich Gothic style that connected with modern Britons the same way their allies the Pre-Raphaelite painters did, or the much earlier ‘Ivanhoe’ (1819) of Sir Walter Scott did. The only difference was that the artisans produced everything that was needed for a total living environment.

Here is the interior of Wightwick Manor, owned by a wealthy patron of the style. The effort to turn the home into a temple of art impossible to build from mass-produced items is fully visible.

All that is in line with Morris’s maxim: “Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life.”

This carpet is entitled “Bullerswood” and was woven by Morris & Company, London, in 1889. Its design of scrolling arabesques and stylized flowers and birds is colored with a range of vegetable dyes. It is a prize of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum but its huge size – 4 meters by 7.5 meters – prevents it from being on permanent display.

The Arts and Crafts movement did not completely reject machines and did use some, including for weaving. But its insistence on the finest workmanship eventually priced the products out of all but the wealthiest households. So, the artisans never realized their utopian dream of turning every man’s home, even the most ordinary, into an earthly paradise.

But the movement did set the stage for later schools of design which more populary raised interior design to the level of a fine art. They include the American version of Arts and Crafts, which used machines to lower the cost of craftsman-produced furnishings. They also include Art Nouveau and Art Deco. In all these styles, the handicrafts of Medieval Europe and borrowings from Islamic and Asian sources remained major inspirations.

Morris once acknowledged his debt to Oriental Art this way:

"To us pattern designers, Persia became a Holy Land, for there in the process of time our art was perfected, and from thence it spread to cover for a while the world, east and west."

Today, Morris remains the best-known face of the British Arts and Crafts movement but he is far from its only successful practitioner. Other leading designers are Gavin Morton and G. K. Robertson, who created this carpet woven in Donegal, Ireland, circa 1900:

Original Arts and Crafts carpets now command high auction prices that put them beyond the reach of most collectors. But the patterns are so popular that many are readily available as reproductions. That includes this replica of a carpet designed by architect and painter Charles Voysey:

The design is "Duleek" -- named after one of the towns near Donegal, where the carpet was woven in the 1800s.

A quick look through the internet shows reproductions of designs like this one are available from $ 25 - $ 50 per square foot ($ 269 - $ 538 per square meter). Those low prices are not due to the use of machines, as the artisans of the Arts and Crafts movement might have feared. Instead, they are due to globalization and the outsourcing of Western hand weaving to the East, a future they never envisioned.

(Note: the picture at the top of this article is a detail of the central field of "Holland Park," a carpet designed by William Morris in 1883.)

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Related Links:

On the Arts & Crafts Movement:

Interactive Textbooks: The Arts and Crafts Movement

The Arts and Crafts Society

On William Morris:

Wikipedia: William Morris

William Morris Gallery

The Textile Blogspot: William Morris Carpets

The Earthly Paradise: Bullerswood Carpet

Arts & Craft Carpet Reproductions:

J.R. Burrows & Company

The Craftsman Home

Michael Fitzsimmons Decorative Arts

Jax Arts and Crafts Rugs

Poster: Donegal Rug by Morton and Robertson

Welcome,

2008-09-27T01:12:00.000-07:00

A Room With No View: How Wall-To-Wall Carpeting Took The Place Of Oriental Rugs

2008-09-27T00:59:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON, October 10, 2008 -- One of the many things that makes rugs such a fascinating hobby is comparing the ways our ancestors regarded them with how we do.

It is well known, for example, that the late 19th century marked the peak of Western interest in oriental carpets. No other period comes close to it in viewing Eastern rugs as an integral part of Western interiors.

Just how much they were prized by our great-grandparents can be seen in a picture such as this. Titled 'Divan,' it is by the Croat artist Vlaho Bukovac in 1905 but could have been painted anywhere in America or Europe at the time.

By contrast, just about no-one would think of making such a picture today.

But why were people a century and-a-half ago such huge lovers of carpets? There are many answers to consider, including one that is as often overlooked as it is simple: the dreadful condition of their floors.

The story is told by Randall L. Patton of Kennesaw State University (U.S. state of Georgia) in a study entitled 'A History of the U.S. Carpet Industry.' He explains how American companies became hugely successful by developing inexpensive wall-to-wall carpeting to solve the country's flooring problems. And, along the way, the tale explains much about how oriental carpets were driven from Western homes.

To follow the argument, one has to remember that many of our ideas today about 19th century homes come from visiting manors that have been turned into museums. In these great houses, the floors are of hardwood that is as carefully laid down as a mosaic and as highly polished as the furniture.

But, in fact, most 19th century homes had floors that were hastily cobbled together by the builders from softwood boards of random sizes. The builders neither stained nor varnished these arrays of panels and they left the homeowners the task of figuring out what to do with them.

So how did people cope with such floors? One way was to leave them bare but "whiten them" by scrubbing them with a stiff brush and sand. Or they could be bleached with lye.

Still another possibility was to paint the flooring to resemble a carpet. That option took many forms that are detailed in wonderful detail on a blogsite named 'Victorian Interiors and More.' The subtitle of the blog is "Victorian life wasn't quite what you may have thought it was."

The site offers this description of using a stencil to paint a floor, as quoted from an 1859 short story that appeared in 'Godey's' magazine:

“Tomorrow, you must drive down to Dayton, Albert, purchase some pearl-colored paint, enough to put two coats on the floor, and some green, enough for a border. Take a sheet of tin, mark three large leaves in a group upon it, and take it to the tinman. Tell him to cut out the leaves like a stencil letter; you can, by putting it down and painting over it, make a handsome border of green leaves for your carpet.”

Beyond painting the floors directly, one could put down painted coverings. A cheap way to do that was to glue newspapers to the floor and paint and shellac them.

Another, more expensive, option was to put down a painted floor cloth. As the Victorian-expert website notes, "generally they were placed in hallways and parlors." In kitchens or any room where water was likely to be spilled, oilcloth was the better choice.

And then, of course, there was matting - the most often used floor covering of all. Inexpensive mats were woven from coconut fiber, straw, and corn husks, while expensive ones were made from wool.

As time went by, and the industrial age brought more wealth to the middle class, all these homemade solutions began to give way to what people really wanted: large and attractive woven carpets.

It was not an indulgence. As one observer at the time noted: "the general use of carpets was a necessity some few years ago from the fact that the floors of our houses were generally built of such poor material, and in such a shiftless manner, that the floor was too unsightly to be left exposed." That is Horace Greeley, writing in his 1872 book 'Great Industries of the United States.'

Carpet manufacturers -- domestic and foreign, hand loom and power loom -- fought hard to satisfy the demand for large rugs. The battle continued on a grand scale until the progressive introduction of hardwood floors through the century finally reduced the demand for wall-to-wall sized carpets and increased interest in smaller accent rugs.

Through these decades from the second half of the 19th century to the early 20th century, the most desired carpets of all were handwoven oriental ones. Their widespread appeal was heightened by their historical association with the rich and by the fad of "Orientalism" that accompanied the expanding colonial age.

Plus, they got a boost from the World Expositions like those in Paris and Chicago, which helped to familiarize millions of people with the artistic traditions of the Islamic world, China, and Japan and to popularize them.

But it was also during this period that power loomed carpets began their steady progress into American homes, a progress that would eventually push out every competitor.

In his history of the U.S. carpet industry, Patton notes that by 1870 power loom technology had been refined sufficiently to produce "reasonable substitutes for higher quality hand loom woven goods." The American machine carpet makers published lavish catalogs, advertised directly to consumers, and sales ballooned to roughly 80 million square meters by 1923.

Then came the Great Depression and a fall-off in business of all kinds. But out the ashes emerged a far more formidable power loom industry. First, based in the northeastern United States and using wool, it struggled to regain the heights of the turn-of-the-century. But in the 1950s, it relocated to the town of Dalton, Georgia, and discovered a magic formula.

That formula was "tufting" a technique traditionally used by local women to produce bedspreads. The technique is to insert tufts of yarn into a pre-woven grid of backing material and then boil the cotton backing to shrink it and lock in the tufts.

Once mechanized, the tufting process reduced the cost of making carpets by half compared to weaving and opened the way for wall-to-wall carpeting to sweep the market. The tufting industry later overcame some final objections that its cotton carpets were less durable than woven wool ones by switching to synthetic fibers and then no more obstacles remained.

Patton says that by 1990 Americans were consuming over 12 square meters of carpet per family per year, compared to about 2 square meters in the early 1950s. "Tufted carpets achieved total dominance of not just the residential carpet market," he notes, "but the residential flooring market in general."

The omnipresence of tufted carpeting in American homes and businesses today has not entirely forced woven carpets -- power loomed or hand loomed -- from the scene. As the author notes, high-end consumers do still appreciate the special qualities of wool and woven carpets continue to dominate specialty commercial markets such as hotel lobbies.

But the triumph of cheap wall-to-wall carpeting does mean that many American housing contractors now simply lay down carpeting rather than hardwood floors as the first and least expensive choice. And that, ironically, creates a situation not so different from the one faced by our great-grandparents.

That is, when your flooring is highly affordable but monotonous, how do you liven it up?

For the past many years, that question has been waived as homeowners have continued to welcome wall-to-wall carpets in white and other single tones. The carpeting, just like white walls, complements today's minimalist interior designs and poses no color problems when choosing the rest of the furnishings.

Still, nothing remains the same and history has a way of repeating itself. Today, people argue over whether it is good taste to add an oriental accent rug to an already machine-carpeted room. Tomorrow, it may become the first thing they rush to do.

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Related Links:

Randall L. Patton, A History of the U.S. Carpet Industry

Victorian Interiors and More

History of Carpet Tufting

Victoriana Magazine

World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893

Welcome,

2008-09-04T12:17:00.001-07:00

A Postage Stamp Commemorates Isfahan As 'The City Of Polish Children'

2008-09-04T12:15:00.001-07:00

WARSAW, September 26, 2008 -- Isfahan is best known for its architecture. It is so beautiful, Iranians say, that to visit the city is to see “half the world.”

And, Isfahan is famous for its carpets in classical Persian court styles.

But in Poland, the city is known for still something else. It is “Isfahan - the city of Polish children.”

This summer the Polish postal service issued a stamp that explains why.

The stamp shows a small boy dressed in a cadet’s uniform. Draped behind him is an Isfahan carpet emblazoned with the Polish eagle. And next to him is the city’s nickname in Polish: “Isfahan - Miasto Dzieci Polskich.”

The stamp commemorates two things: a huge tragedy in Poland’s history, and how Iran helped rescue some of the victims. But to understand the whole story – which today is largely forgotten outside Poland – one must go back to the very start of World War II.

In 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union attacked Poland and divided it between them. Both the Nazis and Soviets sent huge numbers of Poland’s elite to prisons and labor camps. But the Soviets went a step further. They deported some 1.5 million Polish citizens to distant points in Siberia and Central Asia.

The deportations of military families, police, doctors, teachers, and anyone else suspected of patriotic feelings was intended to simplify the Polish territory’s incorporation into the Soviet Union. It also provided more laborers for the Soviet Union's collective farms as Moscow prepared for an inevitable war with Germany.

The horror of this time is vividly told in the accounts of the deportees. Families were packed into boxcars in Poland and confined in them for six weeks as the trains rolled east, for example, to Kazakhstan. Anyone who tried to escape was shot.

Then, in the summer of 1941, the Soviet leaders suddenly changed their strategy. As the war began with Germany, they decided to raise an army instead from among the thousands of Polish soldiers they were keeping in prisons in the Soviet Union. And to ease the way, they granted an “amnesty” to all the Polish deportees.

The result was one of the epic journeys of World War II.

The new Polish army, under an agreement between Moscow and the exiled Polish government in London, was to be sent to the North African front to fight alongside the British. So the Army's assembled just north of the border with Iran, on the road to the Middle East. And it was there, at bases in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, that tens of thousands of deported Polish families headed in hopes of rejoining the soldiers.

But for the families to succeed, they first had to escape the farms they had been assigned to (and many local bosses refused to release them), have money to buy train tickets, and travel for months from Siberia to the south under appalling conditions.

Maria van der Linden, a survivor who was then a child, describes the trip this way in her book An Unforgettable Journey, published in New Zealand:

"We had to change trains frequently, because of the varying width of rail tracks In the USSR. At every railway station we faced long queues for tickets, where numerous waiting families slept on bare floors. Conditions were filthy. People were infested with hair and body lice. There were no proper washing facilities at the stations and toilets were seldom cleaned. Infections spread like wildfire among the waiting travelers. Some people were too ill and exhausted to continue their journey and many passengers died as they waited to purchase their train tickets for the next stage of their trip."

Another child, Zdzislawa Wasylkowska, recalls her journey south like this:

"We had to beg for bread of steal whenever we could. There were no washing facilities. There were lice everywhere and so many dead children. I saw many people thrown from the train. It took us another month to get to Jalalabad, close to the Afghanistan border, but they did not want to take us. We moved on to Guzar where my mother and sister became sick with typhus."

Parents unable to go farther gave their children to others who could. And as the journey went on, the number of orphans multiplied, to the point that the Polish army reception centers had to set up special orphanages to accommodate them all.

The Polish army, known as the Anders’ Army for its commander General W. Anders, crossed into Iran by ship across the Caspian or by road at the end of 1942. The exodus numbered 115,000 – that is, 45,000 soldiers, 37,000 civilians adults, and 18,000 children. Just after they crossed, the Soviet government closed the border again, preventing any more of the some 1 million Polish citizens still in the USSR from leaving.

For those Poles who reached Iran, after thousands died along the way, the emotions were overwhelming. Another survivor, Helena Woloch, recalls:

"Exhausted by hard labour, disease and starvation - barely recognizable as human beings - we disembarked at the port of Pahlavi (now Bandar-e Anzali). There, we knelt down together in our thousands along the sandy shoreline to kiss the soil of Persia. We had escaped Siberia, and were free at last. We had reached our longed-for Promised Land."

Ironically, the Poles had reached a country that itself had been occupied in late 1941 by Russia and Britain. They did so to secure its oil and keep Iran open as a supply route to the Soviet army. Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had earlier brought Iran closer to Germany, was in exile in South Africa and his son was on the throne in his place.

However, if Iranians resented the Russian and the British presence, they were sympathetic to the Polish refugees and welcomed them.

Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi opened his private pool to the orphans. Polish soldiers saluted Persian officers when they passed in the street. And, over time, all the orphans were relocated to Isfahan along with many Polish families because the beauty of the city was thought to be conducive for their physical and mental health.

After the Polish Army left for the Middle East, the families and children stayed on. From 1942 to 1945, there were 2,590 Polish children in Isfahan below the age of seven, living in what became a lively community which was very interested in Iranian culture.

During this time, Polish academicians in Isfahan began an Institute of Iranian Studies. And the carpet in the background of the commemorative postage stamp was woven by Polish girls in the Isfahan school of weaving.

At the end of the war, the refugees went on to Britain or to British colonies, or to the United States and Australia. But, due to a final twist of fate, none returned to Poland. That was because the Allied leaders had agreed at a meeting in Tehran in 1943 to put Poland in the Soviet Union’s orbit. It remained there until 1989.

The Polish postage stamp issued this June recalls all this history. One of the orphans, Przemek Stojakowski, is the boy on the postage stamp. On the First Day Cover that accompanies the stamp, the names of just a few of the hundreds of other orphaned children are also printed.

The stamp helps to explain several other things, too, including why Dariusz remains a popular name today for Polish boys and how the word “kish-mesh” (Persian for raisins) came into the Polish language.

But perhaps most of all, the stamp is a reminder of a universal truth. That is, the world has a long history of tragedies. But it has just as long a memory for acts of kindness.

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Related Links:

Iran and the Polish Exodus from Russia 1942, by Ryszard Antolak

An Unforgettable Journey, by Maria van der Linden

Wikipedia: Anders’ Army

Polish deportees in the Soviet Union, by Michael Hope

The Polish Deportees of World War II: Recollections of Removal to the Soviet Union and Dispersal, edited by Tadeusz Piotrowski

The Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw

Welcome,

2008-08-30T12:38:00.001-07:00

Brussels Celebrates Savonnerie Carpets With 700,000 Begonias

2008-08-28T06:59:00.000-07:00

BRUSSELS, August 29, 2008 – Every summer, Brussels weaves a giant carpet of begonia blooms that covers the entire Grande Place.

The flower carpet does not last long: just three days and four nights. And the amount of work is immense, with hundreds of volunteers arranging some 700,000 begonias (knot count of 300 flowers per square meter) into a meticulously planned pattern.

Still, Brussels considers the effort worthwhile.

The annual event, which began in 1971, reminds the world that Belgium is the world’s biggest producer of begonias -- exporting about 48 million bulbs a year.

Plus, the flower carpet reminds everyone that Belgium also is one of the world’s largest makers and exporters of carpets -- machine-made.

This year, the floral design (shown above) honored France’s “Savonnerie” carpets. Doing so it recalled the days when European weavers first “Occidentalized” oriental rugs on a commercial scale, setting the stage for today’s immensely successful Western rug industry.

Savonnerie carpets were first produced in the early 1600s and combined Eastern pile-rug weaving with French Baroque designs. The success of the patterns – whose motifs include flower bouquets, fleur-de-lys, fruits, and acanthus leaves – was so great that it swung European taste away from oriental rugs for two centuries.

Here is a Baroque carpet in the kind of typical French interior design that defined Western standards of elegance at the time.

Just how that Europe developed its own handwoven carpet industry is a fascinating story with two chapters.

One is a deliberate effort by French kings to monopolize the luxury carpet market in Europe, which was previously supplied from the East.

The other is the coincidence of this effort with a sudden feeling of Western cultural superiority as Europe’s kingdoms first became world powers.

Here are some of the steps along the way:

* King Henry IV (1533 – 1610) decides to revive France’s luxury goods industry, which was decimated in France’s wars of religion. He provides leading artisans, including weavers, with workshops in the Louvre.

** Weaving master Pierre DuPont establishes the style that will become famous as “Savonnerie.” The name is taken from the Paris soap factory which became the location of a major carpet workshop in 1644.

*** European forces defeat the Ottoman army besieging Vienna in 1683. The victory convinced Europe of their cultural supremacy over their Eastern rivals.

**** King Louis XIV bans the import of oriental carpets into France, protecting French production and ending the huge outflow of revenues to buy luxury goods from the East.

Europe’s handwoven carpets had many variations, including Savonnerie and Aubusson in France and, later, Axminster and Wilton in Britain.

This is a 18th century British interior with an Axminister on the floor.

Such carpets were commissioned by courts and by the very wealthy. And their patterns proved adaptable enough to be a centerpiece of furnishing from the Baroque and Neoclassical periods into the Napoleanic era.

It was Napolean, in fact, who gave the Savonnerie factory its last great royal support. Beginning in 1805, he commissioned carpets in the Empire style that defined his age.

The Savonnerie’s story finally ends in 1825 when the manufactory was incorporated with another weaving workshop, the Gobelins, which was famous for tapestries. By this time, the passion for European handwoven carpets had faded under a new set of social circumstances.

One was colonialism. As Europeans expanded across the globe, they came again into direct contact with oriental artwork and renewed their interest in it. By the mid-1850’s imports of oriental rugs were booming, along with Orientalism in general.

But perhaps still more important for the European hand-knotted carpet industry was the invention of the steam-powered loom in 1785. Within 50 years, the great names in European handwoven rugs disappeared or became associated with machine-made carpets as the weaving sector industrialized.

Today, one can still buy Savonnerie carpets but they are reproductions hand-made in China. And one can still buy Axminister carpets, but they are machine-made in England (as pictured here).

Does all this make the Brussels Savonnerie flower carpet a bittersweet image of Europe’s rug-making industry?

Champions of hand-knotted carpets might say ‘yes’ if it reminds them too much of a glorious past now gone forever.

But one can also argue that history must take its course and that the way Savonnerie carpets evolved into today’s multi-billion dollar machine-made carpet industry is as amazing as any other aspect of the rug trade.

In that case, the Savonnerie which bloomed in Brussels Grand Place this year -- from August 15 to 17 -- was good symbol indeed for Europe’s love affair with carpets.

Related Links:

YouTube: Brussels Flower Carpet 2008 - Savonnerie

Brussels Flower Carpet: official website

Wikipedia: Savonnerie

Early Axminster Carpets, by Brenda Rose

In Harry Potter's World, The Carpet Is A Harshang Bidjar

2008-08-21T03:41:00.000-07:00

LONDON, September 5, 2008 -- Is a Bidjar Harshang-patterned carpet quietly becoming the most popular rug of the next generation?

It’s possible – if you think that being visibly featured in Harry Potter films is likely to impact future rug buyers’ tastes. That is, ‘future’ in the sense of today’s children growing up to be tomorrow’s rug lovers.

But before going further, it may be necessary to explain a little about Harry Potter’s world.

Harry, the boy magician, goes to Hogwarts, a school of magic. The school is modeled very much on the great British universities such as Oxford, so Harry lives in a 'House,' or dormitory, with a common room where the resident students can gather informally anytime of day.

Harry’s ‘House’ is 'Gryffindor' and the floor of the Gryffindor common room is covered with a giant Bidjar in a Harshang pattern on a brilliant blue background.

Here, Harry (right) and his two close-friends Ron (center) and Hermione (left) meet in the common room in a scene from one of the seven Harry Potter films.

The carpet shows up in most film scenes of the Gryffindor common room and, along with tapestries on the walls, gives the room a very magical, wizard-like – feel. The non-figurative Harshang design, which conjures up zodiac-like images of crabs and bursting suns, is perfect for the role.

Is it entirely an accident that a Bidjar Harshang almost identical to the one shown here was chosen by the set designers?

Maybe not. More than a few Europeans and Americans who are now deep into adulthood have memories of oriental carpets in university rooms. And a generation earlier, rugs were more common still.

Bidjars are the natural choice for such high-wear settings. Produced in and around the northwestern Iran town of the same name), they are the most strongly made and indestructible carpets of all.

Their nickname, after all, is the 'Iron Rugs' of Persia. They are so densely woven and stiff that they cannot even be folded for transportation. Instead, they have to be rolled up.

Below is a photo of the library room in Eliot House at Harvard University. On the floor – again -- a Bidjar Harshang. Only this time the carpet has a red background.

Seeing an oriental carpet in a university common room may not just be nostalgic for lots of adults who watch Harry Potter with their children.

It also is a reminder of the huge export industry which once thrived in northwestern Iran producing room-sized rugs of all types for wealthy Western institutions and houses.

The peak was at the turn-of-the-last-century, when an oriental rug on the floor was the symbol both of a wide view of the world and a certain standing in the world.

The story of this export industry is well illustrated by the success of Ziegler & Company. The Anglo-British firm based in Manchester, England, was among the first to realize that the West’s ‘Gilded Age’ needed giant rugs that complimented Western room decors of the time.

Arto Keshishian, writing in the magazine Antiques and Fine Arts, gives the background in his article ‘Ziegler and Their Carpets.’ He notes that by the 1850’s Europe’s cyclical interest in the orient was on the upswing again and department stores began stocking up on the existing village and workshop carpets available in Iran.

But, he writes, "unfortunately, the carpets were generally either too long or too narrow for the rooms of the new English homes, because the imported carpets were designed in a traditional format to fit urban, Persian rooms."

The Ziegler Company saw an opportunity. At the time, it was selling printed cottons produced by the Manchester mills to customers in Iran and Turkey. But it changed direction, set up its own looms in northwestern Iran around the town of Sultanabad (now Arak) and began supplying hand-woven carpets to the British market instead.

Ziegler and Company revolutionized oriental carpet production by enlarging the sizes and simplifying the patterns. The company’s artists introduced more space between traditional Persian design elements to achieve, in Keshishian’s words, “an airy visual effect.”

At the same time, “fewer color combinations were used, resulting in a simpler balance and harmony; the color green was liberally incorporated, perhaps to echo the English fondness for the countryside.”

Ziegler did not produce Bidjars and its designs, as shown here, look nothing like the carpet spread across Harry Potter’s floor.

But the principles Ziegler exemplified offer some time-tested guidelines as to how carpet producers can respond to changes in the market and supply what each new generation wants.

Will the next generation surprise its parents by switching from abstract, tribal carpet designs to the lush feel of turn-of-the-last century Bidjars and Zieglers? Only the next generation can answer and, at the moment, its members are still window-shopping – or should we say movie-shopping – the options.

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Related Links:

'Ziegler and Their Carpets' by Arto Keshishian

In Harry Potter's World, THE Carpet Is A Harshang Bijar

2008-08-19T11:31:00.000-07:00

Welcome ...

2008-07-24T04:04:00.001-07:00

Every Era Sees Oriental Rugs It's Own Way

2008-07-23T10:41:00.000-07:00

PRAGUE, August 15, 2008 -- Oriental carpets have caught the eye of Western writers ever since they began trickling into Europe in the 13th century or earlier.

But how Western writers look at these exotic creations has changed dramatically over the years.

In the early days, carpets were symbols of impossible luxury and power. They helped seal alliances between the Ottoman court and European kings, and ambassadors carefully recorded their acceptance and delivery.

Just what potent symbols these objects of art could be is apparent in this brief description of the victorious Sultan Suleyman II summoning the Hungarian king John to him immediately after the battle of Mohacs in 1526:

“Along the short mile the King traversed to go to the Emperor, Turkish and various fine carpets were laid on the earth as far as the tent of the Emperor.”

The words belong to the Hungarian royal chaplain George Szerémy, who was there. The picture of Sultan Suleyman II above is from an Ottoman court miniature.

Over time, carpets as trappings of royal command found their way (in reduced versions) into more and more Western households. First nobility, then merchants and then, with the industrial age, the ever more comfortable middle class bought eastern rugs. So many, in fact, that by the mid-1800s, how carpets were displayed in western homes could be an issue of public debate.

Edgar Allen Poe is best remembered today as an American pioneer of the Romanticist Horror genre. But he was also a well-known literary and, sometimes, social critic who contributed an essay entitled 'The Philosophy of Furniture' to Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in 1840:

“Carpets are better understood of late than of ancient days, but we still very frequently err in their patterns and colours. A carpet is the soul of the apartment. From it are deduced not only the hues but the forms of all objects incumbent. A judge at common law may be an ordinary man; a good judge of a carpet must be a genius. Yet I have heard fellows discourse of carpets with the visage of a sheep in reverie — "d'un mouton qui rêve" — who should not and who could not be entrusted with the management of their own moustachios."

Poe goes on to accuse the main commercial carpet centers of his day of violating all public standards of good taste. "Brussels is the preterpluperfect tense of fashion" in Western rugs, he claims, and "Turkey is taste in its dying agonies."

What does Poe like? Well, colors that are not too lively. "A carpet should not be bedizzened out like a Riccaree Indian — all red chalk, yellow ochre, and cock's feathers," he says, apparently having seen something like that on someone's floor. As for patterns, only non-figurative. "Distinct grounds and vivid circular figures, of no meaning," are his maxim.

If Poe seems surprisingly argumentative about carpets, he is only a little ahead of his time. By the end of the 1800s, passions rose still higher.

Britain's The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs offers this view of carpet collecting in a 1903 commentary:

“There are, I must suppose, but few hobbies that claim so absorbing a devotion as does the pursuit of the oriental carpet. Every hobby, no doubt demands a good deal from its victims, but the exactions of most of them are tempered with mercy: thus the collector of old furniture does not necessarily cut himself adrift from pictures, nor does the lover of old arms from bric-a-brac; but the oriental carpet is inexorable and remorseless, and the true carpet lover gives himself to carpets and to carpets only. They are his pictures, his furniture, his bric-a-brac, his all. True the field of the oriental carpet seeker is an immensely wide one. His horizon extends from Morocco to China, and the period during which the objects of his affections have existed, and existed as they do today, dates back to the days of the Pharaohs; in the palaces of ancient Egypt they were employed as decorations and the priests at Heliopolis used them at religious ceremonies.”

Whether these notes about the ancient Egyptians are well-researched, we can't say. But just a few years later, the same magazine makes it clear that a real connoisseur should and can get to a museum or bookstore to learn more about rugs:

"Not very long ago oriental carpets were bought only as house decorations. It is not much more than a decade since our museums accorded them notice on their own account. Today, however, we have turned over a new leaf. Bode, who may in one word be called the magnate of modern art dealing, has devoted intense labour to carpets and filled with them two rooms in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum at Berlin. Since the transition of our interest in this species of art from art-craft to the actual art museums, the carpet has become a distinguished gentleman in the salons of science. I know of at least half a dozen books already written or in the press which will go into the new problem. The first of these works – a standard work in compass and contents – lies before me: F.R. Martin’s 'History of Oriental Carpets before 1800.'

The article, which appeared in 1908 translated from German, is signed Professor Josef Strzygowski. Pictured here is the Central Asian collection of the Russian pavillion at the 1900 Paris Exhibition, an event that greatly increased Western interest in the rugs of Turkestan.

Today, good taste, a collector's passion, and scholarly interest are all part of our outlook on oriental carpets. And there is still a sense of medieval awe that overwhelms anyone standing before a masterwork of the Mamluke, Ottoman, Safavid, or Mughal courts.

But contemporary writers also express something new, and that is anxiety - with a capital A - about something no previous generation had to think about. Today, we know that the chance of finding any new, as yet undiscovered, weaving cultures is nill and that, meanwhile, all the known weaving cultures are rapidly modernizing.

That gives rise to worries that come in both mild and potent varieties. The mild version is that carpet collecting has now reached a dead end and the thrill of new discoveries must give way to recycling what we have. The potent version is fear that the growing globalization of the carpet market will eventually drive many weaving cultures to extinction.

Here is the abstract of a scholarly paper presented in 1999 by anthropologist Tom O'Neill of Canada's University of Western Ontario. It describes how classical Tibetan weaving (below left) has turned into modern Tibetan-refugee weaving (below right) in Nepal:

"The popularity of the Tibeto-Nepalese carpet in the European hand-knotted carpet market created a modern industry in peri-urban Kathmandu, Nepal, that established the Tibetan refugee population there as well as a new class of Nepalese entrepreneur. This paper employs Igor Kopytoff's (1986) perspective on the social life of things and Keith Hart's (1982) definition of commoditization to argue that the short career of the Tibeto-Nepalese carpet as an export commodity has been one of increasing homogenization that has transformed the materials, weaving techniques, and meanings of the carpet.Easy access to the lucrative 'middle' markets of Europe has meant that Tibeto-Nepalese carpets are now standardized to compete with other categories of floor coverings, and that the unique hand-knotted quality desired by connoisseurs and collectors is slowly being eliminated."

The article is entitled 'The Lives of the Tibeto-Nepalese Carpet' and appears in the Journal of Material Culture, 1999.

How will writers of future eras view the art of oriental carpets? As the 21st century only just begins, it is far to early to guess. But if the past is any guide, the subject will remain as full of surprises tomorrow as it is today or was yesterday.

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Related Links:

Edgar Allen Poe: The Philosophy of Furniture

The Burlington Magazine: On Carpets

The Burlington Magazine: Oriental Carpets

Tom O’Neill: The Lives of the Tibeto-Nepalese Carpet

Epic Journey: How A Trio Of 1920s Adventurers Filmed The Qashgai Migration

2008-07-19T22:23:00.000-07:00

In Afghanistan's Turkmen Rug Belt, It's Globalization vs. Tradition

2008-07-18T04:13:00.000-07:00

ANDKHOY, Afghanistan; August 1, 2008 -- Twice a week the men whose wives and daughters weave the traditional red rugs of Central Asia come to this town in northern Afghanistan to sell their work.

The carpet bazaar is a rectangular courtyard with a two-floor gallery of traders’ stalls on every side, and the men approach it with trepidation.

Many of the men have dropped in as onlookers on the previous market day to learn what they can about the going prices. Now, accompanied by friends for support, they file into the bazaar and line the sides with their bundled rugs.

When the traders come by, the bargaining begins. First, the carpet is spread face-down on the dusty ground. The uncut top is of no interest; it is only the back the trader wants to see.

He inspects for knot density and evenness of weave. He folds the edges to see if they meet in the middle. And he looks for evenness of tension by carefully measuring the length and width at various points. And all the time he is checking for flaws.

Then he makes an offer: $75. The seller, who wants $120 won’t hear of it. Slowly the offer creeps up to $85 and onlookers begin to exhort the seller to agree. The trader tries to grab the seller’s hand and pump it to show there is a deal. A third person joins the negotiations, probably an agent of the trader, and pretends to be a fair-minded broker.

But still the seller refuses until, finally, the meeting breaks up. No deal.

The seller will try several more traders before he chooses between accepting what seems to be today’s price or coming back another day. He knows that on Mondays and Thursday, so long as this is Andkhoy, the traders will be here.

Andkhoy’s bazaar is described in fascinating detail in a report prepared for the World Bank. The authors, Adam Pain and Moharram Ali of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit surveyed the town’s carpet business over the years 2001 to 2003.

Their work offers a look into a world of sellers and buyers that few Westerners ever see as the famous red rugs of Afghanistan begin their journey to the outside world.

The men who come to the market are heads of Turkmen households that produce carpets on an independent basis. These families have the financial means to purchase wool on credit and usually have at least one other source of income such as land or livestock. They are the most successful producers because when they sell their carpet, they keep the full selling price.

How much can these independent weavers earn? The profit depends a great deal on the quality of wool they are able to buy.

If they weave with low-quality wool from Pakistan, Pain and Ali calculate (in 2003) that they will earn about $25 per square meter from a traditional red rug that sells in the United Kingdom for $250 per square meter.

But if they weave what is known locally as a ‘Biljeek,’ that is a rug woven with finer wool imported from Belgium, they can earn $58 dollars per square meter on a red rug that sells retail for $429 per square meter.

Pain and Ali estimate that about 10 to 20 percent of the weavers in the Andkhoy area are independent. The rest work under entirely different arrangements and, in fact, never come to the bazaar to sell at all. Instead, they work under profit sharing or wage-labor contracts.

A minority of the contract weavers --like the independents -- still produce the Turkmens' traditional repeating ‘gul’ designs or more recent varities of red rugs such as Khal Muhammadi or Mauri. Exporters’ agents provide them the wool and the dimensions and the weavers get 50 percent of the rug’s local market value.

But today the majority of local weavers (the researchers estimate 50 to 70 percent) produce carpets that have no local roots at all. Agents give them some $35 square meter (for a carpet that retails for $549 per square meter) and wool from the Mideast to produce Chobis that have a modified Indo-Persian design.

The Chobis -- which ironically use natural dyes while the ‘traditional’ local designs use chemical dyes - strongly resemble the commercially successful Zieglers produced in northern Persia by Western firms in the early 1900s.

Pain and Ali say that Chobi production, which originated in the Afghan refugee camps around Peshawar, came to Andkhoy as the refugees – both Turkmens and Uzbeks -- returned home. The wage-labor terms pay as well or better than profit sharing and minimize the weavers’ risk. That makes it attractive to poor weavers even though the agents commonly reduce the final wage payment if they find the slightest flaws.

Now, as carpet production in northern Afghanistan keeps expanding, the number of contracted weavers keeps growing.

Pain and Ali note that there are clear economic benefits as the contract weaving joins sharecropping and agricultural labor as the mainstays of people too poor to own land or livestock.

But the authors also sound a warning.

They observe that the happiest position for artisans is when retail customers recognize their work as the expression of a unique artistic heritage and willingly pay more for it than they do for generic goods.

However, if generic weavings become what Afghanistan is best known for, they say, "there is little hope at present that Afghanistan’s carpets will be able to achieve that position."

(Photos of Andkhoy market from: Alti Bolaq)

(Photos of Turkmen Ersari carpets from: Carpet Collection)

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Related Links:

Understanding Markets in Afghanistan: A case study of carpets and the Andkhoy carpet market, by Adam Pain and Moharram Ali

From Andkhoy to Jeddah

Habibullah Kerimi Making a Life and Rugs in Exile

Tribal Rugs: How The 1960s Changed The West’s Taste In Oriental Carpets

2008-07-12T23:06:00.000-07:00

PRAGUE, July 18, 2008 – In the mid-1960s and into the mid-1970s, hundreds of thousands of young Europeans and Americans traveled East – to Morocco and Turkey or, much farther, to Iran, Afghanistan, India, and Nepal.

To the East, as in this verse from ‘Marrakesh Express:”

“Take the train from Casablanca going south
Blowing smoke rings from the corners of my mouth
Colored cottons hang in the air
Charming cobras in the square
Striped djellebas we can wear at home …”

The sudden longing for places with strong colors, tribal designs, and mysticism had an enormous influence on Western taste in oriental carpets. But before considering how much, it is time for the story of ‘Mercedes’ Werner.

Werner, his first name, is a retired German antiques dealer who divides his time today between Wurzburg and Prague. But even a few minutes after meeting him, it becomes clear he considers his spiritual home to be Turkey.

It began in the 1960’s, when he flew to Istanbul for a short vacation. He fell in love with the city and quickly realized he would need a car if he wanted to explore the country. So he flew back to Wurzburg for his old Mercedes and then began regularly driving 20 to 24 hours non-stop from Germany to Turkey.

To pay for his trips, he carried back Turkish rugs, artifacts and, because it was so easy to give the Turkish border guards 5 DM, even antiquities. But the story he likes to tell most is not business related. It is about a roadside village near Lake Van, which had nothing to offer except scenery.

Werner stopped so often at this village that he became very attached to it. He exchanged stories with the people at his favorite restaurant, became friends with the owner, and learned all about the local music. Then, for many years, he stopped going there as business took him elsewhere.

One day, when he was already middle-aged, Werner was home watching a documentary about eastern Turkey. Suddenly he heard the same village music he knew so well and there on the screen was the restaurant owner being asked if tourists ever came to such a remote area.

“No,” said the restaurant owner, “they only go to the seaside resorts.” And he added, “It’s not like 30 years ago when people came here just to see our mountains and learn about how we live.”

“What kind of people were those?” the interviewer asked in surprise.

“Well, like Mercedes Werner,” the restaurant owner said.

Werner says that when heard that he broke down in tears. He didn't know he had this affectionate nickname. And he had not realized how much his visits had been something extraordinary not only for himself but for his friends. The next year he returned to the village and revived what he now sees as a very important part of his life.

Interestingly, there were lots of Werners who came out of the adventures of the 1960s and 70s. Dennis Dodds, the head of the ICOC (International Conference on Carpets), says many current rug dealers got their start just that way. The rugs they discovered on their travels did much to shift their generation’s taste toward village and tribal designs and away from the elaborate city rugs favored by their parents.

In Istanbul, the travelers – including Dodds – gathered at the Pudding Shop, where they exchanged information and contacts for trips across Turkey and on to India. The café’s owner was said to be so helpful that he once gave a chair to a customer to sit on for the journey to Kathmandu. That was when all the usual seats in the minibus were full.

Dodds says that because the travelers were on a low budget and keen to get in touch with nature and natural lifestyles, they were attracted by affordable village and tribal pieces rather than by Ottoman, Safavid, or Mughal-derived designs. The geometric patterns of the rugs they brought home to Europe and America fit nicely with the 1960s fashion of Op Art and they soon became the new market standard.

What weavings most owe their success to these years? Probably kilims. They suddenly became hugely popular, in part because they are so boldly graphic – offering just colors and patterns. By contrast, pile carpets add a third dimension - texture - which diminishes the clarity of the design.

The 1960s and 70s are long gone, along with long hair and long, strange trips. But it is interesting to realize that the aesthetic tastes the travelers helped set for rugs are still very current, and probably will remain so until the next great shift in Western pop culture.

(Kilims pictured here are from Turkish Culture)

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The Pudding Shop

Wikipedia: The Hippie Trail

Touring The Hippie Trail Today

YouTube: Afghanistan On The Hippie Trail 1967

YouTube: London To Kathmandu Overland

YouTube: Les Annees Hippies au Maroc (Part 1)

YouTube: Les Annees Hippies au Maroc (Part 2)

Turkish Prayer Rugs And The Gates Of Eternity

2008-06-23T02:47:00.000-07:00

ISTANBUL, July 4, 2008 -- Is eternity something artists should illustrate as a physical thing? Or should artists represent it as something abstract and supernatural?

It is a question that every religion approaches differently and on which philosophers disagree.

But it is interesting that Turkish prayer carpets offer both possibilities: realistic and abstract. And perhaps that is one reason for their great appeal.

Turkish prayer carpets became widely familiar in Europe and America during the late 19th century, when Western tourists began traveling to Istanbul in large numbers by the Orient Express and by ship. The travelers helped popularize the rugs as symbols of the exotic and spiritual East at a time when Orientalism was at its height.

As a result, production boomed in towns like Ghiordes, Ladik, and Melas (Milas), and their typical designs became household names in the Western market.

The Anatolian town and village weavers, who adapted and simplified the designs of earlier Ottomon court prayer rugs, were not trying to show what heaven looks like. The purpose of all prayer rugs is only to mark out a space for prayer that is secluded from the mundane.

This is in line with the injunction in the Koran to "pray in a clean place". The first mosque is traditionally said to have been a space drawn in the sand by the Prophet Mohammed, who said "take off your shoes when you enter here. This is holy ground."

But because the weavers had to fill the space set aside for prayer, they had to address an art problem that is shared by all cultures. That is, how to best symbolize the eternal.

The designers of Ghiordes and Konya opted for solid architecture. They depicted the central feature of all prayer rugs – the arch – as resting upon columns. The arch itself symbolizes the focal point in a real mosque, which is the mihrab, or ornamental niche, that marks the wall facing Mecca.

This carpet above is a 19th century piece from Konya in central Anatolia.

But weaving natural-looking “gates to eternity ” -- as some Western experts like to describe prayer rugs -- is just one possibility.

By contrast, the rugs of several of the other great traditional prayer rug centers of Turkey – Kula, Ladik, Melas, and Mudjur -- took an abstract approach.

In these rugs, the mihrab is still the defining feature. But the field of the rug is fluid and appears to change with each glance. Instead of a sense of certainty, it offers the mystery of a curtain which one day may be drawn aside.

The rug shown here is from Ladik, a town in central Anatolia not far from Konya.

Both the realistic and the abstract designs were widely collected in the West. But partly due to export pressure to adapt to Western tastes, the quality of the patterns began to decline with time. They became more and more decorative and less and less certain of their identity.

Some experts say the export pressure was so great it caused workshops to reverse the way the rugs were woven. Instead of starting at the bottom and weaving toward the mihrab, some weavers started at the top. That way, the pile would catch the light best when hung on a wall.

Other experts disagree. They say that individual weavers may have started at the top when they were uncertain of their stocks of dyed wool. Since the mihrab is considered the most important element in any prayer rug, they may have wanted to be sure of completing it first before running out of preferred colors.

Whatever the case, it is certain that by the middle of the 20th century, Turkish prayer rugs had lost favor – both in the West and at home.

In the West, fashions changed and collectors began looking for bolder village and tribal weavings free of – among other things – Western influence. Today, in real terms, the cost of a Ghiordes or Ladik in the West is said to be less than it was at the height of the rugs’ popularity at the turn-of-the-last century.

In Turkey, the end of the Ottomon Empire and the rise of the secular republic equally reduced the prayer rugs’ value as weavings.

Townspeople who once commissioned expensive pieces for the Haj or for their homes, and later bequeathed them to the local mosque, gave up those customs as the population shifted to major cities. Prayer rugs became plainer and simpler, as shown by this recently made Ladik.

But all that may just make the great 19th century prayer rugs of Turkey more interesting for those who still want to collect them. Not only do they offer a creative vision of the spiritual world, they also offer a reminder of how much our own aesthetic world keeps eternally changing.

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Related Links:

Spongobongo: A Guide to Turkish Prayer Rugs

Spongobongo: Notes on Ghiordes Rugs and Carpets

Spongobongo: Guide to Konya Rugs

Spongobong: Guide to Ladik Prayer Rugs

Spongobongo: Guide to Melas Rugs

Old Turkish Carpets: Prayer Carpets

New England Rug Society: Prayer Rugs and Related Textiles

Wikipedia: Mihrab

Pierre Loti: When Oriental Carpets Are Not Enough

2008-06-17T07:30:00.000-07:00

ROCHEFORT, France; June 20, 2008 -- Many non-French speakers hear of Pierre Loti for the first time when they visit Istanbul

That is partly thanks to the café that bears his name on a hill overlooking the Bosphorus. The veranda and interior are said to have changed little since the French traveler and writer went there at the turn-of-the-last century to smoke the narghile and gaze at his favorite city.

But once one hears of Loti -- the pen-name of French naval captain Julien Viaud (1850-1923) -- it is hard not to be intrigued.

There is the story, for example, of Loti and Sarah Bernhardt. When Loti wanted to meet the famous actress, he had himself rolled up in an oriental rug and delivered to her door by two men dressed in Arab costume. When he rolled out of the carpet, she was so surprised that they quickly became good friends.

And there is his his book ‘Aziyadé,’ first published in 1872. It chronicles the doomed love affair of a young British officer, named Loti, and a Circassian concubine of a Turkish merchant in Salonica. The two flee to Istanbul until finally they are separated by the pulls of their different worlds.

"I swear to you, Aziyadé," Loti tells her, "I would give up everything with no regrets, my position, my name, my country. As for my friends, I have none and I don’t care. But you see, I do have an aged mother."

How much of the tale is autobiography, how much fiction, no-one knows. But Loti maintained for the rest of his life that his one true love was Aziyadé and that she died of heartbreak before they could meet again.

Loti was perhaps the last great French writer of Romanticism and – sailing with the French fleet – took the genre to settings it had never seen before.

His novels and travelogues explore the Ottomon Empire, Japan (his book 'Madame Chrysanthemum' is the forerunner of Madame Butterfly), Polynesia, Morocco, Iran, China, Egypt and Iceland. What his stories had in common is a longing for the exotic, a world-weariness with European bourgeois life, and immense appeal for bourgeois European readers.

But Loti, who was a member of the Academie Francaise and both admired and ridiculed in his day, reserves his greatest surprise for visitors to his rather ordinary looking home in Rochefort, on France’s Atlantic coast.

From his voyages, he brought home immense quantities of momentos. Gradually, they began to overfill his ancestral home so, as he grew richer, he bought the neighboring house and connected it to his own.

Then, he began refashioning the interior into a whole series of rooms that conjured up the exotic world of his books and, he said, inspired him to write more.

The most amazing room is a full, operetta-stage replica of a mosque. To construct it he purchased a fire-damaged mosque in Damascus that was about to be pulled down and had it shipped in its entirety to France accompanied by a team of Syrian masons.

The mosque is complete down to a Turkish multi-niche prayer rug, or Saff, and is adorned with a giant gravestone from an Istanbul cemetery. Loti said it was the stele from Aziyadé’s grave site.

By his own account, he spent hours in these rooms – which also included a fully furnished Turkish salon -- dreaming of lost love.

“I spend a lot of time at home, they are the hours of calm in my life, and smoking my narghile I dream of Istanbul and the lovely limpid green eyes of my dear sweet Aziyadé.”

At the same time, Loti loved to give parties and he dressed himself and his servants for the occasion – in Arab or Turkish robes.

Was Loti mildly eccentric? That would be an insulting understatement. He was massively and joyously, but also wistfully, out of step with his rapidly modernizing and Euro-centric world.

During his travels in Morocco, he wrote ecstatically of places that Western influence had yet to reach and, at the same time, described what he knew was doomed to disappear. The clarity, detail, and color of his writing won the admiration of painters such as Matisse and writers including Marcel Proust.

Today, a quick browse through the Internet shows Loti available mostly only in French and Turkish and long out of print in English. But his house – now a museum – is an open invitation to follow him home and, from there, still further home to the farthest corners of the East.

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Related Links:

Wikipedia: Pierre Loti

‘The Orient of Pierre Loti’ – Saudi Aramco World

‘Phantoms of the Orient’ - An Exhibition of Loti’s Life and Work – Al-Ahram Weeky

'Armchair Travels with Pierre Loti' - Al-Ahram Weekly

Pierre Loti Museum, Rochefort

Extracts from first chapters of ‘Aziyadé’ (French)

‘Pierre Loti – Turcophile’ (French)

Arabesque Mamluk Carpets Mix Perfect Art With Perfect Mystery

2008-05-30T03:20:00.000-07:00

CAIRO, June 7, 2008 -- Are Mamluk carpets the most mysterious rugs of all?

The are many reasons to think so.

The rugs were created during the reign of the Mamluk sultans in Cairo from 1250 to 1517 at a time when medieval Islamic art was at its pinnacle in Egypt.

And it is clear that the sultans spared no expense -- from the painstaking weaving of the rugs’ mosaic-like designs to their saturated colors to their superb wool.

But no-one is sure exactly where these masterpiece workshop rugs were woven. Some carpets experts say Egypt, some Spain, some Turkey.

One of the reasons for considering so many places is that the rugs appeared under the Mamluks as if out of thin air. Elisabeth Greenberg observes in her article ‘Jewelled Carpets: Treasures of the Mamluk Empire’ that “prior to these rugs there was no pile-rug weaving tradition in Egypt.”

Examining the rugs for clues just offers more riddles. Their lustrous wool is unlike that used in other Egyptian textiles of the time, but doesn’t clearly come from somewhere else. The wool is spun clockwise, when most carpet wools are spun counterclockwise. And, the red dye is obtained from lac – an Indian insect – at a time when master weavers in Turkey and Iran were using entirely different pigments.

That leaves only the carpets’ designs as a guide. And these are consistent with other artworks created under the Mamluks. That makes many experts conclude that the carpets must have been woven in Cairo under the close supervision of the Mamluk court.

As to who the Mamluks were, their story is no less extraordinary. Although they ruled Egypt and Syria, they originally came to the Mideast as slave-solders from Central Asia and the Caucasus. Arab rulers purchased or recruited them as youths from Turkic, Mongol, and Circassian tribes in Central Asia and trained them as elite palace troops.

But the Mamluks revolted and seized power for themselves. And still more surprisingly -- despite a warrior ethos so competitive that, on the average, the Mamluks killed or removed their own leaders every five years – they were huge patrons of art.

When the Mamluk empire fell to the Ottomons in 1517, their distinctive carpets disappeared with them. Today, only one remains in Cairo and the rest of the some 100 or so pieces that survive are the prizes of a handful of top world museums. The images above are of a rug in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Museums rarely display their centuries-old Mamluks for fear they will be damaged by too much exposure to light. But when the rugs are shown, they always amaze viewers -- just as their designers intended.

The Mamluk’s complex Arabesque patterns evoke the harmony and infinity of the divine. Astonishingly, they do so with patterns that appear both perfectly mathematical and perfectly mystical at the same time. And the carpets literally shimmer before the eyes, making a them appear as much like a vision of a rug as a reality.

Small surprise, then, that some carpet producers today are interested in trying to recreate the Mamluks in whole or part.

Woven Legends, a Philadephia-based company, has for several years worked with Turkish weavers to try to duplicate some of the Mamluk Rugs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The results – Woven Legends’ ‘Sardis’ line (right) – have won critical acclaim. The retail price is $ 968 per square meter and the rugs come in a variety of sizes and patterns.

The original Mamluk weavers not only produced the complex geometric medallion carpets they are most famous for but also full-field rugs as well.

The full-field designs are best exemplified by the so-called para-mamluks produced in Damascus. The rugs are often referred to ‘chessboard’ carpets in Europe and are highly coveted collectors’ items.

This one (left) is from the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C.

Today, the chessboard designs, too, are inspiring some carpet producers to explore new possibilities.

This rug produced by Afghan weavers in Pakistan, who have become among the most innovative designers for the popular market today.

Simply called 'Mamluk' (right), it is offered by Nomad Rugs of San Francisco, has an Arabesque field with cartouche borders – both staples of Mamluk design.

At a price of $ 488 per square meter, it can only hint at the charms of more complex Arabesque patterns.

But that may be just where many first-time rug buyers would want to begin.

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Related Links:

Jewelled Carpets : Treasures of the Mamluk Empire, by Elisabeth Greenberg

Mamluk Carpets - Legacy of the Conquering Nomads, by Roy Chatalbash

Art of the Mamluks – Saudi Aramco World, Nov/Dec 1981

History of Mamluks – The Battle of ‘Ain Jalut

The Jazz Age: Gowns, Tuxedos, And Chinese Art Deco Carpets

2008-05-17T07:47:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON, May 30, 2008 -- One of the most elegant times in America was the Jazz Age of the 1920s and 30s. It was a time when, after the horrors of World War I, there was a taste for extravagant clothes and debonair film stars. Long silk gowns, men in 'smoking' attire and, on living room and bedroom floors, not antique Turkish and Persian carpets but – surprisingly – newly made Chinese ones.

Why Chinese? The answer is the strange story of the “Chinese Art Deco” rugs. They were carpets that perfectly fit the spirit of their time and today still evoke that time and no other. But they came about almost by accident.

One of those accidents was the fact that World War I badly disrupted the usual Mideastern trade links for luxury carpets from Turkey and Iran. Another was that people wanted a break from the past in the design of virtually everything, from buildings to furniture to fabrics.

These opportunities were recognized by American entrepreneurs working in Tianjin, China. The port city, south of Beijing, was a major center in the international wool trade and until the 1900s had no history of rug manufacturing. But the expatriate U.S. traders soon turned it into one of China’s biggest weaving areas as they filled the vacuum in the American market, first with traditional Chinese carpets and then with more and more Western-looking variations of the originals.

The most successful design that emerged was something that perfectly fit the Art Deco style of the day. The carpets so complimented what was going on in the West that they became known as Chinese Art Deco even though there was no Art Deco movement in China itself.

One American entrepreneur’s name in particular is associated with the rugs: Walter Nichols. He produced so many of them in Tianjin that Chinese Art Deco rugs are also known generically as ‘Nichols’ rugs. But it has long been debated whether he and other American producers actually designed the carpets or whether the Chinese artists which they employed did so.

Elizabeth Bogen, one of the few rug scholars who has studied Tianjin rugs closely, believes it was the Chinese artists. She finds her evidence in the fact that while the rugs were made for the American market – where Art Deco was characterized by industrial-looking, streamlined forms – great numbers of the Chinese weavings are effusively curvilinear and floral. And those curvilinear patterns seem much less inspired by what was happening in America than by the more naturalist-looking Art Deco tradition in France, half-a-world away.

So how to explain the contradiction in styles? Bogen observes that by the 1920s there were Chinese students who had studied art in many major art schools in Japan and Europe and were familiar with international trends. In Paris, particularly, they found Western art was being heavily influenced by “Japonisme,” or a fascination with Japan’s styles. If these students later became artists for the Chinese Art Deco rugs, it might explain what Bogen calls the rugs’ “exuberant experimentation with Chinese, Japanese, and European design styles and pallets.”

Bogen made these suggestions in her article “What the Wool Trade Wrought,” which appeared in the September-October 2001 issue of Hali Magazine.

The design origins of the Chinese Art Deco rugs may never be fully known. But the whole story leads to some interesting speculation about how Eastern designs get modified for Western tastes and whether the results are in fact Eastern or Western creations.

Bogen argues that the Tianjin rugs were not just the result of an interplay of market forces but also of “contemporary currents in Western art – currents that in turn were heavily influenced by exposure to the arts of Japan and China.”

Put in other words, this is a reminder that the greatest tradition in art, even in the most traditional arts, is to freely borrow ideas across borders. To try to classify art – and particularly the contemporary art of any period – as belonging to one region or another is to miss the excitement of how art reflects a universal human experience as much as it does a local one.

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Elizabeth Bogen:

Elizabeth Bogen: What The Wool Trade Wrought

Elizabeth Bogen: "In Search of Walter Nichols"

Chinese Art Deco Rug Galleries:

Absolute Rugs

Cyber Rugs

SpongoBongo

Art Deco:

Art Deco Society of Washington, D.C.

ArtLex Visual Dictionary

The Orient

2008-05-14T12:53:00.001-07:00

(Fiction - By Karel Capek, 1923)

The well-known Czech journalist Karel Capek wrote about buying oriental carpets in Prague at the beginning of the last century. In his short tale 'The Orient,' he describes Old Europe's fascinating world of carpet connoisseurs and carpet sellers – both honest and not so honest.

It can happen that you win the lottery, or that you get married, or that one day it simply strikes you that you want something beautiful at home; whatever the reason, you decide to buy a Persian carpet. But in the process of actually purchasing an oriental rug, your life is going to turn upside down. First of all, you will have to smoke -- a lot -- because smoking is part of the oriental atmosphere. Second, you will have to walk all over mountains of valuable carpets with the air of one who has never set foot upon anything else. You will have to assume the look of a connoisseur, fingering the pile and the back of each rug as you mumble to yourself. There will be a whole array of initiation ceremonies, from special Persian jargon to passionate Turkish haggling, until finally you reduce a carpet seller to tears as he says he feels so close to you that he is ready to give you his rugs almost for free, even at a loss, and simply as a present between equals. There will be, I say, an entire string of extraordinary things but still you will have only reached the threshold of the Orient. And then, thinking you have finished, you will safely choose a modestly priced Kazak and race home with rosy visions of how it will look beside of your bed. In so many ways, a first carpet is like first love.

The next day, someone will ring your doorbell. It is a polite, lively little fellow pushing another, silent, man in front of him. Immediately, he blurts out in the doorway that he is coming to you because you are an exceptional and extraordinary connoisseur of Persian carpets and that he has brought his business partner with him who just arrived yesterday from uh, well uh ... Constantinople ... with some carpets that, truly!, are just for specialists, and he has brought them first to you so that you can just look, nothing more than look, at them, just for the pleasure of it. And already he is opening the door again and shouting, “Vaclav! Come here!” And in comes a delivery boy with a huge pile of carpets on his back. The man from Constantinople really does have a kind of Persian air but he never says anything, and the active little man starts laying out the first carpet with Vaclav. “Now, this is a fine piece, isn’t it? This one is worthy of you ...” You mention it isn’t quite the kind of thing you are looking for. “That’s just what I thought myself!” the vivacious little fellow shouts victoriously. “You, sir, are a marvelous connoisseur; but here I have a Shiraz which is truly perfect for you, only a real specialist can appreciate it!”

This Shiraz seems horrendously pricy and now your lively guest is whispering something to the silent oriental man in a language that might be Persian or might be Turkish. “Also meinetwegen,” the Persian mutters in German, or “fair enough,” and the lively man announces that his friend is giving you the Shiraz simply as a present, almost completely free, because you are you, and just for 40,000 crowns. You fight off the temptation, you will neither accept as a gift a Shirvan, nor a Gendje, nor a Bukhara, nor even a Baluch, not to mention a Kerman and a Senneh and all sorts of prayer carpets; this time you defend yourself against everything, until this obliging fellow asserts that you have truly prodigious taste and that the really valuable rugs he has are still tied up in customs and if you could see those, well, you would cry with joy. Then, he leads out the Persian and Mr. Vaclav, promising to come back later.

So far, so good. But three hours later, a man in a top hat rings your bell. He hands you his visit card and introduces himself as Mr. So and So, an industrialist who is in momentary financial difficulty. He has decided to sell his private rug collection and ... already he is calling down the corridor “Vaclav! Komm hier! ... and Mr. Vaclav is bringing in a new load of carpets on his shoulders. The man in the top hat discreetly speaks of family problems, saying he has to sell at any cost, even way below market price, but only to a real judge, to a true authority, who knows how much a beautiful carpet means. For example, this authentic Hamadan, the man in the top hat breathes, or this fabulous Mosul. To your surprise, each piece in his family collection seems to still have its inventory tag and its customs seal.

You escape from the heavy-hearted monsieur. A day later, a thin man appears who wants to speak to you very privately about things that are “just for four eyes.” Then he tells you that he has … that he has Persian Carpets ... perfect museum pieces ... that he has obtained under rather special circumstances that, well, to be honest, that he personally spirited out of a Sultan’s seraglio, only please don’t speak about it. In short, they are one-of-a-kind pieces for connoisseurs only and staggeringly underpriced. And already Mr. Vaclav is back with a cargo of rugs on his back and on all of them, too, are customs seals and inventory numbers, And, if you don’t make use of this exceptional purchasing opportunity, then there is no reason to worry, because tomorrow a Russian couple will come to you, from a noble family which has had to flee the country and which escaped with nothing but some rare Persian carpets and now, out of the most dire necessity must part with them. Mr. Vaclav is already waiting in the corridor. And, afterwards, you will get a visit from a resplendent Levantine who does a little business with carpets here and there and the other day came across some pieces that he has not shown to anybody, that are only for true enthusiasts. And after him will come a juvenile delinquent who won’t have Mr. Vaclav with him but who knows of a superb Persian carpet that could be sold to a discreet and well informed collector. And then there still will be the solicitor from Vienna, the widow in need, and the Greek who has no money to pay customs and so has to sell at least one precious Persian carpet -- far below its price, of course, and only to an initiate.

In short, if you keep your eyes and ears open, in a little over a week you will learn how to evaluate the weave, material, age, color quality, and finesse of the design of an oriental carpet. You will meet rogues, cognoscenti, eccentrics, entrepreneurs, and small-time crooks; you will make a kind of pilgrimage to the Orient and, doing so, you will discover a strange, wily, ancient, modern form of business that you will never encounter any other way and that is well worth your investment.

(‘The Orient’ was published in the newspaper 'Lidove Noviny' in 1923; Photo of carpet is courtesy of Ali Majdfar/Persian Carpet Museum Photo Gallery.)

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Related Links:

Karel Capek

Barry O'Connell: Notes on Oriental Carpets and Persian Rugs

Morocco's Berber Tribal Rugs Offer A Different View Of Oriental Carpets

2008-05-11T01:20:00.000-07:00

RABAT, May 23, 2008 -- When people think of oriental carpets, Morocco is not the first place that comes to mind.

But the Berbers, whose nomadic ancestors settled this land around 2000 BC, have an ancient tradition of tribal weaving that is both similar to and distinct from other Middle Eastern rugs and carpets.

The Berbers still make up some 40 percent of Morocco's population -- the rest are Arabs and Moors -- and their stronghold is the Middle Atlas mountains. The peaks rise up as a tall, temperate barrier between coastal Morocco and the vast Sahara desert. On the slopes, which are often better suited to grazing sheep than to farming, about a fifth of the tribes still weave pile carpets and flatweaves in styles that bear their names.

The rugs tend to be large, long, and loosely woven with bright, earthy colors including lots of oranges, yellows, and browns. They have simple geometric designs. But their simplicity is deceiving.

The motifs, often based on diamond shapes, change size and sometimes orientation. And the symmetry is deliberately never perfect.

The result is something that not only looks sui-generis. Often, it feels that way, too. That is because many of the Atlas pile weavings are unusually soft and flexible. They call to mind blankets a much as they do carpets – a light quality which makes them practical for mountain life.

Ancient Berber beliefs, which survive alongside Islam, also find their way into the rugs. Some tribes will burn the frings of their carpets to make them less attractive to the demon of envy. It is part of their belief the duality of life and their desire to invoke positive power, or Baraka, to ward off evil.

Baraka is thought to exist to some degree in all things and artists try to transfer it to their creations through a whole vocabulary of symbols and techniques to protect themselves, their work, and the consumer.

The best place to buy the tribal pieces is from the tribes themselves. But as Western interest in weavings from the Atlas Mountains has grown since the 1970s – and the renewal of curiosity about tribal art worldwide – the rugs also have become a staple of the shops in Rabat, Marrakesh, and Fez.

In these cities at the foot of the mountains, some workshops have even begun producing Berber-type designs. The workshop products tend to be heavier and hold to the floor better than the tribal pieces as they aim directly for the Western interior design market.

Interestingly, Morocco has a long-standing workshop tradition – but not for Berber carpets. Instead, the tradition is for Turkish designs and it dates back to northern Morocco’s long period under the Ottoman Empire from the 16th to late 19th century. The style was loosely modeled on the famous Anatolians from Gordes and Ladik, among other Turkish weaving centers.

These ‘city rugs’ from Rabat and Casablanca do not enjoy much critical acclaim. They are often described as coarsely woven imitations in bold colors that are not likely to please fans of the Turkish originals. But some of the designs offer unusual local twists and they are a historical curiosity.

Older pieces are likely to include cochineal reds from the days when, beginning in the late 18th century, was one of the main centers outside of Central America for farm-raising insects for dye. Now, such rugs are one-of-a-kind because chemical dyes have long since replaced insect dyes and other natural dyes in all Moroccan weaving.

These days, Moroccan city carpets are moving from Turkish designs to Persian-like medallion patterns in a new bid to compete in the world market.

But the strength of the country’s weaving remains, as ever, in its Berber traditions. If the Berber weavers return to natural colors, just as village and tribal weavers are now doing in many other parts of the world, Morocco’s tribal pieces could well gain the greater notice they deserve.

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Related Links

Brooke Pickering Moroccan Rugs

Nazmiyal Collection: Antique Moroccan Rugs

I Love Marrakesh: Ethno Art Gallery

Turkotek: Discussion of Moroccan Weavings

YouTube: My Favorite Rugs Come From Boujad, Morocco

Euratlas: Pictures of Morocco

From Table To Wall To Floor: Oriental Rugs Keep Moving Around European Homes

2008-05-07T12:16:00.001-07:00

PRAGUE, May 16, 2008 -- Oriental carpets are the great nomads of European homes

Over the centuries, few furnishings have moved around as much as they have. Rugs have been put on tables, hung on walls, stretched over sofas, displayed on floors and, finally, tucked under the furniture.

In the process, they have helped express the social values of their owners – from medieval merchants looking for status symbols to modern families looking for creature comforts.

All that makes the history of rugs in Western homes a fascinating study.

Rug experts date the first imports of oriental carpets into Europe to around 1200 – the time of the fourth Crusade – or earlier. The knights leading the crusades were keen observers of Eastern court life and eager to acquire the trappings for themselves.

By 1300, Europe’s court painters began to show some of these acquisitions in their artworks and by 1450 the depictions are so highly detailed they can be cataloged. The carpets – then all from Anatolia with geometric motifs – appeared in many paintings with Christian religious themes and were usually placed at the feet of the Virgin Mary or on the steps of alters. One example is Alessio Baldovinetti’s Madonna and Child with Saints, circa 1454.

Giving the carpets such a place of honor in religious paintings may have been a reflection of the awe the oriental rugs inspired in the European public. And it may show how easily the Eastern textiles found a place within Europe’s own tradition of using luxurious tapestries as symbols of power and prestige.

Through the 1400s, carpets began to become sufficiently available to rich Europeans to also appear in portraits of the nobility and wealthy merchants. By 1450, paintings of festivals in cities like Venice and Florence show wealthy merchant families draping their rugs out their windows for all to see.

The public displays seem intended to emphasize the wealth of the merchant families and their growing social status as Europe moved into the Renaissance. And the rugs from distant lands seem a perfect symbol of the cosmopolitan mood that accompanied Europe’s emergence from centuries of feudalism.

By 1550, Persian carpets began to be imported into Europe along with Anatolians. The Persian designs, with their richly curvilinear designs, equally became part of portraits of the rich and powerful – only now the oriental carpets were displayed most frequently on top of tables.

At times, the tables included conference tables, as in a famous portrait of British and Spanish officials concluding a treaty in 1604 over an Anatolian. This painting is The Somerset House Conference, by Juan Pantoja de la Cruz.

Carpets continued to be draped over furniture in European houses through the 1600s and 1700s, but by 1800s they were on the move again.

During the 1800s, the accelerating industrial age made many Europeans and Americans wealthier and they began acquiring the luxury goods of the rich, including oriental carpets. The new owners experimented with putting rugs of many different sizes in many different places in their homes.

The first half of the century saw carpets move onto the walls and, in small formats, onto the floor. They were status symbols to be displayed and, when they were on the floor, other furniture was pushed back to give them pride of place. Different designs became associated with particular rooms. A lady’s boudoir would have a bright and floral Persian rug. A man’s study or smoking room would more likely have a red-and-black Turkmen.

But by the second half of the 1800s, the trend was toward big format carpets covering more and more of a room. As a result, carpets began to go under furniture. Compared to the earlier taste for putting carpets on top of tables, this was history stood on its head. Yet the practice, and the sense that a carpet – or carpeting – adds comfort to a room but need not be considered as artwork continues today.

Could carpets one day come off the floor again? If they do, there are two directions in which they might go.

One direction is suggested by Europe’s periodic taste for draping colorful carpets over sofas. The famous Austrian psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, raised his couch to iconic status partly by covering it with a beautiful nomadic Qashqai rug. He maintained that the mysterious motifs in the carpet helped his patient relax and wander back into their memories more easily.

At times, carpets even have become the upholstery of the furniture itself. Jon Thompson writes in his 1983 textbook 'Oriental Carpets' of a fad in the 1870s and 1880s for cutting up tribal carpets to use them as the covering fabric for armchairs. He credits the destructive practice with saving at least parts of some valuable rugs that might otherwise have been worn out by use on the floor. The fad inspired one German businessman, Carl Wilhelm Koch, to machine-weave furniture fabrics in Turkmen and Qashqai designs.

The other direction is for carpets to go back onto the walls, the usual place for artwork. They have often been there before. The 19th century craze for prayer rugs from across the Islamic world made many homes look like museums. And still today, a small silk rug of almost any design is more likely to be hung than walked upon.

The future is never possible to predict. But it is interesting to think that putting an oriental carpet on the floor – so automatic today– is historically a recent trend in Western interior design. And if history is a guide, it may only be a step on the way to something else.

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Related Links

Oriental carpets in Italian Renaissance paintings: art objects and status symbols

Turkish Rugs In European Paintings

Kilim Sofas

Oriental Carpets Return To Natural Dyes But Fabled Insect Reds Remain Forgotten

2008-04-29T11:30:00.000-07:00

CHAHARMAHAL District, Iran; May 2, 2008 – When Iranian photographer Javid Tafazoli was walking through a weaving village in the mountains of Chaharmahal va Bakhtiyari province, far to the west of Isfahan, he saw an arresting sight.

It was a cascade of recently dyed red wool hanging from a tree. In a world grown used to dazzling garish colors, the mellow brick-red shades looked like a startlingly natural part of the landscape. He snapped the picture and entitled it simply “Red.”

The same picture could be taken in many villages in Iran today, where weavers are increasingly returning to using natural dyes. They hope that going back to traditional materials will raise the quality of rugs and the value people put on them.

But if there is a new desire to derive red from age-old sources such as the root of the Red Madder plant, which gives brick-red hues ranging from pink to rose to scarlet, another ancient groups of reds seems certain not to return. They are the once famous insect reds.

For centuries, dyers dried and powdered insects to produce colors ranging from pink-lilac through bright crimson to deep-brown-purple. In many areas where the dyes could not be produced locally, they were prized imports.

The first insect dye to be traded in large commercial quantities was Indian lac, derived from the Caccus lacca bug. The insect, which feeds on ficus trees in India, was also a source for lacquer and shellac used on furniture.

The fame of Indian lac grew so great that it was exported over huge distances. In their authoritative book ‘Oriental Carpets,’ Murray L. Eiland and Murray Eiland III say the dyes have been detected in Safavid and Ottoman court carpets as well as on 19th century Turkmen rugs. That is despite the fact that madder was the standard and abundant source for red from Turkey to Central Asia region.

Later, lac gave way to still higher quality reds obtained from the Indian’s bug’s distant cousin, the South American cochineal. The cochineal reds -- traded in the Aztec and Mayan empires and still used in Mexico and Peru (below) -- were discovered by Spanish conquistadors in 1519.

The Europeans considered cochineal to be a perfect red dye because it is stable, easily absorbed by fabrics, and extremely resistant to fading.

The brilliant red comes from the carminic acid in the body of the female cochineal larva, which also makes the bug unpalatable to predators. The Spanish bred the bugs for size and color and created huge ranches of cactus – the bugs’ favorite home. To produce a kilogram of the dye required some 155,000 dried insects and, by 1770, at the peak of the trade, Mexico was exporting some half a million kilos a year.

The global business in cochineal dyes is documented in the 2005 book ‘A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire’ by Amy Butler Greenfield.

Eventually, the Spanish expanded cultivation of the bugs to the Canary Islands and North Africa. But the lucrative business finally came to an end with the invention of chemical dyes in northern Europe in the mid 19th century. Within decades, cochineal red, along with madder, virtually disappeared from use under a tide of synthetic replacements.

Now, in a world saturated with artificial colors, natural dyes are slowly making a comeback. But, in a strange twist for the carpet industry, the once so abundant and highly sought cochineal dyes remain forgotten. The reason is economics.

After they were swept from the textile industry by synthetic dyes, cochineal reds – also known as carmine – found a new and more profitable place in the cosmetics and food coloring industries. Today carmine is a high-priced specialty dye that puts the red in red pistachio nuts, maraschino cherries and Italian aperitifs. Its advantage over man-made red dyes is that it is not toxic or carcinogenic.

That means that making a rug with cochineal dyes today would cost a fortune. The giant cactus farms in Mexico may still exist and the dyes may still be exported, but carpets with insect reds belong to the past.

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Related Links:

Wikipedia: Cochineal

A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire, by Amy Butler Greenfield.

Book: The Red Dyes: Cochineal, Madder And Murex Purple: A World Tour of Textile Dying by Gosta Sandberg

2008-04-23T07:28:00.003-07:00

BISHKEK, April 25, 2008 – When one imagines the vast steppes of Central Asia Felt, yurts and felt carpets come quickly to mind.

It is from sheets of plain white felt that yurts are built, and it is with colorfully patterned felt that they are decorated inside. The result is a warm and cheerful shelter that served Central Asia’s nomads well for thousands of years.

So, it can be a little disappointing for felt enthusiasts to arrive in modern Bishkek and hardly find a yurt, or even a felt, in sight.

In Kyrgyzstan’s capital city -- population about one million -- yurts today are only set up in the garden of someone’s home when a family member dies. The lady of the house faces the tent wall and the mourners come to sit behind her and sing a dirge. She finally turns to face them when they come to touch her shoulders and comfort her.

Even in the marketplaces it is hard to find felt. The carpets for sale are machine-made ones of the kind available anywhere in the world.

Janyl Chytyrbaeva, a Kyrgyz journalist, explains why. “Everyone wants a house like you see on TV,” she says. The machine-made carpets are given as gifts at weddings and funerals and most people’s apartments and houses are covered with them.

Does this mean that felt has disappeared from Kyrgyz life? No. But like so many traditional handicrafts elsewhere, it is endangered and its only protectors are poor people and artists.

Chytyrbaeva, who is herself a great admirer of felt, says the only place to find it in use in Bishkek is where the poorest migrants from the countryside have settled on the outskirts of the city. There, they cover the floors with plain felt mats or with patterned Shyrdaks (Shirdaks, Shurdoks), which are carpets made by sewing together felt of different colors.

Both kinds of felt carpet make warm flooring in a country where the winters are bitterly cold. For additional warmth, laborers’ families will also put sheepskins here and there on top of the felt. Sometimes, the sheepskins are themselves made as kind of shyrdaks by stitching together variously dyed pieces.

Still, if these furnishings seem humble, the ancient felt-working tradition of Kyrgyzstan itself is rich. Skilled felt-makers can produce pieces of effortless sophistication and great art just as readily as ordinary villagers make plain felt floor mats.

Highly complicated Shyrdaks are created by cutting the same design into several sheets of brightly colored felt and then switching and refitting the pieces together like jig-saw puzzles.

The flowing and harmonious patterns, filled with symbolism, complement the unstructured texture of the felt. With additional techniques, including appliqué, more detailed designs become possible.

Kyrgyz felts are gradually gaining a place in the Western market, yet they still remain little known compared to the other great textiles of Central Asia: the red pile rugs of Turkmenistan or the Suzanni embroideries of Uzbekistan.

A handful of rug importers are scouring the Kyrgyz countryside for artisans but many more Western businesses seem content with just importing Kyrgyz-made felt slippers and hats or, more recently, stuffed toy animals.

That seems modest for a nomadic culture that in many ways was unique. The Kyrgyz, who live in a mountainous country, migrated up and down their slopes with the seasons while most of their steppe neighbors wandered widely across the plains.

Today, they can date their presence in the mountains to thousands of years ago and have many traditions all their own. That includes the design of the national flag. It is the only one in the world that has at its center a stylized representation of the roof of a traditional yurt.

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Related Links

FeltRugs Company, Britain
http://www.feltrugs.co.uk/

Shirdak Silkroad Textile Company, Netherlands
http://www.shirdak.nl/

Kyrgyzstyle Company, Kyrgyzstan
http://www.kyrgyzstyle.kg/production/shirdaks/index.htm

Photos of Kyrgyzstan: Jonathan Barth
http://www.barthphoto.com/Kyrgyzstan.htm

YouTube: How Nomads Make Felt (Mongolia)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ0uojUHYdA

keywords: Shyrdaks, Shirdaks, Shurdoks, central asian felt carpets, Kyrgyzstan, nomads, oriental carpet design and production, Bishkek, steppes, central asian rugs, central asian carpets, felt carpets, felt rugs

2008-04-23T07:28:00.001-07:00

Central Asian Felt Carpets Search For Their Place In The Modern World

2008-04-23T06:44:00.000-07:00

BISHKEK, April 25, 2008 – When one imagines the vast steppes of Central Asia Felt, yurts and felt carpets come quickly to mind.

It is from sheets of plain white felt that yurts are built, and it is with colorfully patterned felt that they are decorated inside. The result is a warm and cheerful shelter that served Central Asia’s nomads well for thousands of years.

So, it can be a little disappointing for felt enthusiasts to arrive in modern Bishkek and hardly find a yurt, or even a felt, in sight.

In Kyrgyzstan’s capital city -- population about one million -- yurts today are only set up in the garden of someone’s home when a family member dies. The lady of the house faces the tent wall and the mourners come to sit behind her and sing a dirge. She finally turns to face them when they come to touch her shoulders and comfort her.

Even in the marketplaces it is hard to find felt. The carpets for sale are machine-made ones of the kind available anywhere in the world.

Janyl Chytyrbaeva, a Kyrgyz journalist, explains why. “Everyone wants a house like you see on TV,” she says. The machine-made carpets are given as gifts at weddings and funerals and most people’s apartments and houses are covered with them.

Does this mean that felt has disappeared from Kyrgyz life? No. But like so many traditional handicrafts elsewhere, it is endangered and its only protectors are poor people and artists.

Chytyrbaeva, who is herself a great admirer of felt, says the only place to find it in use in Bishkek is where the poorest migrants from the countryside have settled on the outskirts of the city. There, they cover the floors with plain felt mats or with patterned Shyrdaks (Shirdaks, Shurdoks), which are carpets made by sewing together felt of different colors.

Both kinds of felt carpet make warm flooring in a country where the winters are bitterly cold. For additional warmth, laborers’ families will also put sheepskins here and there on top of the felt. Sometimes, the sheepskins are themselves made as kind of shyrdaks by stitching together variously dyed pieces.

Still, if these furnishings seem humble, the ancient felt-working tradition of Kyrgyzstan itself is rich. Skilled felt-makers can produce pieces of effortless sophistication and great art just as readily as ordinary villagers make plain felt floor mats.

Highly complicated Shyrdaks are created by cutting the same design into several sheets of brightly colored felt and then switching and refitting the pieces together like jig-saw puzzles.

The flowing and harmonious patterns, filled with symbolism, complement the unstructured texture of the felt. With additional techniques, including appliqué, more detailed designs become possible.

Kyrgyz felts are gradually gaining a place in the Western market, yet they still remain little known compared to the other great textiles of Central Asia: the red pile rugs of Turkmenistan or the Suzanni embroideries of Uzbekistan.

A handful of rug importers are scouring the Kyrgyz countryside for artisans but many more Western businesses seem content with just importing Kyrgyz-made felt slippers and hats or, more recently, stuffed toy animals.

That seems modest for a nomadic culture that in many ways was unique. The Kyrgyz, who live in a mountainous country, migrated up and down their slopes with the seasons while most of their steppe neighbors wandered widely across the plains.

Today, they can date their presence in the mountains to thousands of years ago and have many traditions all their own. That includes the design of the national flag. It is the only one in the world that has at its center a stylized representation of the roof of a traditional yurt.

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Related Links

FeltRugs Company, Britain
http://www.feltrugs.co.uk/

Shirdak Silkroad Textile Company, Netherlands
http://www.shirdak.nl/

Kyrgyzstyle Company, Kyrgyzstan
http://www.kyrgyzstyle.kg/production/shirdaks/index.htm

Photos of Kyrgyzstan: Jonathan Barth
http://www.barthphoto.com/Kyrgyzstan.htm

YouTube: How Nomads Make Felt (Mongolia)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ0uojUHYdA

keywords: Shyrdaks, Shirdaks, Shurdoks, central asian felt carpets, Kyrgyzstan, nomads, oriental carpet design and production, Bishkek, steppes, central asian rugs, central asian carpets, felt carpets, felt rugs

Central Asian Felt Carpets Search For Room In The Modern World

2008-04-22T10:59:00.000-07:00

use faces the tent wall and the mourners come to sit behind her and sing a dirge. She finally turns to face them when they come to touch her shoulders and comfort her.

Even in the marketplaces it is hard to find felt. The carpets for sale are machine-made ones of the kind available anywhere in the world.

Janyl Chytyrbaeva, a Kyrgyz journalist, explains why. “Everyone wants a house like you see on TV,” she says. The machine-made carpets are given as gifts at weddings and funerals and most people’s apartments and houses are covered with them.

Does this mean that felt has disappeared from Kyrgyz life? No. But like so many traditional handicrafts elsewhere, it is endangered and its only protectors are poor people and artists.

Chytyrbaeva, who is herself a great admirer of felt, says the only place to find it in use in Bishkek is where the poorest migrants from the countryside have settled on the outskirts of the city. There, they cover the floors with plain felt mats or with patterned “Shyrdaks” (Shirdaks, Shurdaks), which are carpets made by sewing together felt of different colors.

Both kinds of felt carpet make warm flooring in a country where the winters are bitterly cold. For additional warmth, laborers’ families will also put sheepskins here and there on top of the felt. Sometimes, the sheepskins are themselves made as kind of shyrdaks by stitching together variously dyed pieces.

Still, if these furnishings seem humble, the ancient felt-working tradition of Kyrgyzstan itself is rich. Skilled felt-makers can produce pieces of effortless sophistication and great art just as readily as ordinary villagers make plain felt floor mats.

Highly complicated Shyrdaks are created by cutting the same design into several sheets of brightly colored felt and then switching and refitting the pieces together like jig-saw puzzles. The flowing and harmonious patterns, filled with symbolism, complement the unstructured texture of the felt. With additional techniques, including appliqué, more detailed designs become possible.

Kyrgyz felts are gradually gaining a place in the Western market, yet they still remain little known compared to the other great textiles of Central Asia: the red pile rugs of Turkmenistan or the Suzanni embroideries of Uzbekistan.

A handful of rug importers are scouring the Kyrgyz countryside for artisans but many more Western businesses seem content with just importing Kyrgyz-made felt slippers and hats or, more recently, stuffed toy animals.

That seems modest recognition for a nomadic culture that in many ways was unique. The Kyrgyz, who live in a mountainous country, migrated up and down their slopes with the seasons while most of their steppe neighbors wandered widely across the plains.

Today, they can still date their presence in the mountains to the very beginnings of Turkic history. Many other Central Asian cultures came and went as the great empires of the steppes rose and fell. But the traditions of the Kyrgyz remained largely their own.

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Related Links

FeltRugs Company, Britain
http://www.feltrugs.co.uk/

Shirdak Silkroad Textile Company, Netherlands
http://www.shirdak.nl/

Kyrgyzstyle Company, Kyrgyzstan
http://www.kyrgyzstyle.kg/production/shirdaks/index.htm

Photos of Kyrgyzstan: Jonathan Barth
http://www.barthphoto.com/Kyrgyzstan.htm

YouTube: How Nomads Make Felt (Mongolia)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ0uojUHYdA

2008-04-21T00:58:00.000-07:00