TEA AND CARPETS

Bad Goods: How Counterfeiters Weave Antique Rugs From Scratch

2011-12-31T04:07:00.001-08:00

Fakes of antique carpets are nothing new in the rug business. But today's versions are technically so good that they can fool even top rug experts and sell for big money. How do the counterfeiters do it? Textile researcher and traveler Vedat Karadag has been looking into the question for 15 years from his home base in Istanbul and shares this information.

ISTANBUL, January 11, 2012 -- Counterfeits of old Turkish carpets began to appear in the marketplace in the first half of the 20th century. At that time, they were usually aimed at tourists or amateur rug collectors and were easy enough for experts to detect.

But in recent years a new, technically sophisticated production of fakes has arisen in Turkey, Iran, and the Caucasus that is so good that the new rugs pose a real danger to the antique market.

The new techniques began to develop in the 1980s, when there was a renaissance of rug repair in Turkey and restorers became very skillful in matching colors and wool quality as they repaired old rugs.

In order to match the colors and feel of old wool during a restoration, they moved pile knots from one part of a rug to another or even borrowed the knots from an entirely different old rug if it had an adequately long pile.

However, rugs were not just restored this way. They were also sometimes upgraded and made to look older than the evidence their original dyes presented.

If there was a limited amount of synthetic color in a rug, it could be completely replaced with natural colors. Once the offending colors were gone, the rug could be marketed as older and sold for more money.

In these pictures of restored rugs, we see both chemical color replacement and antique restoration.

Here the restorers have taken out chemical dyed orange color knots.

And here the chemical orange dyed knots have been replaced with natural dyed antique madder color knots.

It wasn't long before the high prices that these restored and upgraded rugs brought in the marketplace inspired some restorers to explore methods that would allow them to weave “old” rugs from scratch.

However, there were some technical problems to overcome.

The primary one is that old rugs have a different look and they feel different than new rugs made from new wool. Over time, exposure to light and air softens a rug's colors, increases the shininess of the wool, and opens up the wool fiber so that an old rug has the appearance and feel of age and use.

To obtain old wool for new "antiques", restorers turned to old kilims from Anatolia, Iran, and the Caucasus. These were pieces that were relatively inexpensive, either because they were damaged, or had very plain designs, or were originally un-dyed.

Unraveling these kilims gives a good yield of yarns in a variety of colors. So much so, that the price of these types of kilims actually began to rise with the increased demand for them from restorers.

Here are the unraveled yarns from old fragments.

But there is a problem with getting wool from old kilims. The yarn is crimped from being squeezed for years between warp strings and has to be made to relax enough to use it again in knotting a new rug.

Here is a close-up of the crimped yarn that comes from a vegetable dyed kilim.

Nevertheless, rug restorers always find a way to solve a problem. To relax the wool, they hit upon the idea of boiling it in a cauldron of hot water. The result is that the wool softens and loses its twist.

The softened yarns after the boiling and untwisting process.

Just as there is the question of where to get old wool for weaving an antique, so is there the question of where to get an old rug foundation on which to tie the new knots. The restorers solved that problem in another clever way: they took an old rug of little value and stripped it of its original knots until only the foundation remained.

Here is an Anatolian yastik that is of little vaule because of its washed-out chemical colors and not very exciting or well-executed design.

And here is the same rug with all of the knots picked out of the foundation.

We don’t know what happened to this foundation after all of the knots were picked out. But we can be sure that the new colors were vibrant and the design was well executed, to the best of the faker’s imagination.

Finally, there is the problem of making a newly woven pile look worn and aged.

Counterfeiters have found that rubbing the pile with a smooth pumice stone is much more convincing than clipping the blacks and browns with scissors. Whereas clipping leaves the wool with small, sharply cut ends, rubbing with pumice makes the ends of the fibers look naturally worn, even under examination with a magnifying glass.

The rubbing helps duplicate the effect seen in old carpets, where the ingredients in black and brown dyes have caused the wool to deteriorate faster than the wool dyed with other colors.

But there are other ways to do it, too:

Sheep shearers being used to make the pile lower in places -- also an effective method.

The pile can be burned with a strong flame and then rubbed and cut away to make different colors have slightly different pile heights. This is another technique to simulate natural wear and age.

Dust tumblers have been used for generations in Turkey to get the dust out of rugs before they are washed. If you tumble an old rug in there for a little while, the dust comes out. If you leave a new rug in there long enough, it becomes more pliable and the edges and ends get some wear, a little bit like an old rug.

The strong summer sun of Anatolia is another great tool for aging rugs. They are left in the sun for weeks at a time in order to soften the colors. Often a rooftop is used for maximum sun exposure.

Of course, a little light traffic on a rug is good, too, and heavier traffic is probably even better. Great spots with heavy traffic are a restaurant or even a sidewalk.

Heavier traffic and busier streets have a fast effect on aging process.

Once the counterfeiters work is done, all that is left to do is to admire their artistry. And, as these pictures show, the results can be stunning.

Here is a great looking, all finished fake of a late 19th century southwest Iranian Gabbeh rug.

This is a counterfeit 17th century Anatolian rug.

Here is a counterfeited fragment which can be sold as all that remains of an 18th century Anatolian prayer rug. It is placed beside a genuine 18th century Anatolian prayer rug for comparison.

And here is a very fine forgery of an antique flat-weave sumac with a Laila & Majnun design from the epic Islamic love poem of the same name.

The forgery is of this genuine antique Layla & Majnun piece, which is worn with true age.

Are there ways that true antique rug lovers can protect themselves from the forgers' ever increasing skills?

One of the best keys may be training ourselves to recognize the lanolin content in the wool fibres.

A sheep's natural wool is naturally coated in lanolin, a substance which prevents the wool fibers from locking together. The amount of lanolin in the wool diminishes as a rug ages over decades and centuries but it is not easy for forgers to reduce it artificially.

It is not that difficult to see the differences in the wool with a close up examination or by feeling the wool with your palm and the tips of your fingers.

Train your hands and palm by touching as many pieces as you possibly can. You will develop a feel for it. Study your own pieces with magnifiers. You will see how real wool fibers look with natural use.

Another good safeguard against forgeries is to trust your instincts and your taste.

Fakers often make aesthetic mistakes. They sometimes put fake repairs into the flat woven ends of rugs so that you will easily spot the fake repair but not realize that the whole rug is newly woven.

If you sense your eye is being deliberately distracted, there's a good chance it is.

Faking old rugs is not just an Anatolian phenomenon. Many other weaving areas have followed the Turkish lead. Convincing copies of old Gabbeh rugs come from Iran, as do fake Shahsevan flatweaves.

And just as the rug business is a cross-border industry, the counterfeiting business has become one, too.

Iranian dealers have employed Turkmen weavers in Afghanistan to copy anqique Turkmen pieces, while Anatolian traders have financed the faking of antique Caucasian rugs in the Caucasus and of Kaitag embroideries in Daghestan. Even, India is on the same path with their famous Muhgal and local design embroideries.

It is interesting to think that if the last century had its legendary Theodor Tuduc (1888 – 1983), the Romanian carpet forger whose work was so good it was collected by museums, this century may produce yet greater counterfeit artists. The sophistication of techniques available to forgers only keeps growing and with it so does the challenge of separating genuine antiques from look-alikes.

Vedat Karadag heads Cultural Travel, an Istanbul-based company specializing in custom-designed travel for small groups or individuals interested in exploring Anatolia or the Silk Road countries of Central Asia. Textiles are one of his many areas of interest and expertise.

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Turkmen Carpets: From Bukhara To The Black Desert

2011-12-17T05:07:00.000-08:00

BUKHARA, Dec. 17, 2011 – When the "red rugs of Central Asia" first arrived in Western Europe in the mid-to-late 1800s, nobody knew much about where they came from.

They trickled out through the Russian Empire and bore an exotic name: Bokhara carpets. But apart from the fact Bokhara (today Bukhara in Uzbekistan) was a legendary city on the Silk Road, the name gave no hints of the rugs' origins.

Another name commonly used in Victorian England for the carpets told even less: "Gentlemen's Carpets." They were called that because they particularly appealed to men as furnishings for dens and studies.

It took until our present day before people widely realized that the red rugs' only relation with Bukhara was that the city's bazaars were the collection point for sending them to Western markets. And that, in fact, the carpets were woven by a specific people that mostly live far away from Bukhara: the Turkmen.

The Turkmen who sent their carpets to the bazaar inhabit a vast expanse of arid land between the Amu Darya river and the Caspian Sea that mostly is made up of the Kara Kum Desert, or "Black Sand" Desert. Today, much of that land is the country of Turkmenistan, but there are also populations of Turkmen living across the borders of Iran and Afghanistan.

Traditionally, the Turkmen were both a nomadic and settled people, largely depending on how much water was available. They wove everything needed for a nomadic lifestyle but also wove many of the same items when residing in towns and villages.

Here is a picture of a nomadic Turkmen family posing on a carpet outside their felt yurt. It was taken by the Russian photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky in the early 1900s when Turkmenistan was part of the Russian Empire.

When the Turkmen arrived in the region is uncertain, but they were part of a vast migration of Turkic peoples who moved into the Caspian area, northern Iran and Anatolia around 1,000 AD. Their language belongs to the same family of languages – Oghuz Turk – as those spoken in Turkey, Azerbaijan, and by the Turkic tribes of Iran.

It is often said that to like Turkmen carpets, one must like the color red. And that is true. Early Turkmen carpets are all dyed in shades of red taken from the madder plant and the shades vary from brick-colored to a dark purple brown. Usually, the other color in the carpets is black.

But if this traditional color palette seems limited, the effects achieved are both striking and subtle. And part of the reason is that the colors heighten, rather than compete with, the carpets' decorative pattern of mysterious tribal "guls."

The guls, the Persian and Turkmen word for flower, are usually octagonal forms that are quartered and placed in rows. Often a large gul will alternate with a subsidiary one, as in this photo of guls in a main carpet woven by the Tekke tribe.

Here the main gul is a variation of a type of gul known as a "gulli (or gushly) gul." The capet is available from Knights Antiques in Britain.

The world of Turkmen carpets is a world of guls and guls themselves are part of the common artistic heritage of the Silk Roads. Historically, guls (known as "rosettes" is Western art history) are found in silk fabrics made by civilizations up and down the length of the road, from the Chinese to the Soghdians, to the Sassanians to the Byzantines.

But just what the Turkmen guls represent is not certain.

According to the Turkmen themselves, they symbolize birds or parts of birds. But the way some guls are used more than others by different Turkmen tribes has long created a debate among Western rug experts over whether they also serve as identifying totems for the tribes that weave them. Research is still needed to answer the question.

Often, Turkmen carpets include both large guls and subsidiary guls arranged in an endless repeat pattern. The arrangement creates an optical illusion in which the eye connects the large guls into one pattern of compartments and the small guls into another, so the two patterns appear to be overlying.

The "double-compartment" pattern is visible in this carpet woven by the Yomut tribe. The large guls are variation of a type of gul known as a "tauk nuska gul." The capet is available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

The double-compartment pattern may be another fascinating link between Turkmen carpets and the ancient Silk Road trading routes. The design, using various kinds of elements, has been found across the ancient world, from Chinese textiles to ceiling drawings in Egyptian tombs.

Today, Turkmen carpets are well known to rug collectors and the early generic names like "Bokhara" are less and less used. But finding a new way to name them has proved difficult because, unlike most rugs, they cannot be reliably named after specific geographical regions where they were woven.

Turkmen tribes were historically so mobile -- claiming and abandoning territories as their neighbor's lost or gained strength -- that it makes more sense to name the carpets after the tribes which wove them rather than the tribe's location at the time.

Here is a map of Central Asia showing the Turkmen's homeland, which includes parts of northeastern Iran and northwestern Afghanistan.

The effects of the Turkmen's mobility can be seen in some of the tribes' rugs. The guls of the Yomut (or Yomud) tribe which had long contact with Persia (and which mostly lives in northeastern Iran today) are believed to show adaptations of complex Persian floral forms.

An example can be seen in the photo at the top of this page of a Yomut carpet with kepsi guls. The carpet is available from James Cohen in Milan.

Over the centuries, as more and more Tukmen moved from nomadism to settled life, the carpets of the tribes which settled underwent more changes than those which stayed nomadic.

One of the earliest tribes to settle appears to have been the Chodor. The designs of main their carpets more varied than those of the other tribes and use more colors.

Here is an example of a Chodor carpet with ertmen guls. It is available from Joshua Lumley near London.

In the case of many nomadic groups elsewhere in the world, settling has meant a loss of weaving traditions.

But in the Turkmen case, settled women maintained their weaving traditions as a way to supplement their family income. Over time the volume of rugs they produced far outpaced those woven by their nomadic sisters.

Thus the rugs of the Saryk, which remained nomadic longer than any other Turkmen tribe, until the end of the 19th century, are considerably rarer than those of other groups.

Another tribe whose rugs are rare is the Salor – but for a different reason. The Salor, long considered among the oldest of the Turkmen tribes, disappeared at some time in the 19th century, leaving behind their weavings as their only legacy.

At what point the weavings of settled Turkmen tribe turned into a major regional business sensitive to the changing tastes of buyers is unclear.

But by the time the traditional red rugs came to the attention of Western enthusiasts, there was already production of another class of Turkmen carpets – not traditional at all – which were aimed at the sophisticated tastes of urban centers such as Bukhara, Samarkand, and far beyond.

These rugs were the so-called "Beshir" carpets, named not after a tribe but one of the towns where they were woven along the Amu Darya river, which flows between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

Here is a Beshir carpet available from Knights Antiques in Britain. Some other Beshir carpets show the influence of popular ikat designs taken from Central Asia's vibrant textile industry of the same time.

Exactly who wove the Beshir carpets is unclear, because historically these towns were home to a mixed population of Turkmens from different tribes and even indigenous Iranian people who pre-dated the Turkic conquest of Central Asia.

But if Beshir carpets show how Turkmen weavers could adapt to market tastes, the more remarkable thing about Turkmen carpets overall remains how much they have remained true to tradition over the centuries.

An example among many are the carpets woven the Ersari tribe, which has been mostly sedentary since 17th c. Their large carpets are too big for a yurt, so they were clearly made for urban buyers, but their designs stayed traditional.

As experts Robert Pinner and Murray L. Eiland, Jr. note in their 1999 book 'Between the Black Desert and the Red: Turkmen Carpets from the Widersperg Collection':

"The same gols have been used from the pre-commercial into the commercial period and the designs have changed little … The number of colors has tended to decline from the six or nine colors used in earlier rugs to sometimes only three or four in later rugs, (but) the guls will be drawn in a strikingly similar manner."

Here is modern Ersari carpet with another of the many variations of the gulli gul. It is available from Nomad Rugs in San Francisco.

Traditionally, Turkmen weavers not only produced main carpets for the floors of yurts but also carpet-like hangings to cover the yurt doorway (ensi), bags of different types and sizes for storage and transport (chuvals and torbas), decorative trappings used in wedding rituals (azmylik), tent bands and tent pole covers. Many of these smaller weavings show more variations in design than do the carpets.

Perhaps due to this variety, Turkmen weavings of all kinds are today highly popular with collectors. According to Pinner and Eiland, there are more Turkmen weavings in private rug collections in the US and Germany – the two countries with the largest number of private rug collections in the world -- than rugs from anywhere else.

That's a long way for Turkmen rugs to have traveled from the days when they were simply all lumped together on Western markets as Red Rugs, Bokharas, or Gentlemen's Carpets.

And it is a tribute to the weavers' skills that today their work has not just put the Turkmen people on the world's art map, but even the names of their own individual tribes.

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Persia's Signature Carpets Of The Late 19th, Early 20th Centuries

2011-11-26T06:09:00.000-08:00

TEHRAN, Nov. 26, 2011 – If there is a gold standard for Persian carpets produced at the turn of the last century, it is the magnificent rugs woven and signed by master artists working in small studios.

These signature rugs remain legendary today, as do the names of the "ustads", or master weavers, who designed them.

Just five of the best known master weavers are:

Mohammad Hassan Mohtashem, working in Kashan in the late 1800s.

Aboul Ghasem Kermani, in Kerman at the turn of the last century.

Hajji Jalili, in Tabriz at the turn of the last century.

Fatollah Habibian, in Nain in the early to mid 1900s.

Agha Reza Seyrafian (or Seirafian), in Isfahan in the early to mid 1900s.

These masters, and the workshops they led, were so innovative in reworking traditional designs, devising new ones, and playing with color palettes that they were the recognized trend setters of their time.

Their work can be stunningly beautiful.

At the top of this page is a signed carpet by Aboul Ghasem Kermani. It is a hymn to ancient Persian history that depicts in astonishing detail the ruins of Persepolis, the 5th century BC palace of Darius I and Xerxes. The carpet is available from the Nazmiyal Collection of New York.

Here is another signed carpet by Aboul Ghasem Kermani. This one shows the designer's ability to work equally well with floral patterns. It, too, is available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

The carpets of these master weavers have been copied so many times since their deaths that the weavers' names have become generic today for whole types of carpets based on their designs.

But the masters' original works have never been equaled and may well never be. That is because they are the product of a historical moment when Persia's carpet industry was reviving rapidly after centuries of neglect and the spirit of a renaissance was in the air.

The carpet industry had suffered badly during the period of political upheavals that wracked Persia in the 1700s and early 1800s and by the time stability returned many things had changed dramatically.

The royal court system, long the patron for the best arts, was severely weakened and economic power was increasingly passing into the hands of wealthy merchant families. They, and customers in Europe where Orientalism was by now in full swing, became a rich new market for Persian carpet producers who competed fiercely to win it.

The result was the birth of the modern workshop system of carpet production, the system which remains the basis for most oriental rug production today. Unlike the large court-supported workshops of the past, these new ateliers had to be smaller to be commercially successful. And whereas the court workshops had valued tradition above all, now there was increasing room for innovation, as well.

Here is a carpet by the master weaver Seyrafian available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

The best workshops of the late 19th century and early 20th century in Persia functioned much like artists' studios.

The masters were sought after by the wealthiest customers, who commissioned rugs and paid in advance. The advance payment, in turn, provided the capital for the master weavers to obtain the best materials and hire highly skilled artisans.

Just how much status the customers accorded the master weavers was shown by the practice of signing the master's name into the rugs as they were woven – something virtually unknown under the court patronage system. The date the carpet was woven was also sometimes included.

Over the decades from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, the master weavers brought new fame to many of Iran's traditional weaving centers. At times, they were directly associated with the successful revival of an individual city's weaving industry after it had slumped drastically during the previous centuries.

The master weaver Mohtashem is one example. He began work in Kashan around the 1880s at a time when the city's carpet weavers had long ago switched to making shawls. But even as he succeeded in the textile business, he could see it would soon collapse under the pressure of the new machine-produced textiles flooding in from Europe.

Here is a carpet by the master weaver Mohtashem available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

According to legend, Mohtashem re-invented himself, and the city's carpet industry, when he married a woman from another famous carpet center, Sultanabad, who was a skilled rug weaver.

He provided her with Merino wool imported from Manchester – the wool he usually used for textiles – and discovered its high quality allowed a higher knot count for creating detailed motifs with a high pile.

The revival of Kashan's carpet industry, which had been dormant since the fall of the Safavid dynasty in 1723, quickly followed.

In 1890, records show, there were only three operating looms in Kashan. By 1900, there were 1,500 and by 1949 there were 4,000. Fueling most of the growth was Mohtashem's innovation – the use of Merino wool – which continued until the imported wool market crashed with the Great Depression.

Ultimately, Mohtashem's innovation was so successful that his own name became the generic name for all the Kashan carpets woven with Merino wool, which sometimes were also known as "Manchester Kashans." Only the fact that some of Mohtashem's own signed carpets remain helps to preserve the memory of the man himself, about whom little more is known.

A similar revival took place in Nain and is attributed to another of the master weavers, Habibian.

Here is an example of a Nain carpet available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Legend has it that Habibian was the son of the owner of a textile workshop producing abas, a woolen outer garment that usually is striped.

When the market for abas collapsed because clothing fashions were becoming more European in the early 1900s, Habibian switched full time to carpets along with his brother Mohammad.

The Habibians helped turned Nain, which previously had no history as a carpet center, into a city with a reputation for exceptionally fine pieces. Both the Habibian brothers lived and worked in Nain for decades before Mohammad died in 1986 and Fatollah in 1994.

Most of the Habibians' rugs bear their names but that is not the case for all master weavers. In many cases, just a few signed rugs remain and in others cases they are so rare that experts wonder whether some legendary names actually refer to a style rather than to an individual master and his workshop.

Hadji Jalili is one such example. The name is routinely used in the rug business to describe the beautiful floral rugs woven in Tabriz at the end of the 19th century. It also is believed to refer to a particular designer whose success in developing a trademark mix of lighter colors of pinks, gold and grays that helped rouse the famous weaving city from a long period of dormancy.

Here is a Hadji Jalili carpet available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Yet so many of the best Tabriz carpets have since been attributed to Hadji Jalili that they could not possibly all have been woven by a single master's atelier.

So, how should one regard the name Hadji Jalili?

Jason Nazmiyal, whose Nazmiyal Collection deals in antique rugs, says there are two possibilities.

When a master weaver has signed a carpet, then the signature offers clear documentation that the master existed and that the rug originated in his atelier.

But when this documentation provided by a signature does not exist, Nazmiyal says, it may make better sense to think of a master's name as the name of a period of weaving rather than just one person.

"The masters were trendsetters and the look they developed was what everyone was following, the customers and the other weavers," he notes. "They were like top fashion designers today and their impact was far bigger than what they alone produced."

Looking at it that way recognizes that – many decades later – it is not always possible to distinguish designers from the fashions they create and those they inspire. The mystery of who exactly Hadji Jalili was may never be solved, but the beauty of the work attributed to him will never be forgotten.

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The Baroque Era: When Europe Fell Out Of Love With Oriental Carpets

2011-10-15T04:20:00.000-07:00

PARIS, October 22, 2011 – It is a strange thing that during Europe's long love affair with oriental carpets, the love once cooled for almost a hundred years.

That period roughly corresponds to Europe's Baroque era when, instead of importing oriental carpets as they had for centuries, European nobility began buying European-made carpets instead.

Those carpets, like the Savonnerie carpet shown here, looked nothing like the Turkish and Persian styles depicted in the Renaissance paintings of earlier generations. Rather, they were specifically woven in Europe beginning around 1644 to compliment the new baroque architecture of European palaces and mansions.

In fact, the new European carpets did not just compliment baroque architecture, they often directly imitated baroque ceiling designs. That enabled Europe's designers to do what they had never done so lavishly before: swaddle the wealthy in a single style of interior decoration from head to foot.

The single style – Baroque and its spin-off Rococo - conveyed power and opulence and corresponded with Europe's own rising sense of economic wealth and importance.

Still, if the development of French-made Savonnerie and Aubusson carpets, or similar Axminster and Wilton carpets in Britain, suggests that Europeans somehow entirely lost interest in Eastern designs at this time, the impression would be wrong.

Ironically, the Baroque Era in which Europeans lost interest in Oriental rugs coincides with what was Europe's greatest ever period of fascination with all things Turkish. That fascination was so widespread that it had a name: Turquerie.

Here is a portrait of Austro-Hungarian Empress Maria Theresa at the height of the Turquerie fad which swept Europe in the 1600s and 1700s. She is dressed in a Turkish costume and is holding a mask. It was painted circa 1744 by Martin van Meytens.

How the Turquerie fad took shape and why it did not include rugs is one of the stranger stories in carpet history. After all, Turquerie – the French-coined word for Europe's taste for Turkish styles – could be found in many other arts: from dress, to fabrics, to interiors, to porcelain.

To understand Turquerie – which was a precursor of, but quite different from, Orientalism – one has to return to Europe of the 1600s. It was a time when Europe's relations with the Ottoman Empire changed dramatically.

Prior to the the mid-1600s, the Ottoman Empire had been Europe's most feared neighbor. The Empire had grown with astonishing speed from its start two centuries earlier and directly annexed much of Eastern Europe, including Greece.

But by the mid-1600s, the Ottoman's power to expand deeper into Europe was clearly spent. The Empire's second attempt to take Vienna with a 60 day siege in 1683 ended in a disastrous route and, though Eastern Europe would remain under the Ottomans almost another two centuries years, fear of the Empire in the rest of Europe subsided.

Instead, Western Europeans suddenly became very interested in the art and lifestyle of the foe they no longer feared. To dress up for palace balls "alla Turca" became the rage. And the practice of drinking coffee – something that had previously reached only Venice from Istanbul -- suddenly spread across Europe.

In Vienna, one of the first cafes was the House under The Blue Bottle, which opened in 1686. Its origins, just three years after the Ottoman siege of the city, perfectly illustrates the new fascination with the East.

The Blue Bottle's proprietor, Georg Franz Kolschitzky, had lived in Istanbul as a young man and learned Turkish. During the siege he used his language skills to spy on the Ottoman camp. Legend says that afterwards he claimed the coffee beans the Turks left behind as his share of the war booty and used them to start his business. For decades, he ran his café dressed as an Ottoman cafe owner, as this painting from the time shows.

Like any fad, Turquerie was a mix of reality and fantasy. It came when still very few Europeans traveled to the East and it was heavily influenced by Europeans' own imaginary visions of oriental luxury, Ottoman customs, and even harems.

But even if Turquerie was in large part make-believe, there is no doubt that genuine curiosity about -- and even admiration of the Ottoman Empire – was equally part of it.

When one of the most famous, and large-scale, weddings of the time took place in Dresden in 1719, the celebration included days of specially themed events.

On one of those days, the newlyweds (the Prince-elector of Saxony, Friedrich August II, and the Austrian Archduchess Maria Josepha) had a palace in ‘Turkish style’ erected complete with a corps of janissaries. The guests, who included an Ottoman ambassador, were requested to appear in Turkish costume.

Similarly, it became the rage for noble women to have their portraits painted wearing a Turkish costume and in an Oriental setting, sometimes even sitting on an oriental carpet.

Here is one portrait from the time, Mademoiselle de Clermont "en Sultane" painted in 1733 by Jean-Marc Nattier.

A much more famous sitter, the Marquise de Pompadour, commissioned three portraits of herself dressed as a Sultana in 1750. The portraits not only allowed the sitters to appear in exotic fashions but also to abandon their body-constricting corsets -- something that would not become possible again in Western fashion until the 1900s.

Men also took part. In the 1700s, it was in fashion for wealthy men to smoke Turkish tobacco in a Turkish pipe, sometimes wearing a Turkish robe. And when people went out to the opera, it was possible to find Turquerie there, too.

The most famous of the Turquerie operas – still played today – is Mozart's 'The Abduction from the Seraglio'. It was first presented in 1782, but 13 other similarly themed operas predate it. Often the productions clothed the singers in authentic Ottoman fashions, knowing that theater goers were curious about them.

Even in architecture Turquerie found a place, this time in the form of Ottoman-inspired pleasure domes.

Here is the central building of a "Türkischer Garten" built between the years of 1778-91 in southwestern Germany. It is part of the Schwetzingen Castle, the summer residence of the rulers of the then German state of Baden-Württemberg.

One could easily imagine that so much interest in the Ottoman Empire would have to increase interest in that most essential symbol of the orient of all – carpets. But the fact that Europe's taste in carpet patterns went in an entirely different direction may only prove that, ultimately, Turquerie was more a measure of Europe's growing sense of self assurance than of cosmopolitan tastes.

Throughout the 1600s, when Turquerie began, and through the 1700s as it continued, the "gout Turque" coincided with the greatest period of expansionism in European history. It was a fad in an epic period that included the transformation of the New World and the creation of sea trading networks and ultimately colonies across Asia.

That meant that the key status symbols European society would have to be European too. Whereas wealthy Europeans in the Renaissance showed off their Turkish carpets to underline their rich status, the people of the late 1600s and early 1700s centuries furnished their mansions with European-woven baroque carpets instead.

Here is an antique Axminster, woven in Britain, that reflects the English taste of the time. It is available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Interestingly, Europe's overwhelming preference for baroque carpets over oriental ones would not last long. By the mid 1700s, the taste for oriental carpets would begin returning with redoubled strength as Europe's view of the East started to dramatically change again.

This new change, seen most visibly in Napoleon's military expedition to Egypt in 1798, would come as Europeans directly entered into the life of the Orient as never before. It, too, would be accompanied by a new fad: Orientalism. But that is the subject of another story (see: Orientalism and Oriental Carpets).

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From Hand-Knotted To Power-Loomed, Every Rug Has Its Appeal

2011-09-16T22:34:00.000-07:00

LONDON, Oct. 1, 2011 – One of the many fascinating things about rugs is the many different ways they are made.

In some places they are hand-kotted with traditional designs that date back thousands of years. In others, they are partly or entirely woven by machines and there is constant innovation.

The result is a variety of rugs so great that it is easy to get lost in a sea of choices and terminology.

To make sense of this vast world of weaving, Tea & Carpets recently sought out an expert who deals with it daily.

We asked Tony Sidney of Rug Store North East, Britain's top rug online retailer, to describe the main ways rugs are produced today and why.

Sidney says the terms to know are hand-knotted, hand-loomed, hand-tufted, and power-loomed. Each kind of production offers qualities the others do not.

Hand-knotted offers the quality of the most human contact between the weaver, her or his creation, and the rug buyer. When the design is a traditional one, the rug is a message from one culture to another and across both space and time.

Here is an Afghan Kunduz rug, available from Rug Store NE. It is an example of the traditional "red rugs of Central Asia" that continue to be woven today.

But because hand-knotting is laborious and time-consuming, many rug producers have for centuries also sought ways to machine-assist weavers.

One way is to use a loom that is powered by the hands and feet of the operator. This method, particularly used in India and other parts of Asia, speeds the weaving of kilim-like rugs which don't require a knotted pile.

A more recent innovation, since the 1980s, is hand-tufting, which helps weavers quickly produce a piled rug that resembles a knotted one but without actually tying knots.

Here is an example of a hand-tufted rug in a classical oriental design, available from Rug Store NE.

In hand tufting, the weaver pushes wool or a man-made yarn through a matrix material using a hand-held pneumatic gun. Later the yarn is trimmed to create the pile and an adhesive backing is affixed to the rug to hold everything in place.

Sidney says that because hand-tufted rugs can be made faster than hand-knotted rugs, they are generally less expensive.

Yet the tufting method also creates a highly durable rug which, when produced by a skilled craftsmen, can accurately depict even intricate designs.

After hand tufting, the next step in mechanization is machine-looming. The photo below is of a machine-loomed Qashqai available from Rug Store NE.

The use of machines to make rugs has a rich history, beginning in 1800 century with the first mechanical loom invented by Joseph Jacquard of Lyons, France. But large-scale machine production of carpets did not begin until 1839, when Erastus Bigelow, an American, invented a steam-driven loom.

The steam-driven loom dramatically upped the productivity of weavers. A single weaver suddenly could produce 25 square yards of carpet in a workday of 10 to 12 hours, compared to 7 square yards of carpet before.

Ever since, the invention of new machines and synthetic fibers has greatly stimulated the manufacture of rugs and carpets. Today, the technique is used to make copies of all kinds of rugs in western and oriental as well as modern designs, with wool or synthetic fibers.

So which of the many different kinds of woven rugs sell best?

Sidney says the biggest market exists for machine-loomed rugs. At his store, he says, "the largest selling machine-woven rugs at the moment are probably shag pile rugs with the main production coming from Belgium and Turkey."

Turkey – and Bulgaria – are also rising producers of machine-loomed Oriental rugs. "Turkish and Bulgarian wiltons (named for the Wilton Loom they are woven on) are becoming more evident in the market as Belgian ranges in traditional Oriental designs seem to be slowing down," Sidney notes.

The next bestselling rugs, Sidney says, are hand-tufted rugs in both contemporary and traditional designs.

Rug Store NE, for example, stocks mainly Chinese production with a large variety of qualities available -- including high-end wool and silk ranges from Nourison, the world's leading producer of handmade area rugs. Here is an example in wool.

For both machine-loomed and hand-tufted rugs, it is price, availability of programmed sizes (especially larger sizes) and choice of colors that seem to be the main reasons for their popularity over traditional hand-knotted rugs. Rapid and large scale production means distributors and customers can count in advance on find the size and colors they want.

Does that mean that hand-knotted rugs -- the small fish in this sea of production – one day will be crowded out of the market?

Sidney sees no danger of that.

"There is still no substitute for a genuine hand-knotted Oriental rug, woven by a experienced weaver using good quality wool and dyestuffs," he says.

He adds, "We will always have a select group of customers who know the difference and are happy to pay for a good quality hand-knotted piece that will far outlast any machine-made rug."

(The picture at the top of this page is a detail of a medallion in a hand-knotted rug from Pakistan reproducing a William Morris design.)

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Russia And The Red Rugs Of Central Asia

2011-09-15T22:37:00.000-07:00

MOSCOW, Sept. 15, 2011 -- Central Asian carpets came to attention of Europeans in the mid-1800s largely as a result of the Russian Empire's expansion into the region.

The expansion took place in a dramatic reversal of the previous order.

For centuries, Russians had lived in the shadows of the Turkic and Mongol empires that dominated Eurasia. From 1223 to 1480, neighboring Tatars held such direct sway over Russia's principalities that Russians call it the time of the "Tatar yoke."

And for centuries more, nomads so regularly raided Russia and Eastern Europe for slaves that the word "slave" itself derives from "Slav" in many European languages.

But gunpowder gradually neutralized the advantages of the horse borne warriors.

As Robert B. Golden notes in his book Central Asia in World History (2011), nomads were no longer able to take cities fortified with canons by the late 1400s. By the mid-1600s, the infantryman's flintlock musket had become a match for the nomad cavalryman's composite bow.

Then it was Russia's turn to expand across the steppes, starting in the mid-1500s under Ivan IV the Terrible. By the time the Russian Empire reached the Silk Road cities of Central Asia in the late 1800s, it is was an unstoppable industrializing power that had helped defeat Napoleon and recently annexed the Caucasus.

Tashkent, Bukhara, and Samarkand fell to the Russian Empire like dominos, captured in 1865, 1867, and 1868, respectively. Above is a picture of the battle for Samarkand.

The cities fell quickly because, by the 1800s Central Asia had declined into an impoverished region of settled and nomadic peoples steeped in tradition. The trans-continental Silk Road trading routes had been undercut by the sea trade and the wealth and vision they once generated were gone.

But some tribes put up a fierce resistance. At the battle of Geok Tepe ("Green Hill" in Turkmen) in 1882, some 25,000 Turkmen held out in a fortress for 23 days against a far better armed Russian force of 6,000. Finally, the walls were mined and the fortress was taken by storm.

Here is a photo of Turkmen soldiers in chain mail and armed with antiquated muskets.

In the wake of Moscow's conquests, the famous red carpets of Central Asia, known in the West but rarely seen in abundance, came flooding onto the Russian market.

One American observer, New York Herald correspondent Januarius MacGahan, witnessed the surrender of the city of Khiva to the Russian Army. He reported that families were forced to sell their carpets and other belongings to traders in order to pay tributes levied upon the defeated tribes:

"The Turcoman carpets, too, were very much in demand, and sold readily, in spite of the high prices demanded for them and of the fact that hundreds had been "looted" in the campaign against the Yomuds. A carpet, four yards long by two wide, brought 4 to 5 (pounds).

He added:

"A curious feature of the sale was, that although the Turcomans must have been hard pressed for money to pay the indemnity, they could not be induced to lower their prices a single kopek. They simply named their price, and you might take the article or leave it, as you pleased."

Here is a photo of a Turkmen woman standing on a carpet she has woven before her yurt. The photograph is by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, who traveled throughout the Russian Empire in the early 1900s and was a pioneer of color photography.

The Russian conquest of Central Asia came at the height of the scramble by European powers for colonies worldwide and Moscow's occupation of the region followed the model of the times.

Despite the fact the territory was part of the Russian Empire, its peoples were designated "inorodtsy", or aliens. They were subjects but not citizens of Russia.

And unlike other ethnically non-Russian subjects, they could not be drafted into the Imperial Russian army, where they might acquire knowledge of modern warfare and weaponry. That was, perhaps, in memory of the past days of the Tatar yoke.

Of course, there was mass colonization, too, with ethnic Russians moving into the region, particularly to Kazakhstan, starting in the 1890s,.

Still, while Central Asia was treated very much as a colony, Moscow was interested in learning more about both its economic potential and its peoples. So, Russian academic teams fanned out along with colonial administrators.

The work of some of these teams helped lay the foundations of the West's enduring fascination with Central Asian rugs today – both as art and history.

In 1901 and 1902, Samuil Martynovich Dudin, already a well-known amateur specialist in Oriental Art, led two trips to collect materials and photographs for the first Central Asian collection of the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. He brought back an enormous number of objects (2,526), including 350 rugs and carpets.

Here is one of Dudin's photographs, showing a bazaar in Central Asia.

Dudin's rug collection, which exists intact today, included Uzbek, Kirghiz, Baluch, and Afghan rugs. But most were Turkmen pieces because he considered the Turkmen to be the best carpet weavers in the world. He explained why in his travel notes:

"This quality of Turkmen rugs, in addition to other reasons, can be explained by the fact that all items are used, aside from their practical function, as decoration for the yurts. When put on camels during migrations and wedding ceremonies, they served as publicity for the family, visual evidence of the weavers' skill, the brides and wives.

He concluded:

"It was the competition of the inhabitants of various yurts that created the superb examples of carpet craftsmanship which one admires in one's travel on the Turkmen steppes and in local carpet shops.”

This picture of a Turkmen family seated in its yurt and surrounded by textile items was taken by Prokudin-Gorsky in the early 1900s.

But if Russians appreciated Central Asian carpets and, helped funnel them to Western Europe, the increased interest had a devastating effect on traditional carpet weaving itself.

By 1898, the ancient Silk Road cities were linked by rail to Russia proper via a western line to the Caspian and, by 1906, via a northern line to Orenburg (on modern Russia's Kazakh border). Commercialization of the weaving craft accelerated with the pace of exports.

Rug researcher Richard Wright notes that "from about 1900, functionaries were worrying about weavers' movement away from traditional designs."

To support traditional handicrafts, administrators introduced the "kustar" (or "artisan") program in Central Asia just as elsewhere in the Empire. The program, which distributed traditional designs to weavers and organized promotional exhibitions, was intended to help peasants supplement their livelihood by producing and selling quality handicrafts. But often it had the effect of simply fanning commercialism further.

The decline in quality continued. By 1903, says Wright, official reports were complaining of the "recent use" of synthetic dyes instead of natural ones and of "hasty work." By the end of the first decade of 20th century there were complaints that it was difficult to see sharp outlines in “new” rugs.

Then, far greater threats to tradition arrived.

The Russian Revolution brought communism to Central Asia and the drive to industrialize. Thousands of weavers were "collectivized" into state-run manufactories where, aided by machines, they churned out endless meters of cheap carpeting for public halls across the Soviet Union.

Those weavers who still created carpets at home found their ability to maintain the quality of their work and sell it severely limited. The Soviets' initial maintenance of the kustar program gave way to state neglect, good materials were hard to get, and the free-market was banned.

Here is a rare example of museum-quality weaving in the Soviet era: a portrait carpet of Lenin. It may have been specially commissioned for a meeting hall, mausoleum, or the private villa of a powerful party boss.

Yet if overall the weaving of the once-famous red carpets of Central Asia sank abysmally, there was one saving grace in the story. Ironically, it was the ability of Turkmens who had fled Moscow's control to continue their tradition of fine weaving and even pioneer a return to natural dyes.

As Robert Pinner & Murray L. Eiland, Jr, note in their 1999 book Between the Black Desert and the Red – Turkmen Carpets from the Wiedersperg Collection, "many Turkmen groups migrated to northern Afghanistan for religious reasons" when the Russian Empire conquered Central Asia. And later, "around the time of the Russian revolution there were more tribal movements toward the south."

In northern Afghanistan, the new arrivals joined fellow Turkmen who had been living and weaving there for centuries. Their weavings found their way West via Kabul and, later -- when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and many weavers fled south to Pakistan -- via the rug bazaars of Peshawar.

Today, with the independence of the Central Asian states since 1991, there are hopes that fine carpet weaving will revive, particularly in Turkmenistan. But progress is slow, despite the Turkmen government's opening of a carpet museum in the capital in 1994 and injunctions to producers to return to natural dyes.

Still, there is no reason to doubt a renaissance will come, or to doubt Central Asia's ties to its carpet heritage. By no coincidence, the flag of independent Turkmenistan is also a showcase of the 'guls' most commonly used by the country's five major tribes in their carpet weaving. Those tribes are the Tekke, Yomut, Ersari, Chodor, and Saryk.

(Note: Dudin is quoted in 'Thirty Turkmen Rugs - Masterpieces from the Collection of S. M. Dudin, Part II (Saryk Weavings)' by Elena Tsareva, originally published in Oriental Rug Review, Vol. 11, #1)

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Time Off: A Rug Dealer Vacations In Turkey

2011-07-23T03:56:00.000-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 15, 2011 – What does a rug dealer do when he goes on vacation in Turkey?

One thing is to reflexively cast an eye around the rug markets to see what's new.

So, when Tea and Carpets learned that San Francisco dealer Chris Wahlgren of Nomad Rugs had recently been to Istanbul and Konya, we asked him to share his impressions with us.

The biggest surprise?

After not visiting Turkey since 2004, he was amazed by how good things look. The European Union designated Istanbul as the European Capital of Culture in 2010 and the city spruced up its main historic districts for the occasion. They still shine.

As for Konya, that too has changed. Over the years it has turned from a sleepy town into a thriving city of over a million people.

Here is a picture of Konya with its famous Alâeddin Mosque, constructed in stages in the mid-12th and mid-13th centuries by the Seljuks.

All the changes are a measure of how much Turkey's economy keeps growing despite the big slump of recent years. And that, Wahlgren says, creates challenges for its rug sector.

As more manufacturing jobs open up, weavers are increasingly moving to factory jobs instead. They consider the factory jobs more prestigious and secure than handicrafts and the work often pays better.

To compete, rug producers have to increase salaries. But that drives their own production costs up, making it harder to compete with powerhouses like India and China where labor costs are low.

"I don't know how much longer we can count of Turkey to be a producer except on a small scale," Wahlgren observes. Already about half the stock in Istanbul's carpet shops is from Pakistan and Afghanistan because Turkish production is not large enough to meet demand.

Still, Turkey's carpet producers are famously resilient. And Wahlgren saw plenty of signs that they plan to stay in the game, particularly by innovating with new designs.

"Turkey has always been smart about re-imagining rugs," he says. That includes in recent decades pioneering the return of natural colors with the DOBAG project, introducing the world to patchwork kilims, and experimenting with patchwork rugs.

Here is a patchwork kilim available from Nomad Rugs in San Francisco

Today, the newest innovation is "overdyed" rugs, also known as "retro" rugs. They were first shown in the United States at the Domotex show in Atlanta last year but Wahlgren found so many in Turkish shops that it is clear producers are banking on them to become a new trend.

How an "overdyed" rug (shown here) is made is interesting.

"They take old Turkish village rugs that are not saleable due to their color or condition, then they bleach and wash them, and then overdye them in very brilliant colors, like bright blues, mauve, or purple," he says. "They are heavily distressed, with remnants of the original design showing through in the background."

These are rugs that are meant to be highly visible and so they probably go best with minimalist furnishing styles. Individual rug lovers may, or may not, like them. But from the producers' point of view, one can't help but admire their genius. They are the perfect solution to rising weaver costs.

"They can get an old village rug for a couple of hundred bucks, bleach and overdye it, and then sell it for a couple of thousand bucks if it’s room-sized," our visitor notes.

If that isn't clever marketing, what is? Wahlgren himself hasn't decided if he likes the rugs enough to stock them but he's keeping the door open. Without a doubt the rugs are intriguing – combining a modern look with a traditional design – and they could well be a fad for the next five years or so.

So, did Wahlgren, who says he spent 90 percent of his vacation time in Turkey vacationing, bring anything home with him?

Like any visitor to Turkey -- on vacation or on business -- he did indeed.

For his shop, he ordered some mohair tulus with wool so fine it feels like silk, some natural dye kilims, some patchwork kilims, and some yastik-sized small rugs. About 30 to 40 pieces in all.

This picture is of a natural dye kilim from Konya, available from Nomad Rugs in San Francisco.

And he brought something home for himself, too.

"I received a beautiful kilim from Mehmet Uçar," he says "natural dyed with a deep saffron color." He doesn't need to add that a gift like that is something to treasure.

Mehmet Uçar, who works in the Konya region, has been called the "master of the natural-dyed Konya kelim" by Hali magazine and for years has been one of Wahlgren's close associates and suppliers.

That may seem like a lot of rugs to bring home from vacation. But being able to bring so many is precisely the fun of being in the rug business.

(The picture at the top of the page is of a weaver in Konya.)

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Rugs And The Art Of Looking Beyond What You Can See

2011-07-09T00:56:00.000-07:00

PRAGUE, July 15, 2011 -- Can viewing a rug be a metaphysical experience?

It can be if you see rugs as many are meant to be seen.

That is, as a patch of infinity.

The idea might not make much sense until you consider how many rugs have field patterns which do not seem to stop at the rug's border.

Instead, they have an endlessly repeating pattern which appears to spill under and past the rug's own borders.

And because the pattern seems to extend ever outward, it is easy to imagine the rug itself is just a small sample of an infinitely larger universe, like a patch of stars in the sky.

Just how this works can be seen in rugs from almost any era and from across the rug-producing East.

Here is an Ottoman court Usak Medallion carpet from around the 16th century.

The focal point of the rug is the central medallion but other, partial, medallions float above and below it, giving the impression that the patterns go on forever.

But if Ottoman court weavers seemed to enjoy creating such illusions of infinity, they were far from the only ones.

So did court weavers in Mamluk Egypt, Safavid Persia and Mughal India.

And so did -- and continue to do – many city and tribal weavers.

Below is a 19th century Turkmen tribal carpet – a Yomud – from Central Asia.

It, too, has a field made up of ever repeating elements that have no beginning and no end.

At the top of the carpet, the final row of field motifs is only half complete, as if they literally have been interrupted by the border only to continue again on the other side.

This Yomud rug is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Interestingly, the appearance of the borders themselves often only helps heighten the sense of infinity.

Particularly on village rugs, weavers are likely to simply stop working on a rug when it reaches the desired length. The result is "unreconciled borders," where the repeat of the border motifs stops but does not clearly end, much like the field design itself.

The readiness of a weaver to stop "just-like-that" as she weaves suggests an artistic tradition very different from that of the West, where symmetry and a sense of completion are usually the rule in art.

So perhaps it is no surprise that some scholars have tried to explain where the tradition comes from and what it means.

Schuyler V.R. Cammann, a professor of East Asian studies who has written about rugs, puts it this way:

“We are accustomed to seeing patterns that fit neatly within trim borders or assigned frames, completely compact entities. To comprehend these infinite patterns, expressing a very different way of thinking, we must put asides our customary points of view and take a new look at some of the rugs we have come to take for granted.”

His remarks appear in the Textile Museum Journal, December 1972, in an article entitled "Symbolic Meanings in Oriental Rugs."

Cammann believes the answer lies in the way weavers in Muslim lands view the world and are inspired by the spiritual ideas and beliefs of their common faith.

As he notes, "we meet the concept of endlessness very frequently in Islamic thought. God – under the name of Allah – is described as having limitless transcendence, boundless power, infinite mercy and compassion."

But if the concept of infinity is central to Islam, he believes that Eastern artists' comfort with depicting the world in infinite terms can be traced to long before Islam itself.

Cammann notes that in the Louvre Museum there is a 7th century BC Assyrian carved stone slab which represents a carpet set before the throne in the king's court at Ninevah. Its central field, enclosed by a continuous floral border, also has a repeating pattern.

"These continuous patterns – so characteristic of Middle Eastern design and by no means confined to rugs – did not originate in the Islamic tradition, he concludes. "Muslim weavers took over this already ancient device to express some of their most fundamental beliefs."

If the artists who weave oriental carpets were content to express infinity in their work and stop there, it would already by interesting enough.

But some rug designs appear to go yet a step further and that is to try to suggest the "indefinability" of the world around us, as well.

That concept may seem more familiar when we realize that it already is a large part of what makes Islamic architecture so distinctive and instantly recognizable, such as this dome interior of the Sheikh Lotfollah in Isfahan.

On mosques, the walls and domes are often covered with arabesques and tile which break up the surface into myriad smaller patterns which make the solid structure of the building itself appear to be what it is not: airy and weightless.

In effect, matter is "dissolved," and that contradiction between appearance and reality powerfully evokes the indefinability of the divine, of the spiritual, and ultimately, of all creation.

Often the breaking up of a surface into smaller elements is done using a pattern which itself seems to endlessly repeat beyond the confines of the surface itself, further reinforcing the idea of the infinite, indefinable nature of the universe.

And it is this combination of techniques that can be seen at work in many of carpets which most famously have captured the imagination of Western rug collectors and painters.

Here is a photo of a Lotto carpet woven in a court workshop of the Ottoman Empire.

The Lotto design so captivated European Renaissance painters that it is the most frequently depicted classical Anatolian carpet of all, appearing this way or with variations in some 500 paintings.

But Lotto carpets are just one example. Cammann says the same principles can be seen in the earliest known rugs from Seljuk period and in the Mamluk carpets of pre-Ottoman Egypt.

And, again, they seem to be at work in many village and tribal rugs throughout history.

According to Cammann, the repeated stars and octagons and extra fillers in other shapes that break up the background of Caucasian rugs are not so much the result of a horror vacui, or fear of empty space, as many Westerners imagine, but an example of the dissolution of matter.

Here is a Shirvan carpet from the Caucasus, showing the use of such filler. It is available from Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Many Central Asian rugs, including Yomud and Tekke, also combine the principles of infinity and dissolution of matter in their patterns.

It would be fascinating to know more about how and when weavers across the Muslim world began to introduce such intriguing ambiguity into their works.

But finding out is complicated by the fact that Muslim historians never paid much attention to chronicling changes in the arts.

The reasons for the absence of art history, interestingly, are much the same as those which made the artists allude to the indefinability of divine creation rather than depict subjects realistically.

If something is indefinable, it is not man's work to define it. The historians passed on to more worldly concerns, like politics, and left the artists' secrets to the artists themselves.

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The Antique Carpet Trade: "It's More About What People Feel Than What They Need."

2011-06-12T02:12:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK, June 15, 2011 -- If there is a pinnacle to the rug business, it is the antique carpet trade.

It is not only where people are willing to spend the most on a carpet they admire but also where dealers take the greatest risks.

Why risks?

Because to be successful, a dealer not only has to invest huge amounts of money in inventory. He or she also has to hope the global economy stays strong enough to create enough buyers to keep turning the inventory over and make the business prosper.

That's why Tea & Carpets welcomed the opportunity recently to interview one of the most successful people in the antique carpet trade, Jason Nazmiyal.

His New-York based company Nazmiyal Collection has been a leading name in the antique carpet world for decades. If anyone can describe the ins-and-outs of the business he can.

We started with this question: How much has the economic downturn affected the antique carpet market?

The answer is: a lot. Since 2001, he says, the antique market has been under heavy pressure. That's because the purchase of antiques is related to the performance of the stock market. When people's investments do well, they spend their extra earnings on luxury items, when not, not.

The goods Nazmiyal specializes in – room-sized decorative antique rugs – are luxury items running from $ 20,000 to $ 200,000. So, he has felt the pressure firsthand.

Shown here is an antique Agra currently available from the Nazmiyal Collection.

Buying antique rugs, Nazmiyal explains "is more about what people feel than what they need." And over the past years, when even CEOs have worried about losing their jobs, what many people have felt is the urge to be cautious.

But how that caution gets expressed in the rug market can be surprising.

What many interior decorators advised their clients to do during the worst of the downturn was to buy new rugs instead of antique ones, because they are less expensive.

And, as that caused antique rug inventories to pile up, many antique rug dealers followed suite. Rather than invest their capital in more inventory, they invested in producing new rugs themselves, instead.

Nazmiyal did not follow that strategy, but he says for many dealers it made economic sense.

Here's why: To sell a $ 25,000 antique rug, you have to have half a dozen similarly expensive pieces for the client to choose from. But to sell a room-sized new carpet you need only show a $ 200 weaving sample.

If the sample satisfies the client, weaving can go ahead with just a fifty percent deposit, with the rest to be paid when the rug is delivered.

Here is another antique Agra carpet, with a flower design, available from Nazmiyal Collection.

The Nazmiyal Collection weathered the storm without switching to new rugs because its inventory is large and it has an extensive website with global clients. But, perhaps most valuably, the company's long-standing reputation for quality assures designers and others seek it out.

Today, with the economy showing signs of recovery, the antique carpet market is slowly stabilizing again.

Over the past six months, Nazmiyal says, the drift to new rugs has reversed and buyers are returning to vintage pieces.

The reasons they are returning are all the classic ones for which people value antiques. Compared to new rugs, antique rugs have greater interest of history and provenance, they have a patina that will take new carpets decades to acquire, and you don't have to wait six months for them to be woven.

There is another question that always fascinates people about the antique carpet business and that is the way it is influenced by changes of taste and style.

So, we asked how much tastes in antique rugs have changed over recent years and what is in demand now.

The answer, again, was surprising. Over the last 10 years in the United States , Nazmiyal says, decorators grew tired of busy Persian designs. They moved to East Turkestan rugs, for example, instead. Such rugs offered simpler designs and more monochromatic, muted colors.

Here is an antique Khotan available from Nazmiyal Collection.

But over the past six months, things have shifted once again. Now high-end decorators are looking for traditional designs and bolder colors.

What drives the taste changes is a mystery. But the way it works is through the power of a handful of famous tastemakers.

Nazmiyal estimates that in New York City, there are about five "phenomenal designers" who are the trendsetters of our time and whom all the other designers watch. When their taste in fabrics, wallpapers, and other furnishings changes, so do the kinds of carpets the decorating world wants.

Interestingly, the designers themselves may or may not know much about the history of oriental carpets. "Some of the New York designers are so well trained to see beautiful things," he says, "that they don't need to know rug history and styles. They can just be confident of their own taste."

Does this mean that everywhere fashions change as if on cue? Not at all. There is still plenty of room for regional differences and there are variations in what kinds of antique rugs people want even from city to city.

Nazmiyal says that in Atlanta, for example, there is equal demand for beautiful carpets with medallion or all-over designs. But in New York, decorators only want all-over designs because they feel medallion designs fit less flexibly with current styles.

Similarly, there are trans-Atlantic differences.

In Europe, where houses and apartments tend to be smaller than in the United States, a 9 x 12 foot carpet is about the maximum any room can absorb. That makes a big rug, like a Sultanabad or Hajji Jalili, less desirable. And it gives people reasons to prefer smaller yet still highly visible rugs, like Caucasians, instead.

Here is an antique Sultanabad available from Nazmiyal Collection.

One could pose questions about the antique rug trade all day and still never finish. So, we ask a final question about something most people only dream of. That is: what rug do you select for your own house when you have virtually every possibility available in your inventory?

Nazmiyal says he has a mix. He keeps a silk and wool Tehrani woven in 1920-21 with blues and whites in his library. And an early Agra in his living room.

Then he has to laugh. Like many carpet enthusiasts, he has a small obstacle to bringing home ever more antique pieces, as much as he might want to.

"My wife likes new things, not old ones," he says. "So when I bring an antique rug home, it has to be clean and with a full pile and look like a new rug."

How familiar does that sound? Sometimes the husband is the collector, sometimes the wife, and always compromises have to be found.

"But over time," he adds, "she's come to like antique rugs much more. It only took 15 years."

May all families enjoy such peace. And thanks again to Jason Nazmiyal for sharing his experiences with us.

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Mughal Carpets And The Natural Beauty Of Flowers

2011-05-14T01:44:00.001-07:00

NEW DELHI, May 15, 2011 – When Europeans discovered a direct sea route to India in 1497-8, they arrived just in time to witness the birth of one of the East's great empires.

It was the Mughal Empire and it was the last of the waves of epic conquests by Turkic-Mongol warriors which for centuries shaped the history of so much of Eurasia.

The empire the Mughals (or Moguls) created, beginning in 1526, so impressed Europeans with its wealth and power that the word 'mogul' has become a synonym in English for "tycoon," as in a Media Mogul or Banking Mogul.

But the Mughal Empire also gave India one of its most enduring and internationally recognized artistic styles. That style is the decorating of objects of all kinds with patterns of naturally depicted flowers.

This carpet, and the detail of it shown at the top of the page, show just how beautifully Mughal weavers portrayed flowers. The carpet is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Where did this style originate and how did it become the epitome of Mughal art?

The origins can be traced to those of the Mughal Dynasty itself, which began with Babur, a blood descendant of both Timur and Chengis Khan.

Born in 1483 in the Fergana Valley of present day Uzbekistan, he grew up in the fusion of Turkic-Mongol and Persian culture which then characterized court life across a vast band of Eurasia -- from Anatolia to Persia to Central Asia.

This shared court culture put a premium on luxurious gardens and Babur personally built some of the most famous gardens of his time. The garden, which he built in Kabul, his first major conquest, still stands as one of the city's landmark parks and is the site of his tomb.

But it was Babur's subsequent conquests of the Muslim sultanates of northern India that brought still more elements into the mix and created a uniquely Mughal artistic style.

India's Muslim sultanates dated back to Islamic conquests centuries earlier. But their populations remained largely Hindu, and it was the fusion of Turkic-Mongol and Persian culture with Hindu aesthetics that would distinguish the Mughal style – and Mughal carpets – from the art of the other great eastern empires.

Here is a map showing the greatest extent of the Mughal Empire, which lasted from 1526 to 1858.

The distinctly Mughal style did not emerge immediately. For decades, Mughal carpets were essentially "Persian style" carpets which took their design inspiration from Persian floral carpets while adding some Indian motifs, such as segmented blossoms, wisteria, or grape clusters.

This Persian Style echoed the initially large presence of Safavid artists at the Mughal court.

The Safavid artists' presence was due to a quirk of history. Babur's son, Humayun, lost his father's empire to usurpers and was sheltered for years by the Safavid Shah Tahmasp, who was a huge patron of the arts. After Humayun regained his throne and Shah Tahmasp turned austere in middle age, many of the Shah's finest artists moved to Humayun's court instead and became its leading lights.

Nevertheless, a distinctly Mughal "Flower Style" of naturally depicted plants and flowers gradually gained ground.

During the reign of the next Mughal emperor, Akbar, blossoms and vines, even whole plants, became commonly represented in Indian art. And Akbar's successor, Jahangir, made a special trip to Kashmir in Spring just to admire the valleys in bloom.

After returning from his trip, Jahangir famously recited an ode celebrating the natural beauty he had seen and ordered one of his most accomplished miniaturists, Mansur, to paint more than a hundred portraits of flowers.

One of Mansur's paintings is shown here.

By the time of the following emperor, Shah Jahan (1628-1658), who is most famous for the Taj Mahal, the rapidly developing Flower Style was already spreading across Mughal art.

Patterns of naturally depicted flowers could be found on objects ranging from inlaid stonework, to the borders of miniature paintings, to ceramics and carpets.

Daniel Walker describes how the Flower Style came to dominate Mughal carpet design in his book "Flowers Underfoot, Indian Carpets of the Mughal Era."

In the book, published in conjunction with an exhibit of Mughal Carpets at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1997, he writes:

"It is true that in the earlier years of court carpet production, from about 1580 to 1630 or so, the patterns of Indian carpets were heavily dependent upon Persian models (nevertheless displaying an unmistakably Indian aesthetic).

"But then a particular fashion for formally but naturalistically depicted flowers came into vogue. This truly indigenous style came to dominate Indian ornamentation in all media and even influence foreign artistic production, particularly in Iran, perhaps as a result of carpet or textile imports."

But developing a unique Flower Style was not the Mughals' only contribution to carpets.

The Mughal weavers also made extraordinary use of color to achieve naturalistic effects, including "mixing" of two colors to achieve a third one. They did so by juxtaposing knots of different colors, usually in checkerboard fashion, to trick the eye.

At the same time, the weavers used color shading to highlight the edges of plants and other objects and give them a three-dimensional appearance.

Both these techniques, Walker notes, were rarely found in carpets outside of India.

The weavers did not always strive for realism in their portraits of flowers. They also sometimes combined the blossoms of different plants on a single stem to create imaginary plants of great beauty, too.

Here is a Mughal carpet with a motif of just one flower set in an apparent niche.

Such Mughal niche rugs are frequently called prayer rugs but many art experts believe they were more likely used as qanats, or screens, to surround the tents of an emperor's encampment when he was traveling.

One more unique characteristic of Mughal carpets was that weavers did not use silk for the high-knot count they needed to draw their flowers.

Most often, they used pashmina, the extremely fine wool undercoat of the Himalayan mountain goat. As Walker notes, that made India "the only carpet weaving society where silk was not the luxury material of preference."

The source of the pashmina was western Tibet but, because it was imported through Kashmir, Europeans long referred to it as "cashmere," mistakenly assuming Kashmir was its source.

Europeans began to become familiar with Mughal carpets by the early 1600s, very shortly after English and Dutch ships followed the Portuguese trail to India in the last decade of the sixteenth century.

Records show that Britain's East India Company sent a first shipment of carpets back to England in 1615. The Dutch started to ship carpets from India in about 1625.

But the Mughal carpets which first appeared in Europe were not the Flower Style carpets so sought-after today. They were the Persian Style ones which at that time still dominated Mughal weaving.

Ironically, the European taste for Mughal Persian Style carpets continued long after the Flower Style became dominant in the empire itself. That was because the European market for centuries had thought of 'oriental carpets' only in terms of what was most familiar to it -- Anatolian and Persian styles -- and imported accordingly.

European paintings of the time – particularly Dutch and British paintings – continued to frequently portray wealthy families with a prized oriental carpet displayed on a table near them.

But precisely because Europeans tended to import Mughal carpets that were Persian Style, it is often hard for art experts today to know if the carpets depicted were made in Safavid Iran or in Mughal India.

Had the families acquired a Flower Style carpet, instead, knowing its provenance would be easy.

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The Silk Roads Of The Sea: Dhows, Junks, and Caravels

2011-04-12T06:59:00.000-07:00

LISBON, April 16, 2011 -- When one thinks of the ancient carpet trade, it is the Silk Roads and camels which first come to mind.

But the trade routes that connected East and West were not just overland. Many of the same goods that moved across Eurasia by caravans also moved along the coasts by ship. And these Silk Roads maritime routes have a fascinating history of their own.

Shown here is a "Portuguese" carpet woven in Persia or India at the end of the 16th century and most likely commissioned by European merchants.

Such carpets were woven at a time when Europeans had still only recently begun trading with the East by sea. The carpets are named after their Portuguese-looking ships and sailors which, some observers believe, illustrate the biblical story of Jonah cast overboard and swallowed by a whale.

Just how and when the vast chain of sea-trading links connecting the western and eastern worlds got started is impossible to known. But by the time of the Romans, it was already well established. The sea-trade ran across the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, across the Indian Ocean, and up the rim of the Pacific using a variety of boats suited to local conditions.

The Romans' galleys and bathtub-shaped sailing ships went only as far east as Alexandria, at the landlocked end of the calm sea they called Mare Nostrum. There, they picked up goods transported overland from the Red Sea, which had much rougher sailing conditions altogether.

The Red Sea, and beyond that the Indian Ocean, was the world of Arab dhows.

They were rigged to sail tightly against the wind as well as before it, so they could hug the ocean coastline and minimize the risk of going far out to sea. The dhows connected Arabia with Persia and India and went as far as the Malay Peninsula.

Beyond the Malay Peninsula, still another world began, that of ocean-going Chinese junks. They too, could run against the wind or before it, but they were much bigger than dhows and could stand very heavy seas without being swamped. They connected Southeast Asia with China's main ports of Canton and, farther north, Hangzhou.

What did this ancient trading network, which remained virtually unchanged until European ships moved east a thousand years later, carry?

The most important goods of all were spices, which were highly valued by people across Eurasia. The spices were prized as luxurious flavorings for food, as the most effective ingredients of contemporary medicines, and as perfumes for secular, medicinal and religious use.

The spices were cultivated in Arabia (cinnamon and frankincense), in India (pepper and sugar) and in the islands of Indonesia (nutmeg, mace, and cloves). The variety of spices traded was staggering, with just the four biggest being pepper, cinnamon, ginger and saffron but also including such items as galangal, which only recently has become known again in the West thanks to Thai cuisine.

But spices were far from the only things traded by sea. So, too, were silks, ceramics, cast iron objects and, one can almost certainly assume, oriental carpets.

Over the centuries, many of the East's greatest carpet-producing courts, including those of the Safavid and Mughal Empires, had access to both land and sea-trading routes thanks to their Indian Ocean ports.

The sea often could offer merchants a surer and safer way than roads to get their products to distant markets.

On land, the Silk Roads crossed some of the highest mountains in the world, passed through a multitude of tax-hungry fiefdoms and kingdoms, and required that pack animals get regular fodder and rest.

But on the sea, things could be easier. The captain of a dhow with crew of ten men could use the monsoon winds to make the round trip from the Red Sea to India in 18 months and carry a cargo of twenty to fifty tons. All along the way he could use ports that were in the hands of Muslim rulers who shared a common interest in trade and where traders spoke Arabic as their lingua franca.

Here is a photo of an Arab dhow built in last century but whose design, using wooden planks held together with ropes rather than nails to better survive crashes against coastal rocks, is centuries' old.

The eastern sea routes, and particularly the spice trade, were so profitable that any nations that controlled them could be assured of vast riches. But no single power tried to monopolize them until the rise of Europe's great maritime powers in the 15th century.

Those powers were far away on Europe's Atlantic coast and resented the costly chain of brokers connecting them with the eastern trade. They dreamed of becoming direct participants themselves but for centuries had no way of doing so.

Ironically, their moment came when Europe in general began to learn more about the geography of Eurasia by traveling the Silk Road land routes.

During the Pax Mongolica of the 13th and 14th centuries, when travel on the Silk Road was safest, the first European travelers since Alexander the Great reached India and Marco Polo went as far as China. The tales they brought back inspired the Portuguese to look for route to India south around Africa and the Spanish for a route across the Atlantic.

In 1497, just five years after Columbus crossed the Atlantic to discover the New World, the Portuguese captain Vasco da Gama sailed with four ships past the Cape of Good Hope and began feeling his way up the east coast of Africa. In the African-Arab trading port of Malindi (near Mombasa) he found a local navigator to guide him across the Indian Ocean to Calicut and its huge entrepots of pepper.

For the expedition, Da Gama used the kind of ocean-going caravel that both the Portuguese and the Spanish favored for their early voyages of discovery. It has a shallow draft to chart unknown waters, can sail with or against the wind, and has cargo space for voyages of up to a year.

After Da Gama's success, a larger Portuguese expedition with 13 ships followed and, when the six surviving ones returned to Lisbon laden with pepper in 1501, it was clear to all of Europe that the world would never be the same. Paul Freedman, author the 2008 book Out of the East, Spices and the Medieval Imagination, quotes Venice's envoy in Portugal giving this typical reaction of the time:

"If this routes continues – and it already appears to me easy to accomplish – the king of Portugal might be called the king of money … the entire city [of Venice] remains astonished that in our day such a new route would be discovered, never known or heard of by our ancestors," the envoy, Priuli, wrote.

The Portuguese were able to swiftly dominate the Indian Ocean trade because they had superior firepower and, in Freedman's words, "a willingness, even eagerness, to use force." Fresh from wars with the Moors, they hoped to drive Muslim traders entirely from the sea trade.

Portugal did not have the resources to do that, but it did set up its own trading network that eventually extended from Brazil to Macau on the Chinese coast and other Atlantic powers soon followed suit.

Pictured here is the Basilica Bom Jesus, a Portuguese church erected in Goa, on the west coast of India, which was Lisbon's headquarters in the East.

Curiously, the one world power that could have pre-empted Europe's domination of the sea routes never did so. That was China, which itself sent a huge fleet of war and cargo ships into the Indian Ocean in seven expeditions beginning in 1405 – almost a century before Portugal rounded Africa.

The expeditionary fleets, commanded by Admiral Zheng He, dwarfed Portugal's first voyages of discovery in every respect. His first expedition included 317 vessels and the largest of the ocean-going junks – the treasure ships -- had nine masts on their 122-meter-long (400-foot-long) decks. By contrast, the largest of Da Gama's ships had four masts and was about 30.5 meters (100 feet)long.

This picture shows the relative scale of a treasure ship and a European vessel like those of Da Gama and Columbus.

The Chinese expeditions carried silks, porcelain, and spices and were intended to display the splendor and power of the new Ming dynasty. The expeditions went as far as Persia, Arabia and down the east coast of Africa, and states and leaders that recognized Ming supremacy and offered tribute were rewarded with diplomatic recognition and trading rights.

But the Chinese fleets, which carried artisans, scholars and naturalists as well as sailors and troops, were never about monopolizing trade. Rather they were sent out to explore the world and acquaint it with the Mings. After the last expedition in 1433, China's rulers began to regard the expeditions as too costly and no longer useful. They were confident trade would always flow to China anyway as the Center of the World.

China's approach to sea trade did not change the world, but Europe's did. The Europeans' trading outposts became colonies and their wooden sailing ships evolved into giant ocean steamships. The seas became crisscrossed by ever more vessels, laying the foundations for today's globalized world economy.

These days, there is no doubt that oriental carpets, along with many other goods once traded along the Silk Roads, move west by both sea and land. Most of the handmade carpets exported to Europe arrive at Germany's port of Hamburg, from which many are shipped on to the United States.

The ocean-going carpets are memorialized in Hamburg by one of the few public monuments to the carpet trade that exists in the world today. It is a bridge covered with a stone mosaic in the pattern of a Persian carpet and it lies in the heart of the port's old warehouse district, the Speicherstadt. (For more see: Carpet Made of Stone Honors Hamburg As Europe's Oriental Rug Port.)

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Kuba Weavings: The Art And Appeal Of Africa's Rug-Like Raffia Textiles

2011-03-26T02:03:00.000-07:00

KINSHASA, March 26, 2011 -- It's not always easy to tell the difference between a fabric and a rug.

It should be, of course, thanks to some simple rules of thumb.

For example, fabrics are used for clothing and upholstery, while rugs mostly go on the floor.

And while both are woven, fabrics usually don't have a pile like knotted rugs do.

But then one runs into an extraordinary form of weaving which breaks all these simple rules and makes collectors wonder how to display it when they get it home.

That something is a boldly patterned, pile-cloth which is woven from wool-like palm fibers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It goes by the name of the people who make it: the Kuba.

Most collectors – and this unusual art form has many – elect to display Kuba weavings by hanging them on the wall, like a prized small rug.

But the Kuba people themselves weave the cloth to make ceremonial dresses worn by both men and women.

For them, it is clearly a fabric and one so prized that people wear the dresses only to attend major events like funerals.

When a person dies, he is buried in one of his dresses so his ancestors will recognize him by the family pattern he wears.

Where does one begin to tell the history of Kuba weaving? Perhaps by noting that it is an ancient tradition about which little is known beyond the last hundred years.

The reason for the short time-frame is that unlike other fabrics, the fine palm fibers from which the cloth is made is as degradable as any other plant. Unless it is carefully preserved in dry conditions, it rarely outlasts its own creator's generation.

Here is a grove of raffia palms, showing the size of the leaves from which the fibers are made.

Ephemeral or not, the Kuba weavings are powerful enough that they have long been prized as trade items by other peoples living around the Kuba's home region.

That region is between the Kasai and Sunkuru rivers, in the west-central part of the DR Congo (formerly Zaire), in a vast area of savannah and forest land that is reachable with a long boat journey from Kinshasa to the river port town of Ilebo.

The subgroup of the Kuba considered to be the best weavers of all is the Shoowa. They were recorded as living here as early as the 17th century.

Margaret Blechman, author of "Discover Shoowa Design," a booklet prepared for the Smithsonian Institution's display of raffia textiles at the National Museum for African Arts in 1988, describes the cloths and their creators this way:

"In the past, raffia textiles were used as money. The Shoowa exchanged them for other goods. Raffia textiles are still worn, enjoyed for their beauty, and kept as treasured possessions.

"For men, a woven and embroidered raffia strip may be used as a decorative border on a wrapper worn for special occasions. For women, several squares of raffia cloth sewn together made a wraparound skirt. At funerals, particularly court funerals great numbers of raffia textiles may be displayed to honor the deceased."

Here is a photo of the Kuba court taken in the mid 1900s.

The first Europeans did not reach the Kuba kingdom until 1890. When they did, they were immediately struck by its elaborate codes of ceremony and dress. So much so, that photo sessions with western magazines like "Life" became de rigeur, with Kuba kings using the opportunity to further the reputation of the Kuba as the foremost artists in central Africa.

The massive amounts of decorative bead-work visible in the photo attests to the wealth the kingdom acquired from trade with neighboring peoples.

The beads themselves are a legacy of the European slave trade, when glass-makers first in Venice and later also in several northern cities manufactured vast quantities of decorative beads as exchange currency to use in Africa and the New World. The slave trade, based on the coasts, did not directly reach the interior Kuba lands but the bead-based economy it created spanned the continent.

To make their rug-like fabrics, the Kuba pound palm fibers until they become soft and threadlike and as easy to dye as wool. The loops of the fine threads are trapped between a warp and weft of sturdier fibers using a loom, and the loops are later cut and trimmed to form an even pile.

Each weaver -- it can be a man or a woman – decides individually whether to make a cloth with a uniform design or vary the designs in midstream, even several times. Traditionally, they do not use preliminary sketches.

What all the weavers do have in common is an agreed vocabulary of shapes, each with its name. Here are just a few: an intertwined loop (called Imbol, or basketworking); a hexagon with or without smaller hexagons inside (Iyul, or tortoise); and a triangle with two angled arcs (Lakiik, or eyebrows).

The shapes can be combined to create intricate mazes that constantly surprise the eye by attracting it in different directions.

After Europeans found the Kuba lands, Kuba textiles began to regularly reach art dealers in Brussels and Paris, who sold them as "African velvets" in the 1920s. Among the artists in Paris who saw them in shops or museums and were particularly drawn to them was Henri Matisse.

Matisse, who was born into a family of textile makers and had a life-long interest in both painting and fabrics, hung panels of Kuba textiles along his studio walls next to the bark cloth he brought back from his 1930s trip to the South Seas.

He wrote in letters to his sister that he often looked at the panels for long periods, waiting for design ideas to come to him.

Art historians say that Matisse's correspondence indicates that the Kuba designs may have been the inspiration for the paper cutouts that were his final major works, such as his 1951 'Snow Flowers'.

The website of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art notes in an article entitled 'African Influences on Modern Art' that in his cutout collages Matisse blends "a vivid color palette with the allover patterning of the textiles to produce abstract floral forms free-floating in space, creating perspectival shifts between foreground and background."

The abstract patterns displayed in Kuba cloth are equally believed to have served as a source of inspiration for artists such as Klee, Picasso, and Braque.

Probably it should be no surprise that in recent years some rug makers have explored recreating Kuba designs in wool and silk.

Here is one example sold by Landry & Arcari in Boston. The "Shoowa" is a 100 knot rug using Tibetan wool, mohair, and silk and woven in Nepal. It is approximately 6 feet by 8 feet 6 inches in size. (See 'Afro-Tibetan Fusion Rugs' at Landry & Arcari's blog.)

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Related Links:

African Influences In European Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Kuba People, Governors' State University

Kuba Fabrics Online:

Marla Mallet Textiles and Tribal Oriental Rugs

AfricanArt.com

Textiles of Africa

Ethnic Arts

The Niger Bend

Textile Arts

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Why Chinese Carpets, Born On The Steppes, Have Classical Chinese Designs

2010-12-11T03:07:00.000-08:00

BEIJING, Dec. 18, 2010 – Like the other countries of the ancient Silk Roads, China has a rich carpet tradition.

But it is a younger heritage than those of Central and South Asia or the Middle East and very much unlike them.

Because the first pile carpets in China seem to have been woven only some 500 years ago – in the 15th century -- it seems clear pile carpet weaving arrived to China from elsewhere.

The best guess is that the technique traveled up the Silk Road into northwestern China from neighboring East Turkestan.

Northwestern China was, and is, a vast steppe land peopled mostly by Turkic-Mongol peoples. At that time, these steppe lands, which today include Inner Mongolia, were outside the Great Wall protecting China proper.

So, the early carpets were not ethnically "Chinese" -- in the sense of the Han Chinese who lived within the wall (outlined in red here).

But for reasons that still fascinate historians, they almost immediately became a medium for Chinese – not nomadic – art.

And it is that quality which makes Chinese carpets so unlike their more "oriental" relatives.

Carpet scholars Muray L. Eiland Jr. and Muray Eiland III write in their book Oriental Carpets (1998) that "although it is possible that the pile carpet is not indigenous to China and was introduced from Central Asia, its designs have become as classically Chinese as those of textiles of porcelain.

"The same floral forms, of lotus and chrysanthemum, appear repeatedly, while the same simple devices of frets and swastikas are common in the borders. There is a lavish style of mythical animals and scrolling vines and more styles of the repetition of simple geometric figures."

Here is a carpet showing a mix of floral and geometric figures. The carpet is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

The picture at the top of this page is of a naturalistic carpet from around the northwestern town of Ningxia.

That the carpets should become so classically Chinese is surprising because the steppe lands -- which are a rich wool producing region -- had a millennia-old tradition of felt carpet making with its own rich vocabulary of motifs.

But it may be that by the 15th century, the people of northwest China already were heavily influenced by the overwhelming culture of China proper.

It is likely, too, that in many of the main commercial centers for the rugs, such as Ningxia right beside the Great Wall, urban populations were already ethnically mixed.

The rugs woven in northwest China had several markets.

One market was the nomadic lands to the north, Mongolia and beyond, where the rugs were used to decorate yurts.

A second market was Chinese Muslims who needed substitutes for prayer rugs, which were not woven in China.

And the third and richest market – and the one which undoubtedly did the most to determine styles and designs -- was temples and noble homes.

Ningxia rugs, for example, were used extensively in the monasteries of Tibet and northwest China. The temple carpets included Banner rugs, Hanging rugs, Curtain carpets and Pillar carpets.

The Pillar carpets were sometimes made in two halves to fit around a column. Picture here is a column carpet from the 1880s in the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection.

Interestingly, special colors were reserved for special audiences. Yellow was reserved for royal use, such the court and temples, while red was for gift carpets exchanged between aristocrats.

But if these pile carpets are so distinctly Chinese in appearance, does it mean that the indigenous people of the northwest contributed no influence of their own?

Hans Bidder, a German diplomat and carpet historian who lived many years in China before his death in 1963, believes the felt carpet culture of the steppe lands had a great effect on how the pile woven carpets were decorated.

Bidder is particularly intrigued by the way the fields of Chinese carpets so often appear to be blank canvases upon which motifs – from animals to Taoist and Buddhist symbols – are placed in almost 'applique' fashion.

Shown here is a carpet from the northwestern city of Baotou (or Paotou) showing objects in sharp contrast with their background.

Often the motifs stand out so dramatically from the background that almost appear to have been inlaid into the field of the carpet the way motifs are rolled and pressed into the plain backgrounds of felt carpets.

The appearance is sometimes heightened by cutting the pile to put the motifs in even higher relief – a practice that remains very common in Chinese carpets today.

That preference for high relief makes a fascinating link not only to the art sensibilities of the nomadic felt makers but also to a period in China's own history when – due to the Mongol conquests of the 13th century – felt carpets briefly and unexpectedly rose to the level of a court art in Beijing.

Bidder writes that "during the period of Mongol Chinese rule (1260 to 1341) the felt carpet developed into a very luxurious object."

He continues, "in the year 1299 felt carpets with an area of 331 square meters were manufactured for the 'Palace of the Special Chambers' (imperial harem) … felts became so refined and improved in quality that the artistry of felt carpets finally equaled that of the best Oriental carpets and sometimes exceeded it." (Bidder, Carpets from Eastern Turkestan, published 1964.)

It is interesting to speculate on how much this experience may have helped set the subsequent taste for bold, high-relief motifs on knotted rugs. But the impact of Mongol rule on Chinese rugs may have been still larger than that.

Bidder notes that ancient China – the Han peoples within the Great Wall – traditionally associated wool with the barbarian world. Their fabrics of choice were cotton and silk, instead.

Here is a Ming Dynasty carpet that looks much like a silk robe in its pattern.

It was only through centuries of contact with nomads on the northern border that Chinese slowly began to adopt the use of felt mats as utilitarian floor coverings or insulation padding on beds. The example of the Mongol court would have done much to convince Chinese to regard wool as an artistic medium, as well.

Still, when weaving looms for carpets arrived in China, many people still regarded them as something alien.

Bidder, a scholar of Chinese texts, cites the earliest known mention of the technology as noting the "weaving process has been taken over from the barbarians and is performed in their strange way." The book was written sometime in the Ming period of the 14th to 17th centuries.

But if wool carpet weaving took hold relatively late in China, it rapidly developed into a major industry.

The most active centers in the northwest – the ones most early carpets are named after – became the provinces of Kansu, Ningxia, and Suiyan (a now defunct province located in today's Inner Mongolia), as well as another part of Inner Mongolia near the city of Baotou (or Paotou)

These centers thrived in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, setting the stage for the phenomenal growth of the Chinese export carpet industry when China opened to the world and major new weaving centers appeared in Peking and its nearby port Tiantsin.

From historical records, it appears wool looms appeared in Beijing in the early 1860s. There carpet-maker developed new patterns based on Ningxia carpet designs but which progressively responded to Western market demands.

Like the earlier Chinese carpets, the new Peking rugs depicted Chinese symbols and designs used for hundreds of years.

But where the symbols tended to be profuse and cluttered together on domestic rugs, the new rugs spaced them out -- usually around a central medallion -- in harmonious designs more suited to western tastes.

Blue Peking rugs made in Western room sizes gained huge popularity, particularly in America. They were followed by other rugs directly produced for the American market, often by companies owned by American expatriates in China.

The most famous of these "American" exports were the Chinese Art Deco rugs of the 1920s and 1930s. But their success is another story (see: The Jazz Age: Gowns, Tuxedos, And Chinese Art Deco Carpets).

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Khotan Carpets And The Lost Legacy Of The Silk Roads

2010-11-25T04:59:00.000-08:00

KHOTAN, East Turkestan; Dec. 4, 2010 -- In the center of the Asian continent is one of the world's most isolated places.

It is a huge region – larger than Western Europe – and has a millennia-old carpet weaving tradition. Yet even today it is little known in the West because it is so remote.

The place is known historically as East Turkestan and, today, comprises China's eastern-most province, Xinjiang.

From any direction, East Turkestan is hard to reach.

Its heartland, the Tarim Basin, is ringed on three sides -- north, west and south -- by mountain peaks up to 6,000 meters (20,000 feet) high, or about half again the height of Europe's Mont Blanc. That walls it off from Central Asia, Pakistan, and Tibet.

On the fourth side, a vast desert cuts it off from China proper to the east.

But over the millennia, this remote place attracted waves of settlers from all directions. And it was the pivot point of the Silk Roads, where the route from China branched south to India, north to Central Asia, and west to Persia, Anatolia, and Europe.

The history of fused cultures can clearly be seen in East Turkestan's rugs and is what makes them both so fascinating and sui generis.

One example is the rug from the town of Khotan shown at the top of this article. At first glance, it looks vaguely Islamic, vaguely Chinese, and vaguely Indian. In fact, it is all three.

Here is a map of the Tarim Basin, showing Khotan (here spelled Ho-t'ien) at the center of the Tarim Basin's southern edge.

Khotan and all the other major towns of the region are oases fed by mountain rivers that disappear into the Taklamakan desert at the basin's center.

Appreciating East Turkestan's carpets means peeling back layers of history, perhaps to about 1,500 to 1,000 BC. That is when historians believe the earliest agrarian settlers began penetrating into East Turkestan which, at the time, was dominated by Turkic nomads.

The settlers were Indo-Europeans who were members of the same peoples of greater Persia whose wars with the Turkic nomads are chronicled in Persia's epic poem, the Shahnameh. They lived in the oasis towns and adopted Buddhism from India while the nomads roamed over the mountain slopes.

Here is a picture of another Khotan carpet. The carpet is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

The medallions are called Ay Gul, or "moon" motif, and are arranged in a pattern reminiscent of the three lotus seats on which Buddha flanked by two Bodhisattvas is represented in temple art. The border recalls nomadic felt carpet traditions.

Just when weaving began in East Turkestan is unknown. But Western archaeologists have dated the earliest pile carpet fragments found in the Tarim Basin to about the third century AD. The fragments were found at Buddhist sites excavated by Sir Aurel Stein in Niya, an oasis east of Khotan, around 1900.

During their history, the Buddhist oasis towns would be repeatedly overrun by powerful Turkic nomadic confederations, notably the Hsiung-nu (or Xiongnu) in the second century BC. But the nomads were content to levy tribute without changing the towns' culture or their role as middlemen for the Silk Roads.

Similarly, China, which increasingly dominated the oasis states from the second to fourth centuries BC, had no interest at that time in colonizing or in spreading Chinese culture to them, unlike today.

Instead, the Chinese were interested in maintaining garrisons to guard their Silk Road trade and assure their own imports of jade, which the mountain rivers bring down to the Tarim Basin. Whenever the rival Tibetan Empire displaced the Chinese, it too left the oasis states largely independent.

The first real changes came about with the waves of Turkic conquests which began in the ninth century as huge new confederations of nomads mobilized for the westward migrations that would change the face of Eurasia.

As the Turkic tribes adopted Islam, they also forced the conversion of the Buddhist oases, imposed their language, and created East Turkestan as we know it now.

But if the conquests and later settling of the region by the Turks, and definitively by the Uigur Turks, brought new religious and cultural influences, it did not mean the end of the old artistic ones.

Rug expert Hans Bidder writes in his landmark book Carpets from Eastern Turkestan (1964):

"Iconoclastic Islam which spread into the oases from middle of the 10th century was indeed able to subdue the religious art of Buddhism, but the new faith proved incapable of gaining any hold upon individual arts and crafts which had their roots in the traditional customs and economic existence of the oases.

"The old carpet weaving craft in Khotan, for example, whose precious fund of designs had been influenced by ten centuries of Indo-Grecian art, freely continued its own path of natural development."

Here is another Khotan carpet, this one in a "coffered gul" pattern.

Bidder writes that "the coffered gul design, so characteristic of Khotan, dates back to either the Gandhara-Buddhism period, or to an even earlier epoch." (Gandhara, stretching from Kabul to Peshawar, reached its height under Buddhist kings from the 1st to 5th centuries AD.)

He observes that the rosettes in the coffer boxes may be a floral "Khotan modification of a Turkoman Gul," while the border – with its curious multi-colored disintegrating design is Indian-influenced.

Another major influence in the design of many East Turkestan rugs was undoubtedly the patterns on Chinese silks that passed up and down the trade routes.

East Turkestan's carpet trade flourished through the middle ages and into the early modern era as the courts of Turkic rulers patronized the carpet workrooms of the oases. The carpets also found markets in India, Persia and Central Asia as part of the Silk Road trade and absorbed new influences from them in exchange.

But when China occupied the whole of East Turkmenistan in the 1750s, things changed radically. The Chinese court had little interest in pile carpets beyond receiving them as diplomatic gifts and Chinese homes made no use of them at all.

Worse, East Turkestan's incorporation into China cut its economic connections with the west. Commercial weavers who previously imported dyes from India were cut off both from their supplies and their best route for connecting to the fast growing rug market of 19th century Europe.

Here is a photo of one of the most common East Turkestan patterns. It is a carpet woven in Yarkand with a pomegranate-vase design. This and other designs were also woven in the best known of the oasis towns, Kashgar.

Those carpets from East Turkestan which did make their way west usually did so via the mountains into the Russian Empire and on to Central Asia's great carpet market in Samarkand.

By the time they reached Europe, they were generically – along with other Central Asian rugs – termed "Samarkands" and their identity was lost.

Similarly, if they went to Europe via oriental arts dealers in Beijing, they were called Kanju after one of the provinces they passed through on their way to the Chinese capital. That name, too, told nothing of their real origin.

Today, after decades of an isolated and then re-opened communist China, the weaving industry of East Turkestan is so weak that it offers little for carpet enthusiasts.

Commercial workshops are as likely to produce knock-offs of Persian carpets as copies of the region's own designs. If traditional carpets are woven for home use in any numbers, they are rarely seen or remarked upon by travelers.

But the fact that weaving still exists at all in a place so long forgotten by the world's carpet markets is something of a miracle.

Considering how many millennia and changes East Turkestan's weaving culture has already survived, it would be wrong to count it out now.

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Khotan Rugs: Samuel's Antique Rug Gallery

Khotan Rugs: Doris Leslie Blau's 'Samarkand' Gallery

Rags To Riches: The North American Art Of Hooked Rugs

2010-11-11T07:14:00.000-08:00

BOSTON, November 20, 2010 -- It is always fascinating to see how rugs in so many parts of the world originated as practical necessities but evolved into items of art.

One example is hooked rugs.

They are a peculiarly North American creation that began as floor coverings and today are just as likely to be prized wall hangings.

In the process, they have become one of the more enduring handcrafts in Canada and the United States and a medium for endless creativity.

Just how wide ranging they can be is shown in the rug below by Massachusetts artist Margaret Arraj.

It is in the style of a Khotan carpet from east Turkestan in the 1700s, inspired by the original in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Arraj, whose rugs are for sale at her website Mill River Rugs is particularly interested in ethnic floral designs and old textiles.

As she says, her designs “honor the artistic life and tradition of a variety of countries. In this way, they bring us closer to other cultures and times.”

But most hooked rugs do not wander so far from home.

Instead, they take their themes from North American folk culture as they depict flowers, wildlife, people, historical events, geometric patterns or simply express the imagination of the artist.

And in that way, hooked rugs today remain surprisingly close to their origins in the in the 19th century.

Just how hooked rugs evolved in the 1800s is a fascinating story.

Author William Winthrop Kent writes that the earliest forebears of hooked rugs were the floor mats made in Yorkshire, England in the early days of the industrial revolution.

At that time, workers in weaving mills were allowed to collect the excess pieces of yarn that were by-products of the work. The pieces, which were called “thrums” and usually some 9 inches (23 cm) long, were valuable to the workers because yarn in general was expensive and the products of the mills were affordable only to the middle and upper classes.

The mill workers put the thrums to good use.

They pulled the strips of yarn, one by one, through a grid backing to make carpets. The backing was linen or burlap or any other such heavy material and the tool for pulling the yarn through was a simple hook with a wooden handle.

Later, this technique transferred to North America, specifically to New England and the Canadian Maritimes, and flourished.

It became a favorite way for poorer households in these regions to produce colorful floor covering at a time when most 19th century homes had unsightly floors that were hastily cobbled together by the builders from softwood boards of random sizes.

Because yarn was expensive, and always saved for knitting sweaters, poor families without access to thrums usually made their hooked rugs using scraps of ordinary cloth.

But no matter what fabric was used, the hooked rugs were more attractive than the common alternative at the time: inexpensive mats woven from coconut fiber, straw, or corn husks.

Here is an antique hooked rug. It is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

One might expect hooked rugs to have died out once machine-powered carpet weaving, invented in the 1830s, developed sufficiently to produce cheap carpeting in massive volumes. And by the 1870s, machine weaving was doing just that to solve people’s flooring problems.

But instead of disappearing, the pastime of “hooking rugs” passed from being a household chore into a hobby.

Over time, as standards of living improved with the industrial revolution, the materials used in the rugs also upgraded.

By the 1930s, when artists and author Pearl McGown widely popularized the art by publishing formal guidelines for it, the “pile” material had become wool strips and the rugs – as they are still called – had become wall hangings.

In their heyday as a floor covering, hooked rugs were often produced by poorer families and even businesses for sale commercially.

The most ambitious products were hooked carpets of living-room size.

Here is an antique hooked rug – 12.5 feet by 16 feet (3.8 x 4.8 meters) – designed in the style of a baroque European carpet.

Such old pieces today are highly prized and are sold by some dealers in North America as “American Hooked” rugs right alongside antique oriental ones.

And, because there is not enough supply of the large antique hooked rugs to meet demand, there is also a market for reproductions. That's as some American decorators try to recapture the look of New England homes of days gone by, particularly for vacation cottages.

The commercial reproductions, made outside of North America, exist side-by-side with the very active output of rug hooking hobbyists and artists across Canada and the United States.

As always, the hobbyists continue to hook rugs for their friends and family but, unfortunately, only rarely for sale.

For a video demonstration of how hooked rugs are made, and examples of folk art motifs, click on this YouTube link:

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Related Links:

Mill River Rugs: Gallery of New Hooked Rugs

Absolute Rugs: Gallery of Antique Hooked Rugs

Gene Shepherd Rug Hooking Video

Attend the 12th ICOC in Sparkling Stockholm: June 16-19, 2011

2010-11-03T03:16:00.000-07:00

By Dennis Dodds, Secretary General of the ICOC

We invite you join us for the International Conference on Oriental Carpets' big events in Stockholm, Copenhagen and St. Petersburg. The deadline for the 'Early Bird' Registration discount is just 30 days away!

Book before December 1st and enjoy considerable savings. At the conference, hear educational lectures from international experts, greet old friends and meet new ones. Visit a robust International Dealers’ Fair of antique rugs and see exhibitions of Caucasian, Anatolian and Persian rugs and textiles from private collections. A special display of rare Turkmen carpets and trappings is also being organized.

Feast your eyes on the world famous ‘Marby’ rug (pictured here) and 17th century Turkish ‘Transylvanian’ rugs, glorious "Polonaise" carpets, tapestries, colorful 18th century Swedish folk textiles and the exquisite Safavid silk velvet coat that belonged to Queen Christina...and this is just a sampling!

Visits to several museum exhibitions include the Royal Palace with their vast collections of fine art. Day-excursions to Stockholm’s many splendid cultural and historic sites will be available.

An art-filled pre-conference tour takes you to Copenhagen, Denmark and the incomparable David Collection, considered one of the world’s finest collections of Islamic art, including carpets and textiles.

Your amazing post-conference tour of 5 nights and 4 fabulous days to the incomparable city of St. Petersburg, Russia, will cap off an unforgettable ICOC experience. See the Pazyryk carpet and other rare textiles, carpets and collections of great art in the magnificent setting of the Hermitage Museum, with informative programs presented exclusively for ICOC participants. An exhibition of Central Asian carpet masterpieces from the Russian Ethnographic Museum’s celebrated vaults, the Kunstkamera Museum of Peter the Great and tours of Czarist country palaces will make this a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Evenings in Stockholm, Copenhagen and St. Petersburg (with its ‘white nights’) will be filled with festive receptions. June is an ideal time to visit these wonderful cities with their rivers, canals and cultural attractions. Please join us in making this 12th ICOC an educational and memorable travel experience. For more general information about ICOC, go to: www.ICOC-orientalrugs.org

To book your discount registration before the deadline, go to: www.ICOC2011stockholm.se

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Kabul's Old City Gets A Facelift

2010-10-13T07:58:00.000-07:00

KABUL, October 16, 2010 -- Kabul has been so damaged by wars and pell-mell rebuilding that it's hard to remember this was once a pretty city with elegant mud-brick mansions, elaborate carved-wood lattice windows, and shady courtyards.

But some of the old neighborhoods still exist, hidden away in what today are the poorest parts of town.

To find them means going to the very center of Kabul, where a bazaar the locals call "Titanic" appears each summer in the dry gulch of the Kabul River, then disappears again with the spring floods.

There, you have to duck behind the Soviet-era buildings and concrete-box shops surrounding the bazaar and plunge into a labyrinth of smoky, noisy lanes. As the smoke from the blacksmiths' forges stings your eyes and the hammering rings in your ears, you reach the neighborhood of Murad Khane.

For decades, this neighborhood of once-grand homes was so neglected that it literally fell into ruin. The mud-brick homes crumbled around the residents as they became too destitute to repair them. Some of the largest homes turned into cheap warehouse space for the nearby bazaar and their courtyards became dumping sites for trash from other parts of town.

But now, Murad Khane is reviving. Since 2006, it has been the focus of a major renovation effort funded mostly by private international donors. And as its buildings return to view, the neighborhood is becoming one of the city's most charming historical treasures.

Rory Brown, the development officer for the project, says the task of just digging out the trash has been prodigious. "Since 2006, we have removed almost 20,000 cubic meters of rubbish from the streets, courtyards, and sites of collapsed buildings in Murad Khane," he says. "In places, that has meant the street level has dropped by up to 2 meters."

Here is a picture of one of the neighborhood's landmark buildings, the "Peacock House," after extensive restoration. A 'before' picture of the house is at the top of this article.

The recovery is part of a $25 million effort by the Kabul-based Turquoise Mountain project and the brainchild of two well-known British personalities.

One is the Prince of Wales, who famously dislikes modern architecture, and the other is Rory Stewart, Turquoise Mountain's founder. Stewart walked across Afghanistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban to write the best-selling book "The Places In Between" and, like Prince Charles, admires Afghanistan's cultural and artistic traditions and wants to help revive them.

The Peacock House is named for the motif of peacocks that appears on its carved wood facade. Like many of the other landmark buildings in Murad Khane, it dates to the 1920s, when dozens of buildings with elaborate wood carvings were erected by rich families.

The district itself was long associated with the royal palace that stands nearby. Afghanistan's founding ruler, Ahmad Shah Durrani, built several buildings there in the 18th century to house members of his court and it remained a prestigious address for centuries afterward.

The aim in restoring Murad Khane now is both to save the centrally located district from being bulldozed to make room for new buildings and to find a new life for some of the finest structures as a crafts school. Fifteen of the buildings will provide the campus of the Institute for Afghan Arts and Architecture, which will not only teach new generations of artisans but also help provide a sustainable economy for the rest of the district.

This student at the Institute for Afghan Arts and Architecture practices calligraphy.

At the same time, the urban-renewal project has built a primary school in Murad Khane, provided the neighborhood with electricity, water, sewerage, emergency repairs on private houses, and now is completing a women's community center. All the work has created near full employment in the neighborhood.

In one of the restored buildings, the institute's ceramic school is already up and running. Its teacher and headmaster is Abdul Matin, who graduated from the school last year.

Matin says one of the most difficult things for the students to master is the traditional glaze that gives Afghan ceramics their characteristic blue-green coloring. The glaze is based on a plant that grows in northern Afghanistan called "gaz" and which requires many steps to process before it delivers a rich range of colors from yellow to green.

"Actually, we don't burn the [plants] ourselves, but the people of Hairaton in [northern] Balkh Province collect them, ignite them, and collect their coal," Matin says. "We purchase the coal, then we heat it by adding some special products and next crush the coal into powder in a special machine. Once we have the powder, we can use it as a glaze."

Matin, a native of the nearby village of Istalif, which is traditionally famous for its ceramics, operates his own pottery business in addition to teaching. His studies at the school prepared him to do that by including not just pottery classes in the three-year curriculum but also general art history and design classes, business classes, and even English-language lessons.

Pictured here is one of the woodwork teachers at the Institute for Afghan Arts and Architecture.

The comprehensive education the school offers has made it a magnet for would-be artisans across the country, despite its small size. The total student body is only 120 students, with some 30 places in each of the four craft areas of ceramics, woodworking, jewelry-making, and miniature-painting.

Khan Etebari, a spokesman for Turquoise Mountain, says each year the Institute for Afghan Arts and Architecture gets hundreds more applicants than it has places.

"Each year we announce the process of institute enrollment and on the average we receive between 800 up to 1,200 applications for 30 seats," Etebari says.

Unlike traditional apprenticeship programs in Afghanistan, where a student begins to study under a master at 12 and completes his training with almost no other education by 18, the new art institute only takes students who already have graduated from high school. The arts-and-crafts education at the institute is so complete that it has received Britain's demanding City and Guilds Accreditation, which certifies the quality of the students' work.

For now, as reconstruction in Murad Khane continues, the institute's three other schools remain housed in an old fort the Turquoise Mountain renovated elsewhere in Kabul as a temporary quarters. The older students there may or may not ever see the new campus being prepared for them before they graduate.

Here is one of the restored buildings in Murad Khane that will serve as part of the new campus of the arts school.

But the teachers say that all the students of the new art institute have one thing in common that previous generations of artisans in Afghanistan lacked. That is, the possibility of making a successful commercial living in their own country when previously many had to flee to find work elsewhere.

Haji Aslam, the head of the school of jewelry and gem-cutting, was trained by his father, who was a jeweler to the Afghan court. But he spent much of his own professional life as a refugee in Pakistan because of Afghanistan's recent decades of turmoil.

"[The economy] wasn't good, it was collapsing, and then all of us became refugees and headed toward the neighboring countries of Pakistan and Iran because there was a big fight here," Aslam says. "Our own home got hit with a rocket; my kids were injured and we couldn't live here."

Aslam says that today the jewelry business is good in Kabul, for both modern and traditional styles, and he believes his students will not have to live as he did.

It is an optimistic thought in a country still struggling with an insurgency and major economic problems. But such optimism seems fully at home in the newly awakened neighborhood of Murad Khane.

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Turquoise Mountain Foundation

Strong Sales But Low Investments Spell Trouble For Afghan Carpet Producers

2010-10-02T04:43:00.000-07:00

KABUL, October 2, 2010 – Sales are good in Kabul, where both large numbers of foreigners and newly prosperous Afghans create a steady business for carpet dealers.

In Najeb Zarab market, where wholesale and retail carpet shops fill the inner courtyard of a large building, the famous red-and-black weavings so characteristic of northern Afghanistan reign supreme.

NATO and U.S. soldiers come looking for souvenirs and buy a six-square-meter Khal Mohammadi design for $ 2,000 or two of them for $ 3,000.

And Afghan shoppers come for rugs to fill their reception rooms or give as gifts. During the recent Eid holidays, the shop owners say, business was particularly brisk.

But if the fast turnover suggests good times for Afghan rug merchants, that is only half the story.

Many will tell you that the sales only hide a very worrisome business trend. And that is the flight of capital investment from their industry. Without new investment, they fear, the country's still just revived carpet sector will shrink despite the strong market demand.

Subhan Gul is CEO of Hali Weavers, a young company that has exhibited its products at international trade shows such as Domotex in Hannover and won awards for its design innovations.

A visitor might expect him to be upbeat about his success, and he is. But he also surprises guests with the extent of his concern about the future.

In previous decades, Subhan says, when he and many other Afghan weavers were based in refugee camps in Pakistan, there was virtually no domestic Afghan market for rugs. But unlike today there was plenty of investment money.

In those days, wealthy Afghans who fled the country to escape its wars needed somewhere to put their money to work. And in Pakistan they often put it into the refugee carpet industry since they lacked the contacts needed to invest it in other sectors of the Pakistani economy.

The returns for the investors were good because, at that time, the global economy was strong. Afghan weavers in Pakistan enjoyed notable successes, including launching the now famous chobi design which swept the export market with bold Indo-Persian designs and natural dyes.

The chobi, which appeared some 10 years ago, still remains one of the best selling carpet designs in the world today.

But as Afghan refugees have returned in large numbers to Afghanistan over the past decade, the investment possibilities for those with money have broadened considerably.

Subhan says that these days faster returns can be made by investing in virtually any kind of business that imports consumer goods. The number of shops – from kiosks to a shopping mall complete with escalators – that now fill Kabul's streets offers a measure of how much investment has gone that way.

The impact of the capital flight out of the carpet industry is compounded by a number of other factors, particularly the difficulty of getting bank loans as an alternative. The interest rate for commercial bank loans in Afghanistan today runs 13 to 14 percent. That is compared to just 2.5 to 3 percent in Pakistan, but loan shopping across the border requires the borrower to first be a Pakistani citizen.

Some of the other factors complicating the Afghan producer's finances are the high tax of 15 percent which the Kabul government levies on sales (and which is collected annually when companies renew their licenses); the lack of any government rebates on exports; and a crushing level of bureaucracy which means producers spend some 15 days processing their export documentation for each consignment.

Here is a detail of the weaving on the border of one of Afghanistan's popular red-and-black rugs, a Konduz-Waziri woven in Konduz province.

Afghan carpet producers say they will need new investment if they are ever to complete the process of rebuilding their industry at home. Afghanistan has yet to establish high-quality cutting and finishing facilities comparable to those in Pakistan and much of that downstream work continues to be done at high cost across the border.

New investment is also needed to build up Afghanistan's dye industry and develop its wool sector further. Most of the wool used in Afghan weaving today comes from New Zealand, despite the country having its own famous Ghazni wool which is highly prized by foreign customers.

And, perhaps most of all, investment is needed for that all important activity of any industry: advertising. Without it, and publicity about the uniqueness of the weavers' work, Afghanistan will almost certainly lose ground to powerhouses like China and India which are ready and able to duplicate the Afghans' most successful designs.

For now, the Afghan weavers, many of whom are ethnic Turkmen like Subhan, rely upon the timeless appeal of their traditional red-and-black rugs -- the famous "red rugs" of Central Asia. One of them, a Konduz-Waziri is shown here.

They also are counting upon their ability to keep innovating with the best-selling chobi pattern. Some of the current innovations include add-ons such as silk and gold thread or embossed motifs, and trying different washing techniques such as 'golden wash' to add depth of color and tone.

But if tradition and innovation seem to be enough to keep sales booming for now, they are not enough to make anyone complacent about the future. Instead, without the missing third ingredient – new capital – they may be only enough to stand still in an industry where standing still means losing ground.

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Hali Weavers

Isfahan And The Safavids' Design Of The World

2010-08-20T00:18:00.000-07:00

ISFAHAN, August 21, 2010 -- If there is a single phrase that best evokes Safavid art, it might be "orderly excess."

Curiously, that is the same phrase that could be used to describe European art at the height of the Safavid Empire in the 17th century: Baroque.

But if Persia, too, had a Baroque period and Safavid carpets and other art forms show it, how did it develop and what was its goal?

The greatest builder of the Safavid era – Shah Abbas I – left the answers in a single place for both his contemporaries and for us to see.

The place is Isfahan, one of the world's most famous planned cities.

In Isfahan, his capital, Shah Abbas sought to create a vision that would symbolize his empire.

That was in line with the tradition of dynasties everywhere, but Abbas went further than most.

He wanted to unify his empire by giving its diverse peoples a strong national and religious identity, so he transformed the heart of his capital city into an idealized place they would affiliate with.

And he gave it an unforgettable, almost unworldly, beauty by combining the two artistic elements that do the same for Safavid carpets.

They are: designs with an almost mathematical sense of order combined with effusive use of colors and patterns as decoration.

The effect is to make heavy structures light, whether they are carpets or massive buildings.

Here is a picture of one of the walls of the Mosque of Sheikh Lotfollah, the first mosque built by Shah Abbas when he permanently moved his capital to Isfahan in 1598.

Kim Sexton of the Dept. of Architecture at the University of Arkansas sums up the trick neatly in an article entitled Isfahan – Half the World:

"The application of colored tile patterning (i.e. curvilinear arabesques, floral designs, kufic inscriptions, and imitation tile "carpets") hides a building's structure.

"It prevents the viewer from contemplating the workings of the physical laws which keep the building standing up. Thus, a huge building can be made to seem rather weightless, like an otherworldly miracle hovering on earth."

The trick -- equally known to Baroque artists in Europe -- was not unique in Persia to the Safavids. But it is fair to say that they used it to lift structures to previously unknown heights.

In Isfahan, Shah Abbas heightened the effect still further by organizing some of his greatest buildings around a single city square – a square that with only a little imagination can itself be thought of as a grand Safavid carpet.

The original name of the square is Naqsh-i Jahan, or Design of the World. Measuring 165 meters by 500 meters, it is one of the largest city squares ever built.

That alone represented extraordinary city planning at a time when Abbas' contemporaries were Elizabeth of England and Suleiman the Magnificent and cities usually grew haphazardly by themselves beyond the royal palace.

But the square was extraordinary in other ways, too.

For one, it was truly a shared public space, used for everything from exclusive royal polo matches to popular carnivals. The shah's palace looked out over the square, with a broad verandah for viewing the events below.

The Imperial Palace occupied the entire west side of the enclosed and arcaded square. But it also shared the space with the two other great institutions of Safavid society, the mosque and the bazaar.

Just as weavers might do, the city planners placed all these institutions like motifs around the square's border.

Directly across from the palace is the mosque of Sheikh Lotfollah, the first new mosque to be built in the new capital. It was completed in 1618 as a private mosque for the members of the Shah's harem and so has no minarets.

The stunning ceiling of the mosque shows how much decorated tiles could lift a building's interior, as well as exterior, to seemingly boundless heights.

Here is a photo of the dome interior. The picture at the top of this article shows the details of the ceiling pattern.

The design of the ceiling, with its central sunburst medallion, is highly reminiscent of some contemporaneous carpet designs, showing the high degree of unity in Safavid art style across different media.

On the north and south ends of the square are two other great mosques and, on the north end, too, is the entrance to the Grand Bazaar.

Both the mosques are worth mentioning in their own right.

The mosque at the north end, the Imperial Mosque (now Imam Mosque), is an entirely Safavid construction completed in 1629.

The dome in the main prayer hall is 36 meters high, creating an echo chamber where scientists have measured up to 49 repetitions, only 12 of which are audible to the human ear.

Here is a view of the square from the Imam Mosque. The mosque itself is turned at an angle to the square so as to face Mecca.

At the south end is the Great Friday Mosque, which is much older. It was built when Isfahan was the capital of the Seljuk Empire (1038-1194) that stretched from Central Asia to Syria. It was partly redecorated in Safavid style to harmonize with the other buildings.

The Friday mosque is the largest mosque in Iran and has a central fountain that resembles the Kaaba in Mecca, so prospective pilgrims can practice their rituals before the Haj.

It is interesting to see how the square's designers found a way to visually integrate buildings as varied as mosques, bazaars, and palaces into a single great square.

They did so by highlighting something common to all of them: the iwan.

An iwan is a vaulted arch that has been used in Persian architecture since time immemorial. It was originally used for public buildings, including palaces, but under the Seljuks became part of mosques as well.

Here is a picture of an iwan, with the addition of two minarets, in the courtyard of Isfahan's Great Friday mosque.

It was the Seljuks who first placed iwans at the center of all four sides of a mosque's inner courtyard, creating a unique design that today architects call the 'four-iwan mosque'.

Eventually, the 'four-iwan mosque' design swept the eastern Islamic world, giving its mosques a look as distinctly their own as the Byzantine-based dome mosques of the Ottomans or the columned-hall (peristyle) mosques of the western Islamic world.

To tie together the varied buildings in their 'Design of the World,' the Safavids erected giant iwans as gateways in each of the square's four sides.

As Sexton notes, that made the entire square look like the courtyard of a four-iwan mosque, giving everything inside it -- including the centers of political and commercial power -- a sanctified feel.

That sense of a divinely ordained order increased the Shah's power and his subjects' loyalty the same way arguments that kings ruled by "divine right" increased monarchs' power in Europe.

The beauty of Isfahan staggered people of the time, including European ambassadors and traders who lived in the city.

Here is a portrait of one of Shah Abbas' successors, Shah Suleiman I, depicted with courtiers and visitors in Isfahan in 1670

Thomas Herbert, who was part of Britain's first embassy in Isfahan in 1627 famously remarked "I have thought of writing a book about it, but nobody at home in Yorkshire would ever believe..."

He went on to write a book anyway, 'Travels in Persia,' which was published in 1634 to great success.

The famous half-rhyme Esfahan nesf-é jahan (Isfahan is half the world) was coined by a visiting French poet, Renier.

Persian wags said later that he described Isfahan as only half the world because he had seen only half the city.

(In the panorama of the square at the top of this article, the mosque of Sheikh Lotfollah is on the left, Ali Qapu palace is on the right, and the Imperial – now Imam - mosque is at the back.)

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Isfahan – Half the World, by Prof. Kim S. Sexton, Univ. Of Arkansas

Safavid Floral and Polonaise Carpets: When Persian Rugs Came To Europe

2010-08-06T03:54:00.000-07:00

AMSTERDAM, August 7, 2010 – Sometime before the end of the 16th century, Persian carpets – with their signature floral designs -- burst into European interiors.

It was a dramatic entrance and European artists recorded it.

For centuries, they had painted portraits of wealthy families with geometric Anatolian carpets. Now, they began to depict families with Persian carpets instead.

Above is a painting of the children of English King Charles I by Anthony Van Dyck in 1637.

The change of taste was no accident.

This was a time when European seafarers had finally established routine connections with Persia, India, and China.

It was a time, too, when the Safavid Empire was actively promoting the production of luxury export goods, including silk textiles and carpets.

The two sides came together in places like the port of Hormuz, held by the Portuguese and also used by Dutch traders.

So, it is in paintings of wealthy Portugese, Dutch, and Spanish homes by artists such as Velásquez, Rubens, and Vermeer that the newly arriving Persian carpets most often appear.

The Persian floral carpets often had medallions. But many were also of a new type developed in Persia at this time. They were carpets whose whole field was covered with floral and vine patterns with no medallions at all.

Perhaps the most appealing of these were the so-called Vase Carpets, whose flowers were arranged in either real or imaginary vases. Here is one example.

The full-field floral carpets were a huge success in Europe and, like floral medallion carpets, continue to be one of the most popular formats for Persian rugs today.

At the same time, the new design was exported to Mughal India, where it inspired a whole range of similar full-field styles – dubbed Indo-Persian – that were shipped in large quantities to Europe.

Just how successful an innovation the Safavid vase carpets were can be judged by the value modern collectors attach to them.

This year, a vase carpet – with imaginary vases – sold for just short of $ 10 million dollars, the most money every paid for a rug sold at an auction.

Here is a picture of the carpet. (See: $ 10 Million Persian Carpet Sets New Auction Record.)

The vase carpets were woven in Kirman, whose weavers were particularly innovative during the Safavid era. They developed a special loom setting that gave a wavy finish to the surface of such carpets, adding to the appeal.

European travelers to Persia at this time often remarked on the system of court workshops in cities like Kirman, Isfahan, and Kashan which produced luxury rugs.

Their production reached a zenith under Shah Abbas I (reigned 1587-1629), who was famous for his interest in the arts. Like the earlier Shah Tahmasp, he is believed to have enjoyed designing some carpet motifs himself.

This picture of Shah Abbas is from a ceiling fresco that decorates one of the pavilions in his palace complex in Isfahan.

The royal workshops produced carpets for the palace and mosques as well as gifts for neighboring monarchs and foreign dignitaries.

Some of those gifts, such as a medallion carpet sent to the Doge of Venice, survive in museums today.

So do other priceless carpets that appear to have been commissioned especially from Persian workshops at this time by some European families.

The most famous of the commissioned rugs are the so-called "Polonaise" carpets, such as this one in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It is a floral carpet with an overlying pattern of compartments formed by overlapping cartouches. The pile is silk, highlighted with gold and silver brocading, all in muted colors.

The carpets were termed Polonaise by 19th century carpet collectors because their origin in Isfahan was forgotten over the centuries.

When, in 1878, a carpet similar to this one was exhibited in Paris, it was widely assumed that the coats of arms woven into the rug were Polish and that the rug was made in Poland.

E. J. Brill's First Encyclopedia of Islam (published 1913 – 1936) notes that the carpets were "erroneously connected with an 18th century workshop in Scucz where brocaded girdles in Persian style were made."

That error may be more understandable than it at first seems.

One reason is that the design of the carpets shows a certain adaption to European tastes – something not everyone would expect of an early 17th century Persian weaving.

But it is interesting to know that as early as 1601 Sigismund of Poland is documented to have ordered such a carpet. And that suggests Persian producers and European customers may have come to know each others' tastes from very early on.

The finely-knotted silk carpets woven in the time of Shah Abbas are rarely represented in European paintings, because – unlike the floral carpets that often made their way into interior scenes - they were doubtless very unusual in European homes.

But at least one painting does exist that shows the kind of ultimate Persian carpet a wealthy merchant family could hope to acquire.

The picture is A Lady playing the Theorbo by Gerard Terborch, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The silk carpet is spread over the table on which the lady's cavalier is sitting.

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Persia.Org: Safavid Carpets Photo Gallery

The World's Most Famous Museum Carpet: The Ardabil

2010-07-15T04:15:00.000-07:00

LONDON; July 17, 2010 – The world's museums are full of splendid carpets but the most famous of all is the Ardabil.

One big reason is simply its size: 38 feet long (11.5 meters) by 18 feet wide (5.5 meters).

That is so large that the curators of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London had to make a choice.

They could either keep it on permanent display or not display it at all, because it would be far too much work to just bring it out occasionally.

So, the V&A built a special gallery for it where it is spread in its full glory across the floor and is protected by a glass box.

The Arbabil draws huge numbers of visitors every year and that brings us to the second reason for its fame.

It has a stunning floral medallion design whose center seems to radiate like a sun, transforming the world around it into a sacred-feeling space.

There are very few people who do not feel its power.

On the carpet is an inscription which reads:

I have no refuge in the world other than thy threshold.

There is no protection for my head other than this door.

The strength of the carpet is no accident.

It is one of a pair of matching rugs woven around 1539-50 for a shrine to the spiritual father of Persia's Safavid Empire. It was intended to be, and is, a symbol of power, respect, and holiness on an imperial scale.

How the Ardabil survived almost 500 years and finally came to a London museum is a fascinating story in itself.

But telling it means first describing the origins of the Safavid Empire and the man whose shrine it was made for.

The shrine, in the northwestern city of Ardabil, not far from Tabriz, honors Shaykh Safi al-Din, who died in 1334.

The Shaykh was a plain-living Sufi mystic who inspired a large following at a time when Tabriz was the center of a powerful Turkic state.

His followers remained loyal to his family after his death and the movement grew until, 150 years later, one of its leaders was strong enough to launch a revolution.

That leader was Shah Isma'il, who seized Tabriz in 1501 and, within a decade, all of Persia.

He and his followers, known as Qizilbash (Redheads) for their distinctive turbans with a tall and slender red cone, were messianic warriors who made their brand of Islam, which by now had become mainstream Shi'ism, their empire's state religion.

Ismail and his warriors were Turkmen and spoke a Turkic dialect close to today's Azerbaijani.

But they also were fluent in Persian, the empire's administrative language, making them acceptable to much of the landed gentry.

They dubbed their empire the Safavid – after Shaykh Safi – and it lasted until 1722.

The Safavids inherited the court workshops of Tabriz, Herat, and other leading cities from Persia's previous dynasties and soon began creating their own royal masterpieces.

The design of the Ardabil carpet, woven under Ismail's son, Shah Tahmasp, shows many of the artistic trends already evident in the earlier Timurid era.

Most striking are the resemblance of its medallion design to the format of contemporaneous book covers and the resemblance of its floral pattern to floral designs in miniature paintings.

Here is a miniature painting by one of the most famous artists of Shah Tahmasp's time, Mirza Ali.

It depicts the musician Barbad who hid in the branches of a tree to audition for one of Persia's legendary early shahs after he had been barred from the court by the ruler's jealous leading singer.

The artist has given the figures from ancient times the distinctive Qizilbash turbans of the Safavid court.

Many art historians believe that some miniature paintings not only inspired carpet designs but that some illuminators may also have directly designed carpet patterns.

That is because leading court artists freely crossed between artistic disciplines to help create or influence a unified "court style" identified with a particular monarch.

According to E. J. Brill's comprehensive First Encyclopedia of Islam (published 1913 – 1936), "under Shah Tahmasp excellent painters were employed to sketch carpet cartoons and they introduced human figures and genies into the designs, especially of the large hunting carpets." (see Portable Paradises: The World Of Safavid Garden Carpets)

Interestingly, Shah Tahmasp himself was an accomplished amateur artist who is often said to have designed carpets. He was trained, like many Persian nobles in "the arts of the book," including calligraphy and illustration, and kept a retinue of artists around him.

The twin Ardabil carpets were woven, most likely in Tabriz, when Shah Tahmasp undertook the expansion of the shrine in the late 1530s.

The goal was to expand it as a place of pilgrimage but also, some historians believe, to provide a burial chamber for Tahmasp himself.

Here is a diagram of the floor plan of the Ardabil shrine showing the two carpets' placement.

In fact, Tahmasp was not buried at the shrine, but the idea of creating a mausoleum might help account for the inscription which appears on both carpets.

The inscription (quoted above) is a couplet by the fourteenth-century lyric poet Hafiz. Under it appears the name of the master artist who apparently oversaw the massive weaving project, Maqsud of Kashan.

But how did one of the splendid Ardabil carpets come to rest in a London museum?

In fact, both of them arrived in England around 1893 virtually in tatters. For centuries they had withstood heavy wear in the shrine but as Persia's fortunes rose and fell both they and the shrine were badly neglected.

Carpet historians believe – though no documents prove it -- that both pieces were sold around 1890 to the English carpet producer Ziegler & Co., which had workshops in the northwestern Iranian city of Sultanabad.

The shrine's curators are presumed to have sold the carpets to pay for repairs to the building after it suffered heavy earthquake damage

A British carpet broker then acquired both pieces and used parts of one to repair the other. The result was one 'complete' carpet and one incomplete.

The complete carpet came to the attention of the V&A. There, William Morris, the pioneer of the British Arts and Crafts Movement and one of the V&A's Art Referees, pressed hard for the museum to buy it.

The V&A did so partly by using a public subscription to raise the then vast sum of £2,000.

The existence of its incomplete twin was kept secret by a succession of private owners for many years. It was only revealed publicly in 1931 at an exposition in London.

The "secret" carpet – smaller than the V&A's and borderless – eventually passed into the hands of American industrialist J. Paul Getty and from there to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

It too, is a marvel but due to the ironies of fate, must live forever in the shadow of its better-known twin.

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Portable Paradises: The World Of Safavid Garden Carpets

2010-07-01T04:06:00.000-07:00

TABRIZ, July 3, 2010 – There are few things more appealing than a portable paradise.

So appealing, in fact, that in the early decades of the Safavid dynasty in Persia, portable paradises were not only created, they were taken to the highest level of royal art.

The paradises were lush gardens full of trees and animals and they were portable because they were carpets.

They could be rolled out at will in a noble's tent as he campaigned in dry and parched landscapes and instantly the setting would be transformed into a dreamscape of the highest refinement.

The Safavid paradise carpets contained forests of cypress trees and flowering trees teeming with leopards, lions, deer, peacocks, and flying birds. There were fantastic creatures as well, including Chinese phoenixes and sometimes houris.

Some of the carpets were with medallions and some without. When there was a medallion, it might be transformed into a pool with ducks floating on its surface.

How appealing the gardens were can be easily seen in the picture of one of them above. It is a part of a carpet that today exists in two halves, one in a Paris museum and one in Cracow.

Exactly why so much attention and expense was lavished upon garden carpets at this moment in Persia's long history is unknown. But the answer may be in the fact that the times were tumultuous and the first Safavid Shahs, who were still consolidating their empire, had to spend much of their lives in the field.

Here is a photo of a now lost fragment of another Persian carpet which once belonged to Hungarian tycoon Baron Hatvany. It was lost in the turmoil of the 1930s.

The central medallion of the carpet fragment depicts the encampment of a shah on a military campaign or hunting party. The garden around it is fanciful but the details of the royal pavilion are true to life.

Venetian traveler Michele Membré described the encampment of the second Safavid Shah – Shah Tahmasp - in his account 'Mission to the Lord Sophy of Persia (1539–1542).' He describes a ruler who spent so much of his time campaigning that it was his camp, not the capital city, that was the focus of royal life:

“The tents which Shah Tahmasp had in his company were many, according to what I was able to count with my own eyes he seemed to have 5,000. Of horsemen, as it seemed to me, he had 14,000 in number, without counting servants. Of horses and mules he had so many that they could not be counted. All the plains were full of animals.”

He goes on to say that the royal tents or pavilions were “made of sticks of gilded wood in the form of a dome and covered with scarlet. Upon the cloth is foliae, cut out and sewn with silk. Within, on the ground there was a red felt, lined with a kind of wool canvas, and over the said felt there were very fine carpets of silk, on which appeared figures of many animals and foliage.”

The complex of royal pavilions included an audience chamber -- or divan -- a bath, sleeping quarters and not far away a tent for the miniature painters who were part of the Shah's retinue. The presence of the painters allowed the Shah, who was an amateur painter himself, both to enjoy painting as a pastime and to receive reports on the progress of the royal illuminated manuscripts he commissioned.

In other words, this was a time not only of portable paradise carpets, but of portable court life in toto. The miniature painters whose company the Shah enjoyed produced what was the most valued art of all: illustrated books of poetry or tales of past kings. The books, too, were a moveable feast for the eyes.

Here is a miniature painting showing precisely the sort of royal encampment seen in the medallion of the garden carpet and described by the Venetian traveler. The painting is part of Shah Tahmasp's Shahnameh, the book he commissioned to illustrate the poet Firdawsi's epic saga of Persia's kings. It was painted circa 1525.

It is interesting to note that the first two Safavid shahs – Shah Ismail and his son Shah Tahmasp – were so busy campaigning that they, in fact, largely neglected their official capitals.

Art historian Sussan Babaie describes how much so in the book "Hunt for Paradise: Court Arts of Safavid Iran 1501-1576" that accompanied a major exhibition of early Safavid art in New York in 2003/2004.

She writes that “in the historiography of late medieval and early modern Persianate architecture, the 16th century appears to be an anomaly. No single building from the period, for example, could remotely compete with the monumental achievements in the arts of the book (the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp) or of weaving (the Ardebil carpet).”

One reason why both Shahs may have neglected their capital Tabriz was that it was on the frontline of their continual struggles with the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottomans captured and looted the city several times, so making investments in the usual fixed forms of royal art – large monumental buildings – was decidedly risky. Tahmasp finally moved the capital to the safer city of Qazvin but remained more interested in the portable arts than in architecture.

At the same time, both of the earliest Safavid shahs may have preferred the relative privacy of portable art for both religious and political reasons.

Babaie notes "the war-ravaged state of affairs in the newly minted empire and the messianic zeal of the young Ismail whose dream of establishing a divinely inspired utopian empire on earth precluded public displays of wealth and consumption."

Later Safavid Shahs settled down to a more traditional royal life and built great monuments. Most notable of all was Shah Abbas I, who moved the capital to Isfahan in 1598 and created a model of urban beauty.

But throughout the Safavid period, which lasted until 1736, garden carpets remained highly popular. So much so, that their changes in design to some extent reflect the changes in Safavid royal life itself.

Here is a carpet from the 1600s which contrasts dramatically with those of the century before. The free-ranging forest dreamscape has given way to an orderly orchard with irrigation canals and a central pool.

The carpet, named the “Wagner” Garden Carpet after a German collector, is said to be reminiscent of the royal gardens in Isfahan. It is filled with fruit trees, leopards, gazelles, and even pigeons and butterflies, but it is definitely not portable. Its size is immense: 5.5 meters by 4.3 meters.

It would be wrong to leave the subject of garden carpets without noting that – while they reached a peak of refinement in the Safavid era – both gardens and their depictions have always been part of Persian culture and remain so today.

The first recorded garden carpet can be traced back to the 6th century AD and the Ctesiphon Palace of the Sassanian King Khosrow I.

His carpet – in fact a huge embroidery – used multi-colored jewels to depict flowers and stones bright as crystal to depict running streams. The branches of the trees were of gold and silver thread and leaves were of silk. Unfortunately, the carpet was destroyed in the Arab conquest of Iran, when it was torn up and shared out as war booty.

Here is a photo of another garden carpet, from the second half of the 16th century. It is the Mantes carpet, named after the Church of Mantes outside of Paris where it was discovered before being moved to the Louvre Museum.

Interestingly, the use of the word "paradise" in connection with a garden can be traced back very far indeed – to the time of Cyrus the Great.

Around 540 BC, Cyrus built the largest and most beautiful garden ever recorded at his capital Pasargade, northeast of Shiraz. It was enclosed to keep certain animals in and others out and had rows of fruit trees, shrubs and flower beds. Some of its stone watercourses survive to this day.

Cyrus called his garden a “Paradaiza,” or literally an "enclosed park." The word passed into ancient Greek and from there into most European languages.

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Hungary’s Private Collectors Exhibit Their Carpets In Budapest

2010-06-14T08:53:00.000-07:00

BUDAPEST, June 19, 2010 – Hungary’s Rug Society is hosting an extraordinary look at carpets in Hungarian private collections this summer.

The exhibition, which began on the first of June and has been extended due to popular interest to the end of August, is jointly sponsored by Budapest’s Jewish Museum, which is the venue.

The 35 carpets on display include both carpets kept in Hungary and several brought in by Hungarian rug collectors living abroad.

One of the most striking pieces is a 17-century Kula carpet (above) contributed by the family of the famous carpet collector Edmund de Unger, who fled Hungary in 1948. His son Richard flew in specially with the carpet, which is rarely seen outside the family home in London.

Another extraordinary piece is a 19th century Isfahan Paradise carpet (right) contributed by a collector of Hungarian origin living in New York. The collector has not revealed his name publicly.

The exhibit was opened by Hungary’s Culture Minister Gabor Gorgey, who himself has more than a passing interest in carpets.

Gorgey has written a well-received novel telling the tumultuous history of Hungary from 1940 to 1956 by following the fate of an Isfahan Hunting Rug belonging to a fictional Jewish family.

The novel, called “The Hunting Carpet,” tells how the carpet – like Hungary itself – changes hands from the family, to the fascists, and finally in 1956 (the year of the Hungarian Revolution) to a Soviet general. The novel has been re-printed five times since it was first published in 1988.

Still other fascinating carpets at the exhibit are several Tranyslvanian carpets (below) contributed by collector of Hungarian origin living in Transylvania, now in Romania.

Historically, much of the focus of Hungarian rug collecting has been in Transylvania, where families bequeathed rich Ottoman rugs to the area’s protestant, and sometimes Catholic, churches. Transylvania, which was a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire for 150 years, became part of Romania after World War I.

The fact that the show brings together so many carpets from private collections inside and outside of Hungary is a tribute to the zeal of the Rug Society.

The group, known as “Ten” for the original number of its founders in 2007, wants to re-introduce the Hungarian public to oriental carpets after interest in them all but disappeared during the communist era.

Denes Sandor, one of the group’s founders in 2007, says the current exhibit is the largest to date and the first in the capital. For the first exhibit, in 2007, the group chose a small town, for the second, in 2008, the university city of Szeged.

Sandor would like to revive the days when Hungary was one of the most active places in the Western world for carpet enthusiasts and the home of a number of “firsts.”

Among those firsts was the formation of Budapest’s Carpet Lovers Society in 1923, which debuted with an exhibit of 149 privately held carpets. That was a decade earlier than the formation of the New York-based Hajji Babba Society in 1933.

Going back further, the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest was the first major museum ever to hold a single-theme oriental carpet exhibit – showing 352 Ottoman Turkish pieces – in 1914. That was when major carpet exhibitions were still very much a novelty and had taken place previously only in Vienna (1891), Stuttgart (1909), and New York (1910).

Here is a photo of the current exhibit at the Jewish Musuem, where oriental carpets are displayed in two of the halls and Jewish textiles in a third.

The huge historical – and growing present – interest in oriental carpets can’t help but make even Hungarian collectors sometimes wonder why rugs so fascinate their countrymen.

Sandor says most people assume it must be because the Ottoman Empire directly occupied much of the central region of Hungary for a century and-a-half. But he believes the ties to carpets go much further back than that: to the Hungarians’ own nomadic origins on the Eurasian steppes.

He argues that before the Hungarians, who were renowned horsemen, settled in Hungary some 1,000 years ago, they would likely have had the same carpet culture as other steppe peoples, including using carpets to cover the floors of yurts.

The Hungarian language today remains a Finno-Urgic tongue, so such cultural echoes might not be so distant as they seem. And, says Sandor, that would at least explain why other European nations under long Ottoman rule – such as Greece or Serbia – have never shown as much enthusiasm for carpets as has Hungary.

Here is yet another fascinating carpet on display at the current exhibition.

It is believed to have been woven in Hereke, Turkey, for Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi’s celebration of 2,500 years of the Persian monarchy in 1971.

One clue to the carpet’s identity is its unusual motif of peacocks – the symbol of the Pahlavi dynasty. Another is the border motif of lions holding a sword in the right hand – the same symbol used on the flag of Iran prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

No discussion of carpets in Hungary would be complete without the extraordinary and tragic story of the Gold Train of 1945 – a tale which the location of the current exhibit in the Jewish Museum cannot fail to bring to mind.

During the 1930s and 40s, Hungary’s Nazi-allied government required Jews to deposit all their valuables – including their collections of carpets – in the national bank.

The majority of Jews were later sent to concentration camps but their seized property remained in the vaults until the end of the war. Then, as the Russian army approached, the fascists assembled a 40-wagon train to remove the goods to Germany.

The train was ill-fated from the start.

As it meandered through Hungary and Austria, anonymous trucks pulled up beside it to unload its gold and vanish.

Next, it was seized by Allied troops, first French then American.

Finally, most of its remaining valuables were sent to a military warehouse in Salzburg. From there, they went on to furnish U.S. officers’ homes during the occupation of Germany or were sold in U.S. military exchange stores.

The value of the paintings, jewels, porcelain, and carpets on the train – based upon the existing documentation – would be in the billions of dollars today. Yet most of them disappeared without a trace.

The events remained all but forgotten until 2005, when a U.S. court ruled that Washington should pay $ 6 million in compensation for the stolen property. Given the difficulty of knowing who exactly lost what, the payment was made to Jewish organizations rather than to surviving families.

The Gold Train and the tragic personal stories behind it amount to an inestimable loss for Hungary in every respect, including its once thriving carpet culture.

But the exhibit taking place in Budapest now is evidence that Hungarian collectors can still exhibit some astonishing pieces. And their pieces, plus those in the country’s famous museum collections, provide every reason for rug lovers to again regard Budapest as a carpet capital.

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Exhibition in the Jewish Museum

The First Turkish Carpet Exhibition In The West, by Ferenc Batari, Hali

Two New Czech Postage Stamps Commemorate Caucasian Carpets

2010-06-04T01:44:00.000-07:00

PRAGUE, June 5, 2010 -- It's a rare event when a European country issues a postage stamp commemorating oriental carpets.

But this year the Czech Republic has issued two.

The pair of stamps depicts 19th century Karabakhs, from the Caucasus area of the same name.

One stamp (above) shows a Chelaberd.

The Czech post office described it this way:

"Chelaberd is the best known carpet pattern woven in Karabakh. It is also known by an older designation, Eagle Kazak, which comes from interpreting its main motif – a large, medieval-looking medallion radiating beams – as a two-headed eagle. The oldest carpets of this type have an almost square format, a single dominant medallion, and an unusually expressive bright coloring. It is to this small group of carpets that the piece depicted on the stamp belongs."

The second stamp shows a Kasim Usak.

Here is the accompanying description:

"Kasim Usak carpets are considered by professionals and amateurs alike to be Karabakh carpets from the Trans-Caucasus. Nagorno-Karabakh is a mountainous land located in western Azerbaijan not far from the Armenian border. Individual types of Karabakh carpets are named according to their village of origin. As with other Karabakh carpets, Kasim Usaks are notable for bright coloring, typically flowered borders, and large geometric forms in the center field. The Kasim Usak shown on this stamp is from the 19th century."

The stamps, which were issued in April, are a reminder of the rich collections of Caucasian carpets held by the Czech National Gallery and the National Museum and the importance both curators and the public put upon them.

Most of the Caucasians in the collections are village and city weavings from 1850 to 1910 and they were the object of a major exhibit in Prague in 2007.

The exhibit, which also included carpets in private collections, was accompanied by a book, 'Caucasian Carpets,' describing the exhibited pieces and the history of Caucasian carpets overall.

Since then, some of the Caucasians have also been presented in other periodic exhibits of carpets from Czech museums' and castles.

What the stamps don't tell is the interesting story of how many of the Caucasians came to the museum collections.

And that, in part, is the story of how oriental carpets once played an important role in art schools in the 19th century throughout Europe, only later to be relegated to Asian Art and ethnographic museums as fashions changed.

The Chelaberd on the stamp above, for example, was purchased in Vienna as early as 1886 by the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. It -- along with fabrics and other oriental handicrafts – was part of the study collection the museum maintains for students in applied arts schools.

When the carpet was purchased, Orientalism was at its height across Europe and design students regularly and systematically explored oriental patterns for inspirations.

Just how systematically can be judged by the contents of one of the design bibles for English-speaking students at the time: Owen Jones' "The Grammar of Ornament." Published in 1856 and included some 100 full-color plates of designs ranging from Greek, to Roman, to Byzantine, to Moorish, to Egyptian, to Persian, to Indian to Chinese.

The image shown here is of one of the Persian plates.

Students in other parts of Europe had access to similar archives of material carefully collected by their art school faculties.

National Gallery curator Zdenka Klimtova writes in 'Caucasian Rugs,' her book which accompanied the 2007 exhibit, that Prague's Museum of Decorative Arts purchased the Chelaberd for 55 guilders from Vienna art dealer Theodor Graf.

The school's purchases of rugs were carefully logged and represented considerable investments then just as they would today.

Among the most visible results of the passion for Orientalism in Prague are two major neo-Moorish buildings in the heart of the city. Both are synagogues built in the early 1900s.

One is the Jubilee Synagogue, built in 1906 and named in honor of the 50th anniversary celebration, or the silver jubilee, of the reign of Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria. At the time, the Czech lands were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The interior of the Jubilee Synagogue is a whimsical blend of Moorish elements with intricately painted Art Nouveau details. Many Art Nouveau elements here and elsewhere were derived from oriental patterns, which were a major design inspiration for the art movement.

The honored status of oriental rugs in the teaching collections of European applied arts schools began to decline once the lush styles and fashions of the 19th century gave way to the spare modernism of the 20th.

By the 1950s, most lay forgotten in school basements and had been long removed from the schools' curricula.

Some of the pieces in Prague's Museum of Decorative Arts – including the Chelaberd – were transferred to the National Gallery in the 1960s. There they took on a new status as examples of Asian art distinct from European fashions -- much as European homes in general separated with their oriental rugs after their peak popularity during the Victorian era.

Still, the story of Prague's Caucasian carpets does not end there.

The collection at the National Gallery continued to grow throughout the past decades thanks to a succession of curators interested in expanding it by acquiring some of the good privately owned pieces in the country.

Curators say that Prague has a special relationship with Caucasian carpets because historically they were not only popular in the Czech market but readily accessible.

As part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prague had a direct link through Vienna to the rug markets of Istanbul.

Then, after the first World War, many White Russians brought a wave of Caucasian rugs and other valuable belongings to newly independent Czechoslovakia as they fled west.

And finally, even during Czechoslovakia's long period as a Soviet satellite, it was still possible for ardent collectors to visit two rug-producing areas -- the Caucasus and Central Asia – although the Soviet bloc was cut off from the rest of the global collectors' market.

The newly issued Czech postage stamps are a reminder of all these reasons Caucasian carpets hold a special place in the country's life.

One can only wish other national post offices and museums would team up to tell their carpet stories as eloquently.

(For more on rugs in the Czech Republic, see: A Rare Oushak Carpet In A Czech Castle Catches The Rug World’s Eye.)

(For more on orientalism, see: Orientalism and Oriental Carpets.)

(For more on Owen Jones, see: Owen Jones' Grammar of Ornament.)

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$ 10 Million Persian Carpet Sets New Auction Record

2010-05-08T04:36:00.000-07:00

LONDON, May 15, 2010 -- How much are private collectors ready to pay for Persian rugs?

The answer came at an auction in London last month: just short of $ 10 million.

The carpet – which set a record price of $ 9,599,535 – is a "vase" carpet from Kirman, a city whose weavers are widely considered to have been among the most inventive of the classical carpet age.

The vase carpets, woven in the 16th and 17th centuries, are some of the Kirman weavers' greatest works of art, with spectacular, colorful and intricately designed patterns of swirling branches, foliage and flowers.

The floral patterns may be arranged in vases or, as in the case of the auctioned carpet, there may be no vase apparent.

Such carpets are always highly sought after and rare, with the best examples kept in museums.

But to fetch close to $ 10 million, this carpet measuring 11 feet by 5 feet had to have some unusually distinguishing features. And, in fact, it has several.

One is the unusual energy and charm of its pattern.

Christie's, the auction house which made the sale on April 15, describes its magic this way:

"The designers have worked out an arrangement that makes the blossoms completely secondary to the leaves. It is no longer the powerful scrolling of individual leaves that creates the energy of the design; here it is the rhythm set up by the interlocking leaves.

"Their stems and the drawing of the individual plants growing from each end of the carpet create one rhythm, but the coloring, which makes facing leaves from two different plants still have the same colors, creates the counterpoint. It is an apparently simple but wonderfully satisfying design."

The energy of the arrangement can be seen even more clearly from a distance than from close up.

But the carpet is also noteworthy for another reason that particularly interests carpet historians.

And that is (again to quote Christie's) it "can claim to be the earliest design which can clearly be demonstrated to be a prototype for the most popular Persian carpet design of all - the so-called herati pattern."

Here is a diagram of a herati pattern.

Kirman dominated the rug-making industry of south-eastern Iran for centuries and its weavings were remarked upon by the earliest western travelers to the region.

Marco Polo, traveling through Persia in 1270, praised the carpets of Kirman as a particular marvel.

By the 17th century, at the height of the Safavid era, Kirman’s designers were at their most inventive and their weaving techniques of a sophistication not seen in other parts of the Persian Empire.

One innovation was to set their looms so that the cotton warps were on two different levels. They then threaded the wool wefts, leaving some tight and others sinuous, to give an immediately recognizable wavy finish to the surface of the carpet.

Interestingly, it was this characteristic weaving pattern that helped an art dealer recognize this particular carpet as a Kirman vase carpet (without a vase) and bring it to auction.

The story of who the art dealer is, and where he discovered the carpet, is still being pieced together by an art world hungry for more details. But the early indications are it is the stuff of which legends are made.

The Financial Times reports that the carpet originally was bought for only €18,000 (some $ 23,000) at an obscure German auction house late last year.

"Cataloged simply as “Persian carpet” and estimated at €18,000, the finely knotted wool rug appeared at Georg Rehm, a provincial saleroom in Augsburg, in October last year," the paper says.

It continues: "Asked to confirm the sale, the auction house refused 'to divulge results ... after extensive negotiations with our suppliers and buyers'."

How the carpet fell out of the sky to arrive at "an obscure German auction house" is unknown.

But by the time it went on sale at Christie's enough of its history had become clear to interest some very competitive art collectors.

The carpet was traced to the former holdings of Martine Marie Pol, the Comtesse de Béhague, who prior to her death in 1927 maintained a renowned collection of antiquities, including both European and Oriental Carpets.

One of her many properties, the Chateau de Fleury in the Ile de France region, is shown here.

Much of the countess’s collection was dispersed in two sales in 1927 and 1928, but the Kirman vase carpet was not included in those. Christie's believes the carpet instead passed on to her heirs before being sold at some stage between the 1930s and 1950s.

Yet even as Christie's evaluators widely publicized the carpet's pedigree before the auction, they badly underestimated what price the carpet might command.

The auction house estimated the carpet to be worth from $307,600 - $461,400. But when bidding began, the price immediately began soaring toward the stratosphere.

There were seven bidders, one in the auction room and six on the phone from Britain, continental Europe, the Americas and the Middle East. Among the parties, just one was a museum, all the rest were private collectors.

Britain's Economist magazine described the bidding this way:

"At £2.4m the countess’s rug beat the record price for a carpet at auction; at £3.5m it beat the record for an auctioned Islamic work of art. By £5m, bids began jumping ahead in increments of £500,000, which proved too much for one of the two remaining bidders, who put the phone down at £5.5m, too upset to continue. The rug finally sold for £6.2m (including commission and taxes), proof for the dealer who consigned it that he had been right to trust his instincts."

The identity of the two remaining bidders is secret. But several art dealers have told The Financial Times they believe both were from Qatar.

The Gulf state has a recently opened (2008) Museum of Islamic Art with a major collection of carpets and textiles and it is not impossible the Kirman vase carpet could one day be loaned to it.

In becoming the world's most expensive carpet, the Kirman vase beat the previous record of $ 5.5 million set by the famed Pearl Carpet of Baroda in March 2009 at a Sotheby's auction in Qatar.

The Pearl Carpet of Baroda is not of hand-knotted wool but is "woven" from strings of Basra pearls: one-and-a-half million of them, harvested off the coast of Qatar and Bahrain. It is believed to have been created as a gift for the tomb of Prophet Muhammad in Medina and commissioned by the Maharaja of Baroda, who died before he could make the donation.

After the pearl rug, the previous record-holder for the most expensive auctioned carpet was a silk Isfahan rug dating to the 1600s. It previously belonged to tobacco heiress Doris Duke sold for $ 4.45 million at Christie's in New York in June 2008.

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Christie's: A Kirman Vase Carpet

Financial Times: How An 18,000 euro Rug Sold For 6 Million Pounds

The Economist: Rug Rave – Prices Fly For A Persian Carpet

Rug Rag: Pearl Carpet Of Baroda

Mark Your Calendars Now For The 12th ICOC In Stockholm

2010-05-01T03:08:00.000-07:00

By Dennis Dodds, Secretary General of the ICOC

In June of 2011, ICOC will offer a veritable smorgasbord of unexpected discoveries, exciting sights and festive events that are sure to appeal to rug enthusiasts, expert collectors, scholars and dealers from around the world.

Mark your calendars now!

The 12th ICOC will be held in beautiful Stockholm from June 16-19, 2011.

An art-filled pre-conference tour takes you to Copenhagen.

And a post-Conference tour to St. Petersburg, Russia will cap off your unforgettable ICOC experience.

June is the perfect time to visit these wonderful cities with their rivers, lakes, canals and architecture.

The Conference in Stockholm, June 16-19, is the perfect season and the perfect destination to enjoy educational lectures from international experts, a robust International Dealers’ Fair and several exhibitions of rugs and textiles from private collections.

A special exhibition of rare Turkmen carpets and trappings is being organized. The hotels that we recommend are situated very close to the Central train station and are within easy reach of the Conference Center for these events.

Your evenings will be filled with receptions and visits to exhibitions at several museums and the Royal Palace.

Feast your eyes on the world famous Anatolian ‘Marby’ rug, as well as 17th century Transylvanian rugs, glorious ‘Polonaise’ carpets, colorful 18th century Swedish folk art textiles, and the widely published Safavid silk velvet coat that belonged to Queen Christina. And this is just a sampling!

The pre-Conference tour to Copenhagen, June 14-15, features the stunning new installation of the David Collection, which has one of the finest collections of Islamic Art in Europe, including a small Mamluk rug, a large Seljuk carpet, a ‘Salting’ rug, a millefleurs Mughal rug, an early Persian Safavid carpet and some fabulous early Islamic textiles -- as well as many outstanding European works of art.

See the wonderful Rosenborg Royal castle built by King Christian IV in 1606. In the "The Knights' Hall”, twelve tapestries from 1675-1679 show the King's victories in the Scanian War. This Hall also holds all the 17th century Coronation ‘Polonaise’ carpets and they will be on view together exclusively for our group.

Copenhagen’s Museum of Applied Arts will display some interesting Islamic textiles and we will visit a Royal apartment at Amalienborg Palace where the Royal family lives today.

A leisurely boat tour under the bridges of Copenhagen will give you a sea-view of this remarkable Danish city and its harbor.

The post-Conference tour to St. Petersburg, Russia, June 21-24, promises to be one of the most remarkable highlights of all previous ICOC events.

You will have rare private access to many famous carpets and textiles in the storage rooms of the world famous Hermitage Museum. You will marvel at the venerable Pazyryk Carpet and the splendid Scythian material right before your eyes.

The Russian Museum of Ethnography will give us rare entry to its storage areas and a special rug exhibition, organized exclusively for the ICOC tour group by its renowned former curator, Dr. Elena Tsareva, now of the Kunstkamera Museum.

A boat tour of the River Neva and St. Petersburg’s canals will give you a wonderful perspective of Peter the Great’s ideal city and its historic architecture.

We will also visit one of the splendid Summer Palaces.

(Follow updates regarding the 12th ICOC in Stockholm at: www.ICOC-orientalrugs.org)

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The Qashqai And Other Tribal Carpets Of Western Persia

2010-04-10T04:36:00.000-07:00

SHIRAZ, April 17, 2010 -- When Persian tribal carpets first began to reach 19th century Europe, they often got a mixed reception.

One problem was where to put them.

They were typically of small size at a time when putting a large carpet across a big living room floor was the preferred choice.

And their tribal designs were not considered particularly refined, at a time when "civilized" elegance was the style.

So, Persian tribal rugs -- like Turkmen tribal rugs and many others with bold geometric designs – often found themselves relegated to the "man's" room in the house.

The unspoken rule was: tribal rugs in the study; floral workshop rugs in the boudoir and parlor.

But if there were misunderstandings about where to put the rugs, perhaps the greatest misunderstanding of all was about what to call them.

The name "Persian tribal," of course, meant nothing because it neither distinguished between the rugs' styles nor told anything about the people who wove them.

In fact, the great majority of the rugs were not made by Persians – in the sense of Persia's majority people, the Fars – at all.

They were made by peoples as diverse as Turks, Arabs, Kurds and Baluchs. For millennia, they too have inhabited Persia but they have kept their own languages, cultures, and artistic traditions. Currently, these minorities make up some 49 percent of Iran's inhabitants.

It was only with time that European rug owners began to realize that the new patterns on their floor were a window into a fascinating world of tribal and nomadic folklore that remains very much alive in Iran today.

Here is perhaps the most famous tribal rug of the turn-of-the-last century.

It is the rug used by Sigmund Freud to cover his famous "couch" in Vienna, where much of his pioneering research in psychotherapy was done.

The rug is characteristic of the Turkic-speaking Qashqai (or Gashgai, Kashgai), who are one of Iran's largest tribal confederacies. Their rugs are filled with symbols, both abstract and semi-naturalistic, that derive from the nomadic weavers' ancient traditions.

Freud believed these symbols, with their unconscious suggestions, could help create a mood in which his own patients could relax and more easily explore their subconscious memories. The rug still covers his couch, which he moved to London after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938.

Here is another Qashqai rug with rows of trees interspersed with vines. The carpet is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

The Qashqai, who live in southwestern Iran, were one of the best organized and most powerful nomadic peoples in Persia during the 19th century, when they often forcefully fought off government efforts to control or settle them.

Their annual migration was, and is still, the largest of any in the country.

In their migration, the Qashqai move from their summer pastures in the mountains north of Shiraz to winter pastures south of the city.

The trip, which covers some 500 km (300 miles), takes them up and down steep mountain slopes as they descend from their winter camps at altitudes as high as 2,500 meters (10,000 feet) and move southward toward sea level.

Their life of nomadic pastoralism is told in the symbols they weave into their rugs.

The symbols range from human figures to four-legged animals, birds, trees, and flowers, as well as a wide range of geometric shapes.

Some of their carpets are so filled with such motifs that they almost look like a catalog of the objects in their daily life.

Below is a carpet is typical of the Shekarlu, one of the tribes in the Qashqai confederacy.

In it, the highly recognizable objects include wooden combs used by tribal women for their hair. The combs, as symbols of a bridal trousseau, also stand for marriage and happiness.

The Qashqai consider themselves Turks and call all the other inhabitants of Iran "Tajiks."

But their confederacy itself is a conglomeration of clans of different ethnic origins, including Luri (or Lori), Kurdish, Arab and Turkic.

Their common language is a form of Turkish closely related to that spoken in Azerbaijan.

Just when Turkic-speaking nomads first moved into Persia is unknown.

But most historians trace the first large-scale movement to the time of the Seljuk conquests, around 1,000 AD. That was when Turkic tribes in western Central Asia were migrating in mass further west and south, into modern Iran, Iraq, and Turkey.

The tribes -- from the Oghuz branch of the Turks -- shared similar cultures and languages and many of those ties survive to this day. They can readily be seen in the many shared motifs on rugs across the Turkic world.

Here is a carpet woven by the Amaleh tribe of the Qashqai confederation.

Over the centuries, the Qashqai and other tribal confederacies often played significant roles in ruling the country. Persian shahs routinely took power with the military backing of the Turkic tribes then ruled through the bureaucratic power of the Persian – Fars – elite.

The power of the tribes was not finally curbed until the 1930s, when Reza Shah (who re-named Persia as Iran in 1935) deployed a newly modernized army, with armored cars and planes, against them.

The Qashqai were starved into submission when the army blocked the narrow passes on their migration route across the mountains and the nomads' riflemen were unable to dislodge them.

Since then, many of the Qashqai have settled, joining other members of their confederation who over the centuries have taken up village life.

It is partly because tribal confederacies like the Qashqai have always had both nomadic and settled components that some of their rugs are town or city weavings.

Here is one example. It is a Kashguli carpet from the second half of the 19th century. (Kashguli is the name of another of the major Qashqai tribes. It was also frequently used in the 19th century rug market as a label for a Qashqai rug of superior quality.)

Much of the Qashqai's workshop weaving is associated with Shiraz which, because of the nomads' twice yearly migration around it, is the political and economic center of their life.

So many Qashqais' rugs are sold in the Shiraz bazaar that their weavings, particularly the simpler ones, are often simply termed "Shiraz" carpets.

The Qashqai are hardly the only nomadic and tribal people who have became well-known in Europe through their weavings.

Another is the Khamseh tribal confederacy, which neighbors the Qashqai to the east and is considered to be Arab. It trace its roots to Arab nomads who moved into Persia from the Arabian peninsula well before the Islamic conquest.

But their confederacy speaks no single language and its members, who have banded together for strength, have diverse ethnic origins.

To north and west of the Qashqai are two more major tribes, the Luri and Bakhtiyari. Both speak northwest Iranian languages close to Kurdish and their members have diverse ancestries.

Here is a picture of a Lur taken around 1921. The photo at the top of this article is of the field of a Luri rug. It shows the love of highly detailed symbols that is common to all the confederacies.

It is impossible here – or perhaps anywhere – to list all of Iran's tribes. Even today, despite heavy government pressure to settle everyone, nomads can be found in all but two of Iran's provinces -- Kurdestan and Yazd.

But how much any of the tribes today weave for themselves rather than for the world market they first began to conquer in the 19th century is another question.

Since then, nomadic weavings from Iran and elsewhere have steadily adapted to non-nomadic homeowners' tastes.

An early response was to weave multiple and more elaborate borders, to create more varied looks. So much so, that multiple borders became a tell-tale sign of later nomadic weavings throughout the carpet belt.

In more recent decades, the Qashqai and neighboring confederacies have had great market success by simplifying one of their traditional rug types -- the thick-piled Gabbeh -- to an ever more minimalist look.

The new Gabbeh is composed of just a few tone-on-tone colors and a scattering of tribal motifs or accent points.

The evolution of the Gabbeh tells the story of how the global market looks to nomadic weavings for innovation and change, despite the fact that change is foreign to the timeless world of the nomads themselves.

But exactly how that happens is the subject of another story. (See: How Traditional Are Iran's Modern Gabbehs?)

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Animal Figures In South Persian Rugs

American Sarouks And Zieglers: The First Western-Designed Persian Carpets

2010-04-02T03:36:00.000-07:00

ARAK, Iran; April 3, 2010 -- If you could travel back in time to an American home at the turn-of-the-last-century, it is very possible that the rug on the floor would be an American Sarouk.

The "Sarouk" in the carpet's name refers to the village of Sarouk, in northwestern Iran, where it was made.

But the "American" refers to how much it was modified to suit American tastes, and how hugely popular it became in America as a result.

The double-barreled name makes the American Sarouk one of the most striking examples of the way much of the Persian carpet industry changed between 1800 and 1900. It was a time when the Persian Empire changed greatly too, as it had to adapt to a new world order dominated by industrial powers.

The carpet is believed to have been designed by a dealer in New York, S. Tyriakian, who did what would have been unthinkable in earlier times.

He knew that for many Americans, Persian carpets were too "oriental." The floral patterns seemed too elaborate and overcrowded, while the colors called too much attention to the floor at the expense of the other furnishings.

So, he played with the design and colors to create rugs that owed as much, or more, to European artistic traditions than to Persian ones.

Here is a another Sarouk. This carpet is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Often the background color was chosen to go well with dark-wood Western furniture, something totally foreign to Persian homes.

But the way the colors were obtained was itself still more unorthodox.

To soften the "garish" colors of imported carpets, dealers in New York, London and other European centers had developed "chemical washes." But not all dyes could stand up to them.

In the case of the American sarouks, the original bright pink of the field tended to disappear almost entirely in the bath. So, to restore the color, dealers hired touch-up artists to hand paint the field in the shades they wanted.

Such labor-intensive alterations were possible in the labor market of New York at the time, and as a result the American Sarouks are also commonly known as Painted Sarouks today.

The American Sarouk, which enjoyed a peak popularity in the 20s and 30s, is one of the best-known Westernized designs that came out of northwestern Persia.

But it was neither the only nor the first.

Decades earlier, western capital and finally even Western carpet manufacturers began moving into the Persian carpet industry much as they also were doing in the Ottoman Empire.

As they did, they not only helped to create the boom in 19th century interest in oriental rugs. Ironically, they also helped satisfy it with rugs that often were far more at home in Western houses than they ever would be in Eastern ones.

One of the reasons creating Western-designed rugs was possible in Persia is that, as the 19th century opened, the Persian carpet industry itself was in a state of disarray.

After producing stunning carpets during the long and stable Safavid era that started in 1501, Persia plunged into a prolonged period of power struggles and strife beginning with a Pashtun invasion from Afghanistan in 1722.

The court patronage system, which had stimulated the art of carpet making, ceased and the great urban workshops that supplied the aristocracy of Persia and Europe closed down.

It was not until the establishment of the Qajar dynasty in 1794 that things stabilized again. But by then, the world had changed.

The new challenge for the Persian Empire was to compete with expanding military and commercial strength of Europe which was based upon the industrial revolution.

One reaction was to adapt. The first signs of that can be seen in this royal portrait of the second Qajar shah, Fath Ali.

Such realistic portraiture was a huge departure from traditional Persian court painting based on the miniaturist style. According to Julian Raby, a Lecturer in Islamic Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford, the look is directly borrowed from contemporaneous portraits of Napoleon, which were widely admired for their projection of power. The trees and sky in the background are equally European.

Fath Ali sought diplomatic contacts with the West. And he had an urgent reason to do so.

During his reign, Persia lost two wars in the Caucasus with the Russian Empire.

In 1813 it had to accept Russian annexation of Georgia and most of the north Caucasus region.

In 1828, it had to accept Russian sovereignty over the entire south Caucasus north of the Aras river (also known as the Araxes river and today's border between Iran and Azerbaijan).

This painting by Russian artist Franz Roubaud illustrates a scene from the Russo-Persian war of 1804 to 1813, when outnumbered Tsarist forces made a "living bridge" to transport their cannon to safety.

It was advances in artillery, many developed during the Napoleonic wars, that gave the Russian army a decisive advantage.

As part of their effort to secure the north of the Persian Empire against Russian expansion, the Qajars moved capital to Tehran.

And it is in the oldest historical building in this city – the Golestan Palace – that the empire's struggle to adapt to the West becomes still clearer.

By the time Nasr ud-Din, the best known shah of the Qajar dynasty, took the throne in 1848, Persian royal culture had adopted many of the trappings of European imperial style.

He alternated between wearing Western and Persian clothes, but preferred Western for official photos. As he posed, his empire was being flooded with cheap textiles from Russia and Britain, progressively putting traditional textile producers out of business.

Nasr ud-Dinh made several trips to Europe -- the first shah to do so – and encouraged the introduction of Western science, technology, and educational methods.

He also dramatically changed the Tehran skyline by building a new wing of the Golestan Palace with two European-model towers. Completed in 1867, and blending Eastern and Western designs, the towers were the first of their kind in the capital.

At the same time, Nasr ud-Dinh furnished some of his palace rooms in Western style and created museum rooms to display gifts received from European monarchs, especially chinaware.

Similarly dramatic changes happened in the world of traditional Persian carpets.

With Europe as the world's richest consumer market, Persian producers came under enormous pressure to adapt to that market's tastes.

That taste was no longer for court carpets – the shared culture of Renaissance days – but for carpets that fit middle class European homes with no equivalent in Persia at all.

Arto Keshishian, a London rug dealer, describes what happened next in his fascinating article 'Ziegler and Their Carpets,' published in Antiques and Fine Arts Magazine.

He notes that the traditional decorating scheme for the 'reception' room of a Persian home was one central rug surrounded by runners on all four sides.

But when these rugs were imported as individual pieces to the West they were considered “generally either too long or too narrow” for Western homes.

So, carpet designers – especially in Tabriz – began expanding production specifically to supply the Western market.

Focusing on the region around Sultanabad (now Arak), they encouraged weavers to weave larger carpets that could accent or fill large rooms. They also began modifying designs with Western styles in mind.

But that was hardly the only change.

By the 1880s, several Western companies moved into northwest Persia themselves, commissioning rugs to still more closely fit the home market. The most prominent was the Ph. Ziegler & Company, which would operate in Iran for 50 years and export tens of thousands of rugs to London and New York.

At the turn-of-the-last-century, Ziegler had about 2,500 looms in more than one hundred villages around Sultanabad.

The rugs traveled west on the same caravans that took Shi’ite pilgrims to the shrine city of Karbala in Iraq. At Baghdad, they were transferred to small steamers going downriver to Basra and then onto ships for London. (Patrice Fontaine’s ‘The Carpet Weaving Industry in the Arak Region,’ Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies III, Part I, 1987.)

Keshishian says the Ziegler carpets “were made to achieve a balance and symmetry in keeping with the scale of a room and its furnishings.”

Whether they were designed with a medallion or all-over floral pattern, they were “never overcrowded” so that they would “give a sense of open space and elegance.”

He writes: "The airy visual effect of Ziegler carpets resulted from the design as well as from a weave that was much coarser than that of traditional carpets."

As for color, “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.”

The foreign companies' success had a direct impact on the other producers around Sultanabad.

Patrice Fontaine’s writes in her ‘The Carpet Weaving Industry in the Arak Region’ that to compete, Iranian merchants tried to lower production costs. They supplied weavers with lower-quality wool colored with new Western chemical dyes. And they commissioned designers to simplify rug patterns to speed up weaving and reduce the chance of mistakes.

It is possible today to view this Western tailoring of Persian rugs as an early example of globalization – of the same process of simplifying rug designs to match mass market tastes that characterizes much of the global carpet industry today.

And, indeed, there are some carpet experts who reject calling ‘American Sarouks,’ for example, oriental rugs at all.

As Murray L Eiland Jr. and Murray Eiland III, note in their book Oriental Carpets (2005):

“One might go as far as to say that there was nothing Persian about these rugs except the technique of pile knotting, and the same judgment could be made about thousands of Turkish rugs of the early 20th Century.”

But perhaps the first Western-designed Persian carpets tell a larger story than that.

They are equally a fascinating record of a time when the East’s whole relationship with the West was radically changing and ancient empires were desperately trying to adapt in order to survive.

The Persian Empire, like the Ottoman Empire, did not succeed. Here is a map showing its progressive loss of territory in the 19th and into the early 20th centuries.

With its territorial losses went ties to some of the most famous cities associated with the Persian Empire's traditional artistic culture, including Bukhara and Samarkand.

Meanwhile efforts to regain another key city, Herat, from Afghanistan failed definitively in 1857 with the Anglo-Persian war. Thereafter Russia and Britain directly vied for influence over the region, ending with the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907 dividing nominally independent Qajar Iran into British and Russian spheres of influence.

By the start of the 20th century, the Persian dynasties were so weak that every shah thereafter would die in exile. The country has had to re-invent itself in a process that continues today.

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Orientalism And Oriental Carpets

2010-03-05T23:22:00.000-08:00

PARIS, March 20, 2010 – Europe’s fascination with oriental rugs dropped off markedly from the mid-1600s to the mid-1700s, as the French baroque decorating style, with Savonnerie and similar carpets, swept the Western world.

But by the late 1700s, oriental rugs were back.

And throughout the 1800s and well into the early 1900s, European interest in oriental rugs reached heights never known before or since.

It was a rapid comeback, which went from importing small-format rugs in the first half of the 1800s to importing large-format, room-size carpets in the second.

At the same time, oriental carpets went from being exotic accent pieces shown in isolation on the floor to being fully integrated into the Western concept of interior decorating, including being placed beneath sofas, tables and chairs.

And, in a final measure of success, even Europe’s machine-made rug industry began making copies of hand-made Eastern rugs in addition to European styles.

What happened to make oriental carpets not just the status symbol of the wealthy, as in previous centuries, but a standard part of Western homes?

Part of the answer is Orientalism, the art movement that swept the West from the early 1800s to well past the turn-of-the-last century.

If Orientalism had a starting point, it was probably Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798.

This picture is ‘Bonaparte Before the Sphinx,’ painted many years later by the Orientalist artist Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1868.

Napoleon’s expedition set off a wave of enthusiasm across Europe for rediscovering the Eastern world. The enthusiasm was not unlike earlier generations’ desire to rediscover ancient Greece and Rome via The Grand Tour.

Of course, Napoleon was not a tourist in the usual sense of the word.

His purpose in trying to seize Egypt, then a province of the Ottoman Empire, was to protect French trade interests and undermine Britain's access to India at the height of the French Revolutionary Wars.

But while Napoleon was ultimately forced to withdraw by British naval power and a newly reformed Ottoman army, the fact that his Armée d'Orient campaigned in Egypt and Syria for three years had an electrifying effect on his countrymen.

One result is this building in Paris (No. 2, Place du Caire) which was erected in 1799.

On its façade are hieroglyphs and busts of the goddess Hathor, regarded by ancient Egyptians as the goddess of motherhood and the annual flooding of the Nile.

The building includes an entrance of the “Passages du Caire,” a shopping arcade built at the same time and inspired by the Grand Bazaar in the Egyptian capital. It and other “passages” offered the novelty of covered shopping in the period before the streets of Paris had sidewalks.

By 1833, Paris had its own obelisk, as well. The Obelisk of Luxor, a gift from the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, was erected in the Center of the Place de la Concorde.

The fact the obelisk had spent most of its 3,000 years marking the entrance of the Amon temple at Luxor, and in no way matched French architecture, caused no-one alarm. Instead, that seemed only to make it more desirable.

Other cities followed suit.

London put up its obelisk, also a gift from an Egyptian ruler, in 1878.

New York did the same in 1881, after loading its obelisk into the hull of a steamship.

And, of course, Rome already had one - in St. Peter’s Square - imported by Emperor Caligula in 37 AD.

The burgeoning interest in the East, mixed with the Romanticist spirit of the time, inspired thousands of 19th century artists, writers, and travelers to journey east to personally discover the Orient for themselves.

What they saw and depicted, in paintings and travel literature, made even those who never left home eager to take part – even if just by having a carpet.

Gérôme’s ‘The Carpet Merchant’ (painted in 1887) shows the Court of the Rug Market in Cairo, which Gérôme visited in 1885.

Rug expert Jon Thompson writes in his book ‘Oriental Carpets: from the Tents, Cottages, and Workshops of Asia’ (1993):

“The resurgence of interest in carpets was stimulated by the so-called Orientalist painters, artists working in the Middle East, who presented to the European public a romantic and dramatized view of local life. This type of painting … became extremely popular.”

Not all Orientalist painters were particularly strict about what they saw and what they later added to the scenes from their imagination.

One good example of liberties taken is Charles Robertson’s ‘A Carpet Sale in Cairo.’

The most prominent "carpet" on display is in fact an embroidered cloth, an Uzbek suzanni, of supernatural size.

The figures in the painting are made deliberately small in relationship to everything around them -- a standard Orientalist trick for emphasizing the exotic nature of the setting.

Orientalist writers offered their readers a similar mix of fact and fiction.

Some writers, reflecting the expanding power and self-certainty of Europe in the colonial age, passed harsh judgment on what they saw.

Edith Wharton's described the people in the marketplace of Marrakech with a string of stereotypes in her book ‘In Morocco’ (1920):

"Fanatics in sheep skins glowering from the guarded thresholds of the mosque....consumptive Jews with pathos and cunning in their large eyes and smiling lips, lusty slave-girls with earthen oil-jars resting against their swaying hips."

That was in the same spirit as pictures like this one: ‘Her Master’s Choice’ by Fabio Fabbi.

But other writers saw the East as not so different from Europe itself, despite the outward dissimilarities.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife to the British ambassador in Istanbul, wrote about Turkish women to her sister in 1717:

"It is true their law permits (husbands) four wives, but there is no instance of a man of quality that makes use of this liberty, or of a woman of rank that would suffer it. Thus you see dear sister, the manners of mankind do not differ so widely as our voyage writers would make us believe."

This picture by John Frederic Lewis seems more in line with her impressions. It is entitled “Indoor Gossip, Cairo.”

It is interesting to note that throughout this period, Eastern visitors to the Europe were just as filled with mixed emotions as Orientalist artists and writers seemed to be.

Zeynab Hanoum, the daughter of the minister of foreign affairs for the Ottoman Empire, wrote in her book ‘A Turkish Woman's European Impressions’ (1912):

"One thing to which I never seem to accustom myself is my hat. It is always falling off. Sometimes, too, I forget that I am wearing a hat and lean back in my chair: and what an absurd fashion - to lunch in a hat! Still, hats seem to play a very important role in Western life. Guess how many I have at present – twenty."

Travel between West and East did not become easy until the large scale use of steamships and, ultimately, the railroad.

In 1833, the newly inaugurated Orient Express still only took passengers as far as Vienna. But by 1889 passengers could travel direct all the way to Istanbul.

Suddenly, it was very possible for tourists to travel to the same exotic Orient once reserved for artists, writers, diplomats, and soldiers. And this, too, fed the appetite for carpets back home.

As Thompson notes:

"Paintings of 19th century interiors often include a rug or carpet, usually a tribal or village weaving from the Middle East. Some of these were bought in the local bazaar and brought home by those tireless Victorian travelers, while others were imported by merchants from Turkey, which became the center of the carpet trade."

Here is a painting of the sitting room of the artist-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is by Henry Treffry Dunn, Rossetti's studio assistant after 1867.

Not all the carpets that came to Europe as part of the now booming carpet business were collectibles. Far from it.

The exploding Western demand for carpets brought an explosion of supply in response, and Turkey soon began producing large quantities of coarsely made, crudely patterned carpets for export.

Many of these low-quality carpets are now staples for sale in bric-a-brac shops, where they sometimes shock modern rug lovers. But they once were just as commonplace on hotel and parlor-room floors as were the better quality pieces we so much more often associate now with the 19th century.

(The photo at the top of this story is a detail from Charles Robertson’s painting ‘The Bazaar Khan El Khaleelee Cairo’.)

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The World's Oldest Carpet Story: The Pazyryk

2010-02-27T05:14:00.001-08:00

PAZYRYK, Siberia; Feb. 28, 2010 -- Every carpet tells a story. But few tell one as fascinating as the oldest intact carpet ever found.

It is the Pazyryk carpet, discovered frozen in a tomb beneath the Siberian steppe.

The carpet was woven sometime in the 5th century BC and recovered almost 2,500 years later when, in 1949, Russian scientists opened one of many burial mounds in the Pazyryk valley, in the Altai mountains south of Novosibirsk.

Because the tombs, where Russia borders with China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia, were dug deep into the permafrost and covered with piles of timber and stone, the carpet and the mummified bodies of the nobles it accompanied emerged in a remarkably well preserved state.

Here is a picture of one corner of the carpet, which is now in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The picture at the top of the page is a detail of one of the carpet’s horsemen.

The century during which the carpet was put in the tomb is best known in the West for what was happening in ancient Greece at the time.

The 5th century was the time of the Greek-Persian wars, of Herodotus completing his “History,” of the construction of the Parthenon, of Sophocles writing ‘”Antigone,” and, finally, of the ruinous Peleponnesian war between Athens and Sparta.

But the story the carpet tells is a very different one from that of the ancient Greeks.

It tells the story of the Scythians, a partly settled, partly nomadic people whose home was the vast expanse of Eurasia north of Greece, Mesopotamia, Persia and China.

This is a picture of a Scythian horseman, made with an appliqué felt technique. It is from a wall hanging found along with the carpet in the Pazyryk tombs.

The domain of the Scythians, who were Persian speakers and a fiercely independent part of the Greater Persian world, extended from modern Bulgaria, through Ukraine and Central Asia, to close to today’s Chinese border.

The basis of their power, and their trading wealth, was the huge herds of horses they raised. They are among the first peoples to be mentioned as mounted warriors and their mobility made them almost impossible to conquer.

At the same time, they were a conduit for trade along the Silk Roads, which carried goods between Persia, India, and China.

But if the horse-herding Scythians were mobile, they also were able to maintain the kind of rich court culture one usually associates only with city dwellers.

They were able to due so thanks to their use of carriages like this one, which was found disassembled in the Pazyryk tombs.

Their carriages enabled them not just to easily move their tents and other necessities, but also carry along stores of luxury goods, some which they imported and others they produced themselves.

One of the things the Scythians are best remembered for today is their intricate gold jewelry, which regularly tours the world in museum exhibits.

The other thing they are best remembered for is the size of their royal burial mounds, known as kurgans, which sometimes could reach over 20 meters high. Inside, as in the Egyptian pyramids, nobles were buried with their treasure for use in the afterlife.

This map roughly shows the extent of the Scythian lands at the time of the Roman Empire.

The other great nomadic people of northern Eurasia at this time, located farther east, were the Turkic-speaking tribes.

Later the Turkic-speaking nomads would sweep west in a centuries-long confrontation with the Persian speakers that would be chronicled in classical Persia’s epic poems.

Still, if much is known today about the Scythians due to their mention in ancient histories and the excavation of their burial mounds, very little is known about their carpets and carpet culture.

The only certainty is that their carpets included both pile rugs (the only example of which is the Pazyryk) and felt rugs.

Here is a close-up of a felt saddle blanket found in the Pazyryk tombs.

Both the pile and felt work show a level of technical sophistication that makes it clear they belong to a very old artistic tradition.

But whether that tradition was the Scythians’ own or was borrowed from neighbors is impossible to know for sure.

Most carpet scholars believe the Pazyryk pile carpet could not have been woven in a nomadic setting in such a remote corner of the Siberian steppe.

Murray Eiland Jr. and Murray Eiland III note in their book 'Oriental Carpets' (1998) that the carpet "raises the question as to how pastoral nomads could have acquired such a technically proficient work of art."

They answer that "it could have been through trade, as some Chinese silk fabrics were found at Pazyryk and other early nomadic burials on the steppes."

Theories of the carpet's origin generally assume it was woven in either a major population center of Achaemenid Persia or perhaps an outpost of the Persian Empire nearer to Pazyryk itself.

If the carpet were made in Persia, that would make it not only the earliest intact carpet ever found but also a striking example of the early carpet trade.

With its motifs of horsemen and deer, it may have been expressly designed for export to the steppes. Or, it might have been specifically commissioned by a Scythian chief.

Here is a saddle found in the Pazyryk tombs, showing the same kinds of tassels that can be seen on the saddles depicted in the carpet.

The mystery of the Pazyryk carpet's exact origin may never be solved. And perhaps it does not need to be, because the Pazyryk itself makes a still more important point.

That is, that carpets, whether woven at home or imported from afar, seem to be a universal human interest as old as time.

How did the Scythians use their rugs which – judging by their inclusion in a royal burial tomb – were clearly prized possessions?

The answer must be left to the imagination.

One possibility is that the carpets were at the center stage of decorating schemes that also included elaborate furniture like this table, also found in the Pazyryk tombs.

Perhaps the lion motifs of the table combined with the motifs of both natural and fantastic creatures on the carpets to fill Scythian tents with the echoes of the things their culture most prized.

The Pazyryk carpet alone includes horses, griffins, and deer. Its size is 180 x 198 cm (5'11" x 6' 6").

Today, the Pazyryk carpet is regularly reproduced by modern carpet weavers who find its design still has a magical appeal.

This high-quality replica is produced by weavers working in northern Afghanistan using natural dyes and handspun wool. It is available from Nomad Rugs in San Francisco.

It is interesting to think of the Pazyryk carpet, placed in a royal tent, as the world’s earliest known example of a room with a rug.

And it is even more fascinating to think that this earliest known example is so stunning in its beauty that it can equally express all the pleasure and excitement people have taken in furnishing their rooms with rugs ever since.

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Oriental Carpets And The Legacy Of The Silk Roads

2010-02-12T02:55:00.000-08:00

SAMARKAND, February 14, 2010 -- The Silk Roads, those great trading highways of the ancient world, had a huge influence upon carpets.

So much so, that discovering carpets and carpet culture inevitably leads to discovering the unique world that the Silk Roads created.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the map of the Silk Roads corresponds almost exactly to the map of today’s carpet belt, the countries with a long and still living tradition of producing oriental rugs.

The main trading networks of the Silk Roads stretched across western China (today’s Xinjiang province) to Central Asia, where they either turned south to India or continued straight ahead to Persia, Anatolia, and the Mideast.

At the shores of the Mediterranean they stopped, but boats extended the trade to many ports of southern Europe as well.

What held the Silk Roads together, from time immemorial until they were bypassed by trans-oceanic trade beginning in the 15th century?

The obvious, but incomplete answer, is commerce. And for the markets at the poles of the trade, as in eastern China, southeast Asia, or Europe, that was probably the sole stake.

Eastern China, for example, was throughout most of the history of the Silk Roads the world’s greatest export economy. It produced enormous quantities of ceramics and silk and its export business, organized by independent traders, was a major source of tax revenue for the court.

But where these exports items were headed as they moved in vast camel trains across the empire’s western horizon was of little interest to most Chinese.

Just how much so can be judged from an epic poem written in China in the 3rd century BC. This was about the same time Alexander the Great was firmly linking the West to the Silk Road by expanding his empire to Central Asia.

The poem is “18 Songs of the Nomad’s Flute” and it tells the story of a Han princess who was forcibly abducted by Turkic-Mongol Hsiung-nu (or Xiongnu) nomads and taken north beyond the Great Wall.

Lady Wenji, who was also the daughter of one of the most famous Confucian scholars of the time, was forced to marry one of the nomad chiefs and remained among the barbarians for 12 years.

But she appears to have found nothing of value among them even as she has two sons with her husband and wonders “how could I have become bound to my enemy in love and trust?”

When finally an embassy comes from China to offer ransom for her release, there is no question which choice she will make. She returns to civilization even at the cost of parting from her children and suffering the eternal melancholy the songs describe.

The pictures above are from illustrations for “18 Songs” painted sometime in the 13th century.

But if Lady Wenji’s story became a pillar of Chinese classical literature, the image it gives of the barbarians beyond the Great Wall was only half true. In fact, the nomads and the Chinese were bound together not just as enemies but also as trading partners.

The trade relations between the nomads and China is well explained by Stewart Gordon in his 2008 book “When Asia Was the World,” which describes Asia in the millennium from 500 to 1500 AD.

The nomads, he notes, raised horses that were in constant demand by the Chinese elite and the army and they raised cattle that was essential for sedentary agriculture.

The picture here is of a young Chinese nobleman on horseback, around 1290.

In exchange, the nomads bought the grain and silk produced by China. They also bought iron for horse trappings, elegant cloth for courtly robes, and steel for weapons.

As a result of the trade, the semi-nomadic chiefs not only wore robes of Chinese silk, modeled their own elite life on that of China’s rulers and imported rice as a high-status food, they also adopted many Chinese artistic techniques, including painting, for their court culture.

This porcelain depicting a “Westerner,” or nomad, on a camel is from China’s Tang Dynasty (618-907).

Similar ties between steppe peoples and their sedentary neighbors repeated across Eurasia – from the frontiers of India, and Persia, to the Arabian peninsula. The symbiotic relationships laid the basis for a stable cross-continental trading network that served everybody’s interest.

Over time, the Silk Roads transported goods of almost every conceivable type, from silk to spices to new plant dyes to medicines to industrial products. The industrial products not only included Chinese ceramics but Damascus steel and blown glass from China, India and Persia – the world’s three great glass-making centers in 1,000 AD.

That was at a time when, as Gordon notes, “glass-making had been entirely lost in Europe for centuries and would not be recovered for more than two centuries.”

But if commerce was the raison d’etre of the Silk Roads as far as most people in the manufacturing centers were concerned, it was the cultural exchanges that ultimately became the most important dividend for the people along the Silk Roads themselves.

Over the centuries, these exchanges were so great they created a shared Silk Roads culture that can still be seen in much of the weaving and other art of the region today.

In tracing the history of Asia from 500 to 1500, Gordon describes the cultural exchanges as taking place in two great successive waves: first Buddhist and, then, Islamic.

Both religions were “universalizing,” coming from outside and spreading across huge areas of the Silk Road network by recruiting on a basis of personal commitment rather than ethnicity or region.

At the same time, both religions encouraged people to travel for spiritual development and encouraged rulers to build rest-houses, pilgrimage sites, and colleges (monasteries or madrassas) to facilitate their quest.

Shown here is the complex of three madrassas on Registan Square in the center of Samarkand. The oldest (Ulugbeg Madrassa) dates to the 15th century, the newest to the 17th.

Thanks to these shared religious networks, ideas and artistic styles traveled as easily along the Silk Roads as commercial goods did between bazaars.

Gordon notes that by the Islamic period a man trained in Shari’a law in one state could find employment as an administrator in another.

And court painters “corresponded, viewed each others' work, and moved to find patronage across a network that stretched from Spain to southern India.”

As an example of court painting, here is a book illustration by the most famous court miniaturist, Kamal ud-Din Behzad (or Bihzad), who died in Tabriz in 1535. It clearly shows the influence of Chinese landscape painting in the background.

The evolution of much of the Silk Road region -- think today’s ‘carpet belt’ -- into a shared cultural space was hastened by two other factors: migrations and conquests.

The world being what it is, the increasing riches of cities along the trade routes both gave rise to empires and tempted conquerors from afar.

Just a few of the results were the Seljuk Turk empire extending from Central Asia to Anatolia; Genghis Khan’s empire covering most of Eurasia; and the Timurid empire stretching from Persia to Central Asia to northern India.

These vast empires united very diverse areas which ordinarily were isolated by geography. As Gordon notes, Genghis Khan ruled both steppes and large areas of agricultural China. The Mughals ruled both sides of the Himalayas.

If the shared culture of the Silk Road world could be given a single name, it would be this improbable sounding string of hyphens: Turkic-Mongol-Persian.

But the fusion was real, powerful, and long-lasting. And it helps explain much about what otherwise would be inexplicable in carpet history.

Just one example is the cosmopolitan style of the classical Persian court carpets of the 16th century. In them, Chinese-style cloudbands mix with Islamic calligraphy and Persian legends. All of them together is the legacy of the Silk Roads.

(The term “Silk Road” is a recent, elegant name for a network that needed no name in its own day. The term was coined in 1870 by German geographer Ferdinand van Richthofen, the uncle of the Red Baron.)

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Mejid Rugs And The End Of The Ottoman Era

2010-01-29T01:32:00.001-08:00

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.

The rug is typical of a whole class of small-size, town-woven carpets that appeared in the mid-1800’s. It was a time when the Ottoman Empire was moving rapidly toward its final eclipse in 1923.

The rugs are striking for several reasons. One is their distinctly non-Anatolian look. The other is that, even though they were clearly influenced by the West’s own artistic values, Europeans at the time found them distasteful and fled from them.

How did these rugs come about and why were they popular in Turkey at the time?

The place to begin the story of the rugs is with their namesake, Sultan Abdul-Mejid.

He reigned from 1839 to 1861, during a time of massive threats to the empire’s traditional way of life. His efforts to fend off those threats by Westernizing many Ottoman institutions reached to every level of society, including the Arts. But the results were often mixed.

Abdul-Mejid came to the throne just as one of the empire’s prize possessions, Egypt, had permanently broken away. That followed the earlier loss of Greece and dramatically underlined the need to modernize both the army and to build loyalty among the empire's far-flung, multi-national subjects.

Abdul-Mejid, like his father Mahmud II before him, looked to France and the ideals of the French Revolution for inspiration.

At the time, monarchies everywhere were awed by the way ordinary Frenchmen had enlisted en-masse in the Revolution’s armies to defend the values of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, and how Napoleon had later harnessed that power to all but conquer Europe. Many kings realized that their future depended upon at least partially making their societies more equitable.

Abdul-Mejid sought to transform Ottoman life by introducing the first of what would be many attempts at “Tanzimat,” or “Reordering” over the next decades.

The reforms attempted to stem the tide of nationalist movements within the Ottoman Empire by enhancing the civil liberties of non-Turks and non-Muslims and granting them equality throughout the Empire.

They also established a new system of state schools to produce a new generation of government officials more open to European technologies and administrative practices.

But the reforms were not only changes in substance but of style. Abdul-Mejid built Dolmabahce Palace in the French baroque manner, decorated it the same way, and moved there from Topkapi Palace. He also dressed in the European fashion and government functionaries began to do the same.

Over time, the new European dress-code would fully replace the complicated Ottoman hierarchy of different clothing styles and even shoe colors which had distinguished officials by rank and office. It consisted of a monotonous, long-tailed frock coat that was called the “stambouline” in the West and, more facetiously, the “bonjour tuxedo” in Turkey. Like new uniforms for the army, the coat was intended to change the mindset of those who wore it.

The message was not lost upon Turkish artists, including weavers, who closely watched court styles.

Entrepreneurs responded with new European-flavored designs of their own. One answer was the “Mejid” carpet, which gained wide domestic popularity.

The “Mejids” clearly reflect the Francophile taste of the sultan, though it is not known whether the sultan liked them himself. They were woven in bright pastel shades and decorated with sparse, natural-looking flowers or even rococo swirls. It was a huge departure from Turkey’s own design tradition of non-naturalistic ornamentation and richly concentrated colors.

Here is a carpet woven in Ghiordes at the time. The carpet is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

How much any empire can stave off collapse by adopting new models at times of crisis is debatable. Abdul-Mejid’s efforts ran into huge obstacles, not the least of which were the Western European powers themselves.

They loaned him massive amounts of money to buy weapons to confront the expanding Russian empire, but attached fatal conditions to the loans.

The conditions were demands for trade concessions to open the empire’s raw materials -- wool, cotton, silk and coal -- to European businesses and its markets to European products, including textiles. The results of this, too, were soon visible in the carpet industry and its commercial hub, the Istanbul bazaar.

Until 1830, the Ottoman Empire was still largely a self-contained and self-sufficient space. But with the opening to the West, its manufacturers suddenly came into direct competition with the industrial revolution. European textiles flooded the market and domestic producers found it impossible to compete.

Worse still for the domestic producers, the introduction of European fashions in the court harem caused a wave of emulation among Otttoman women. Dresses were made of European rather than local fabrics and the market for fine Ottoman silks collapsed.

Celik Gulersoy in his 1980 book ‘Story of the Grand Bazaar’ sums up the process this way:

“When ten thousand hand looms disappeared, villages could no longer be closed production units and the villagers turned into laborers and imported European goods rapidly took the place of domestic textiles in the Empire’s markets.”

The new shopping focus was the Bonmarches, the borrowed-from-French generic name for the shops erected in European style on the main avenue of Istanbul's chic Beyoglu district.

In 1881, a visiting English writer, Lady Brassey, described in her book ‘Sunshine and Storm in the East’ how rich Turkish ladies with their servants visiting the Grand Bazaar were surrounded by the treasures of the East but demanded the merchants show them Western goods instead, though these were mostly second quality. She regarded it as very strange.

By the turn-of-the-last century, the Grand Bazaar itself lost its most distinctive feature: the merchants sitting passively on wooden divans with their cupboards full of goods behind them. That, too, gave way to the new European style.

The arches lining the walls of the old Bazaar were connected to form shop facades and the merchants took to standing in their doorways.

In many cases, the merchants had no better choice because their new premises were no bigger than telephone booths. To complete the image of shops on a European street, they added signs and advertising above their doors.

During these decades, the Ottoman carpet production industry changed equally dramatically. Western capital entered the business and the Western market became the driving force of almost all the large-scale carpet manufactories.

Miroslav Jungr observes in his 2005 book ‘Oriental Carpets:’

“The European powers brought every aspect of mass production to bear on the weaving process, including using synthetic dyes and demolishing traditional design schemes. Floral patterns, beloved by foreign customers, became standard even though – with a few exceptions such as medallion ushaks – they had never been part of the Turkish tradition.”

Curiously, the Mejids, the Turkish weavers’ own early experiment with incorporating European styles, were completely overlooked in Europe. Jungr notes their stylized flowers and mostly shiny colors did not correspond to the cosmopolitan taste of the time. But in Turkey they remained popular even after the death of Sultan Abdul-Mejid himself in 1861.

Only today, as their story is becoming better known, are the Mejids beginning to win respect from collectors. And that is partly because of the bittersweet story they tell of the end of one era and the start of another.

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Salting Carpets And Topkapi Prayer Rugs: A Detective Story

2010-01-16T03:30:00.000-08:00

ISTANBUL, January 16, 2010 -- The Topkapi Palace treasury is the repository of many interesting things.

But for carpet lovers, some of the most fascinating – and mysterious – are the niched prayer rugs which are carefully stored away in its darkened rooms, safe from the aging effects of sunlight, air, and wear.

The carpets are so intricately made, and so fragile, that they were obviously never intended for daily use. But just who made them, and what they were intended for, is one of the great mysteries of carpet history.

Here is an example of one of the niche rugs in the Topkapi collection.

The rug is fragile because it is woven in some places with metal-wrapped silk threads. The metal -- silver that is gilded with gold -- gives parts of the carpet a metallic sheen that glitters in the light. But the metal itself can be worn away by the slightest abrasion and, at the same time, it makes the rugs so inflexible that even folding them could tear them.

Thus any of the normal things one does with carpets, from rolling them to stepping on them -- and certainly praying on them -- would destroy them.

Yet that is just one of the many peculiarities of these prayer rugs.

Still more surprising are the inscriptions on the borders.

Prayer rugs are usually associated with the Sunni branch of Islam, which was also the state religion of the Ottoman Empire. But the inscriptions here are Shi’ite, the state religion of one of the Ottoman Empire's greatest rivals: the Safavid Empire of Iran.

And, because Shi’ia themselves use prayer stones but not prayer rugs in their religious observances, the existence of Shi'ite prayer rugs should be an impossibility.

For decades, carpet experts have wrestled with the problem and come up with two explanations.

One is that many of the pieces are modern forgeries of classical carpets.

Another is that the pieces are, in fact, classical carpets but created for a very special political purpose.

Let’s take the forgery charges first.

The trail, like many a good mystery story, begins in London, specifically in the dark corridors of another museum, the Victoria and Albert.

In 1909, the Australian millionaire and art collector George Salting bequeathed to the museum upon his death a rug he believed was made in the 16th century and which in many ways seemed similar to the prayer rugs in the Topkapi.

Like the prayer rugs, it was extraordinarily fragile and woven in places with metal-wrapped silk threads, It also bore inscriptions in cartouches on its borders.

And though it was not a prayer rug itself – it was a medallion rug – it too was clearly never intended for use on the floor.

The “Salting carpet," as it became known, soon caught the European rug world’s eye but not in the way Mr. Salting likely intended.

One reason was its colors. They were very bright and amazingly well preserved. And that, on a rug which otherwise looked like it was from the classical era, struck many as a blatant sign the weaving was a recent forgery.

The challenge became to discover which carpet workshop in the modern era could possibly have forged such a complex piece. And the leading detective was Germany’s Kurt Erdmann, one of the most influential carpet experts of his generation.

Dubbing the “Salting” and similar rugs in other collections “disturbingly colorful,” he blazed a trail to Hereke, about 50 miles east of Istanbul. That is the home of one of the most famous workshops of the turn-of-the-last century Ottoman court, where weavers were routinely commissioned to make copies of Persian and other classical rugs for Istanbul’s palaces.

The “Saltings,” he concluded in 1941, were frauds, but almost perfect ones, and he paid tribute to their weavers, whose identity was betrayed only by their "Anatolian" sensibilities:

“What was achieved deserves full recognition. In the best pieces, the Persian 16th century style is remarkably successful. A wrong note is often struck in the coloring, whereby a difference of artistic sensibility leads, on the one hand, to an exaggeration of the richness of the coloring and, on the other, to adoption of the Anatolian coloring scheme which is restricted to a few shades.”

Here is a detail from George Salting's carpet showing its bright colors.

Few dared argue with Erdmann. So, for decades the Salting carpets lived in limbo.

Because they were incredible pieces of art by any measure, museums and collectors continued to treasure them. But they were identified as 19th century rugs, making them a historical anomoly.

Things might have stayed that way forever except for the march of time.

More recently, a new generation of rug experts has become intrigued again by the Salting carpets and, more particularly, their similarities to their prayer rug cousins in the Topkapi museum.

And those prayer rugs have cast doubt on Erdman’s theory because they, unlike the Saltings in Europe, have a documented biography. The curators of the Topkapi have listed the prayer rugs as part of the royal collection for centuries, long before the Hereke workshop produced its earliest confirmed rug in 1892.

Now, as scholars increasingly regard Salting Carpets and Topkapi Prayer Rugs as a single category, the hunt has turned to piecing together a history that explains how such clearly “Persian 16th century style” weavings came to Istanbul, why they include such a self-contradictory thing as Shi’ite prayer rugs, and how some of these carpets – the “Saltings” – eventually made it to Europe in such a fresh state that they could be regarded as modern weavings.

It is not an easy task, but the history that is taking shape is fascinating. The supporting evidence comes from two relatively new fields of rug study, rug structure and rug documentation, and have helped trace the carpets to the court workshops of the Safavid Empire during the 1500s.

Michael Franses summed up the historical explanation in his article “Some Wool-Pile Persian-Design Niche Rugs,” published in Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies Volume 5 (ICOC 1999).

He notes that in the 1500’s, the Ottoman Empire and the Safavid Empire were locked in a struggle for supremacy. The balance of power went back and forth and the stakes were who would control eastern Anatolia, Azerbaijan and Mesopotamia.

Eventually, the tide turned consistently against the Safavids due to the energies of Sultan Suleyman, the same Ottoman leader who was known as Suleyman the Magnificent in the West.

His armies took took Tabriz twice from the Safavids for various periods and captured Baghdad for good. As a result, the Safavid Shah Tahmasp, who reigned for 52 years during this regional warfare, turned to a policy of appeasement instead.

The gifts the Safavid court sent to Suleyman and his immediate successors are well illustrated in Ottoman miniatures of the time. The paintings show lines of courtiers streaming before the throne bearing boxes, bags, and lengths of fabrics.

The gifts came in special caravans headed by Safavid ambassadors and the caravans were sizable enough to stagger European diplomats to the Ottoman court who witnessed their arrival.

A Hungarian ambassador who was present to see a Safavid delegation arriving to congratulate Suleyman’s son, Selim II, on his accession to the throne in 1567 wrote:

“The train consisted of 700 men and 19,000 pack animals, bearing all sorts of luxuries, including woolen carpets so heavy that seven could scarcely carry them.”

He also wrote that he saw “silk carpets from Hamadan and Dargazan … 20 large silk carpets and many small in which birds, animals, and flowers were worked in gold.”
Some of the miniature paintings of the time show what could be courtiers carrying rolled-up carpets among other gifts including precious silver trays and decanters.

If the carpets did indeed come to Istanbul as gifts, there are still other things to explain, including the giving and accepting of “Shi’ite” prayer rugs.

That they had to be considered “Shi’ite,” there is no question. The calligraphic inscriptions on many of them are in praise of Ali, the Prophet Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law, who is particularly venerated by the Shit’ite faithful.

Similarly, there is no question that the Ottomans, who controlled Mecca and styled themselves the protectors of Sunni Islam, knew what the inscriptions said. The language used in the Ottoman court during much of the 16th and 17th centuries was Persian and Persian culture, like Italian Renaissance culture in Europe, was familiar to everyone in the region.

Were the messages on the carpet a diplomatic slap to the Ottomans even as the gifts were sent as tribute to keep the Ottoman powers at bay?

Or were they a Trojan Horse, slipping the Safavids’ state religion into the very inner sanctum of the Ottoman Sultan, the “Guardian of all the Holy Places”?

The answers may never be known, but the carpets were clearly so valuable that they were not only accepted but preserved in immaculate condition in the vaults of the Topkapi Palace treasury. Whether they were ever publicly displayed is not recorded.

That leaves one last mystery: how some of the Salting type carpets - like this one in Copenhagen's David Collection museum -- arrived in such pristine condition to Europe.

One intriguing possibility is offered by John Mills, whose article “The Salting Group: History and a Clarification” also appears in Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies Volume 5 (ICOC 1999).

Mills suggests some of the rugs may have been smuggled out of the Topkapi and sold in the streets of Istanbul when the city plunged into chaos during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. That was when Russian troops, pushing the Ottoman Empire out of Bulgaria, advanced to the gates of the city and were thought to be on the verge of taking it.

As refugees from the Balkans streamed into the city, there was near anarchy, the price of food shot up, and panicked people began liquidating valuables for cash. Incredible carpets began appearing in the bazaar.

Were carpets from the Topkapi Palace among them?

An anonymous correspondent writing a report five years later in Burlington Magazine has left this intriguing clue:

“I well remember much hawking of harem treasures during the terrible winter of the Russo Turkish war,” he wrote in 1903.

At least one European buyer is known to have bought a Salting type rug at that chaotic time. It is Prince Lobanov-Rostovsky, who was the Russian ambassador in Istanbul in 1878.

If some of the Salting carpets did come out of the Topkapi treasury, that could account for why their colors were so perfectly preserved that they could be mistaken for recent work.

It is an intriguing thought and one which carpets scholars are likely to keep pursuing in the years ahead.

Meanwhile, some Western museums continue to identify their Salting-type carpets as 19th century Turkish work. But the Topkapi palace curators have no doubt their own collection of prayer rugs comes from the Safavids.

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The Origins Of Classical Geometric Carpet Motifs: Girih, Rumi, And Kufesque

2010-01-01T01:27:00.000-08:00

ISTANBUL, January 1, 2010 - The geometric patterns of the Anatolian carpets that so fascinated European painters have diverse origins.

Some of them come from nomadic weaving traditions, such as the Memling gul. It is easy to weave and, unlike more sophisticated designs, has a flat, two dimensional appearance. It can be found in nomadic traditions ranging from Central Asia to the Transcaucasus to Iran and Anatolia.

But other motifs, especially those which appear to be three-dimensional (such as the medallion above), are so complicated they likely were borrowed from other fields of art.

The search for their origins takes one into the sophisticated world of Islamic decorative art and specifically, into the drafting rooms of court and commercial artists who created the complex designs and patterns that can be seen in the tile work of mosques and other buildings or in book illustrations.

One of the art forms such designers took to particular heights was ‘strapwork,’ the use of interlacing lines to give patterns an illusion of depth. The example at the top of this page is from a rug depicted in an Italian fresco from the early 1500s.

The motif -- an strapwork octagonal medallion -- is typical of both "Large Pattern Holbein" and "Small Pattern Holbein” carpets. The octagonal medallions are outlined by interlacing lines which make them stand out from the background field.

Shown here is a much rarer and more elaborate version of a strapwork medallion on a Large Pattern Holbein. It is depicted in the painting 'Virgin and Child with the Family of Burgomaster Meyer," by Hans Holbein the Younger in 1528.

Strapwork, also known as “girih” (the Persian word for knot), is a common design trick in both European and Islamic artwork. But eastern artists, who were particularly interested in geometric shapes, took it to levels of enormous complexity.

Just how complex it could be is only hinted at in carpets. But it is worth taking a moment to consider just for its own interest.

Here is an example of girih used to decorate the exterior of the restored Khanqah (lodging complex) of Nadir Divan Beg, dating to the early 17th century, in Bukhara, Uzbekistan.

The secret to understanding girih, which was meant to both delight and confound the eye, is understanding how the artisans created their designs.

They assembled them from jig-saw puzzle-like pieces, which could be combined with one another to generate an almost infinite variety of different patterns.

Here are five “ghiri tiles” representing different categories of puzzle pieces. They consist of a decagon, a pentagon, a hexagon, a bow tie, and a rhombus and all the sides of each are are of the same length, so any can fit together with the others.

The shapes of the girih tiles are not visible in the final design. What one sees are the patterns formed by the line decoration on the tiles.

How to create girih designs was a whole field of study that was codified in manuscripts of the time.

One such manuscript is the ‘Topkapi Scroll,’ a 15th century collection of architectural drawings created by master builders in the late medieval period in Iran.

The scroll, preserved in the Topkapi Palace complex in Istanbul, contains 114 individual geometric drawings detailing the theory and instructions for laying intricate patterns on walls and vaulted ceilings.

Both this picture and the one above are from ‘Medieval Islamic Architecture, Quasicrystals, and Penrose and Girih Tiles: Questions from the Classroom,’ by Raymond Tennant.

With time, every art form begins to experiment with stylizations, some of which try to turn the art form inside out.

In girih, this took the form of sometimes drawing designs by representing only the interstices where certain lines met. The lines themselves were dropped from view.

An example in carpets is this para-mamluke rug. It is not Anatolian but Syrian in origin.

With large-scale tile work on buildings, the effects of showing only certain interstices could be still more dramatic. The results resembles stars in the night sky, but arranged in subtle patterns that the brain perceives almost subconsciously.

There is no room here to discuss a kind of girih that never appears in carpets and is the most complex of all.

That is designs made up of shapes which, when put together, create a pattern that does not repeat itself, no matter where one looks. Moreover, the shapes cannot be re-arranged in any way that makes the pattern repeat.

One example is on the Darb-i-Imam Shrine (1453) in Isfahan.

The existence of shapes which can do this has only recently been identified by modern mathematicians, who still have difficulty modeling the phenomenon.

The fact that such shapes were being applied in art more than 500 years ago – with or without full understanding of the geometric laws involved – is a humbling reminder of the achievement of the ‘golden age’ of science in the Islamic world, which itself built upon the science of the classical world.

Still another, much easier to understand, motif which appears on Renaissance era Anatolian carpets and is borrowed from decorative tile designs is a motif composed of ‘split leaves.’

The split leaves are known as ‘rumi’ in Ottoman Turkey and “Islimi’ in Persia and can be seen in Small Pattern Holbein rugs (left).

The split leaves are arranged to form a quatrefoil that is the secondary motif in the rug pattern. The quatrefoils alternate with the primary motif, which is the octagonal girih medallion.

What did the split-leaf motif, appears as very angular in these carpets, look like in its original version on tile work?

Here is a sample (right). It is a quatrefoil of four rumi forms embracing a lotus flower and is very curving and lifelike in design. The motif was made angular for carpets to conform with the ‘geometric’ style popular for carpets at the time.

The rumi design, like girih, was subject to much experimentation. One result was what may have been the most popular of all the Anatolian export carpets to Renaissance Europe, the so-called Lotto design.

The Lotto (below), which at first glance looks like an abstraction of the Small Pattern Holbein, has both its motif elements derived from the rumi form.

Most frequently it appears in Renaissance paintings as a yellow geometric rumi lattice on a red ground. In fact, it is the most frequently depicted classical Anatolian carpet of all, appearing this way or with variations in some 500 paintings.

This picture of also shows yet another carpet pattern – this time to form the border – derived from still another field of decorative art: calligraphy.

In the ‘kufesque’ border, the calligraphy, which is highly ornate and curvilinear in its original medium of book illustration, is made geometric by the weavers.

The Anatolian geometric carpets were characteristic of carpet tastes across the Islamic world until styles began shifting toward curvilinear and floral patterns in the late 1400s.

Walter B. Denny, writes in “Anatolian Carpets’ (2002) that “it appears that before the phenomenon known as the ‘carpet revolution’ began to dominate carpet production in the last part of the 15th century, the carpet traditions of all these weaving centers may have shared elements of a common design vocabulary of geometric girih motifs, rumi design, and kufesque borders.”

It is interesting to think that while Renaissance Europeans did not import much Eastern art other than carpets, the rugs did offer them a considerable sample of what was going on in the other Islamic arts of the time.

Today, oriental carpets remain the only form of Eastern art that is widespread in Western homes. Often unbeknown to us, it is still a window onto the much larger, and ever changing, world of Eastern design.

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Related Links:

‘Medieval Islamic Architecture, Quasicrystals, and Penrose and Girih Tiles: Questions from the Classroom,’ Raymond Tennant.

‘The Tiles of Infinity,’ Sebastian R. Prange, Saudi Aramco World magazine, Septmber/October 2009.

Topkapi Palace And The Art Of The Ottoman Court

2009-12-16T22:23:00.000-08:00

ISTANBUL, December 17, 2009 -- Ottoman court carpets are intimately connected with a very special artistic culture, that of the Ottoman court itself.

The court both inspired and was the main consumer of the carpets, tiles, illustrated books and other art objects by countless artisans attached to court workshops inside and outside of Istanbul.

The imperial artisans, collectively called the Ehl-i Hiref or Community of the Talented, produced much of the finest work in the Ottoman Empire and their designs were copied or adapted by commercial artists even down to the village level.

But what why did the Ottoman rulers attach such great importance to developing and maintaining an artistic style that would clearly distinguish the court from the rest of the world outside?

The immediate answer might be that all courts in all lands tend to do the same. Just one other example is Versailles, designed as a pinnacle of Baroque style to underline the power of Louis XIV.

But the Ottoman court, with its seat in Topkapi palace, was very different from Versailles. Whereas Versailles was designed as a public stage, Topkapi was designed as a private one, and its culture was far more self-defined and self-contained.

There was a logic behind that choice.

The story is neatly told in the book ‘The Ottomans’ by Andrew Wheatcroft (1993). As he points out, the Ottoman court projected power through an image of inaccessibility, exclusivity, and mystery designed to create a sense of public awe. And everything about Topkapi palace and its court culture was intended to heighten that effect.

The first great Ottoman sultan, Mehmet II, began building the palace almost immediately after he conquered Constantinople in 1453.

A contemporary, the Greek historian Critoboulos of Imbros, wrote at the time:

“He gave orders for the erection of a palace on the point of old Byzantium which stretches out into the sea – a palace that should outshine all and be more marvelous than the preceding palaces in looks, size, cost and gracefulness.”

The site was the ancient Greek acropolis of Byzantium, the highest ground in the city. And originally, the grounds were far vaster than they are today, extending all the way down the shoreline below.

But if the acropolis had been an open area, Mehmet’s Yeni Sarai (New Palace) was deliberately isolated and separated from the city. Its buildings were hidden behind a massive wall some 35 feet tall. And it was organized in three areas, of ever diminishing accessibility to the public, guarded by three successive entry gates.

The first great courtyard, behind the Imperial Gate was the largest, with an area of 500,000 square feet. It included the workplaces of some 600 craftsmen: goldsmiths, weavers, amber-workers, armor-makers, potters, upholsterers, and many others. There were also stables and the barracks of guards and gatekeepers.

Anybody could enter from the street but once inside had to move and speak quietly.

Europeans found the hushed atmosphere eerie and regularly remarked upon it. Artist Nicolas de Nicolay wrote in 1551 that “notwithstanding the number of people coming together from all parts is very great, yet such silence is kept, that yee could scarcely say that the standers-by did either spit or cough.”

The second courtyard, behind the Gate of Saluation, marked the real boundary between outer and inner worlds. The gate had two sets of doors strong enough to resist a siege and guests passed through it only by invitation or for ceremonial occasions of state.

Once inside, the atmosphere was of a park, with lawns and fountains under cypress trees and gazelles wandering freely. The gardens were dotted with pavilions, or kiosks, which gave the impression of tents erected in an open space. It was an echo – conscious or not – of nomadic life and love of nature in the middle of a thriving but shut out metropolis.

At times, sultans also held outdoor audiences in the park, like the one shown here.

In the park was also the meeting place of the Sultan’s councilors – a kiosk known as the Hall of the Divan. The Hall’s floor was gilded and covered with a carpet of gold and there was a dias with the sultan’s throne. But the sultans themselves often preferred to appear to be absent, listening when they wanted from behind a grilled window.

The window, and the uncertainty of whether the sultan heard what was being said, gave the sultan such a degree of control that many sultans rarely attended the meetings of the divan at all.

The innermost world lay behind a third and final gate: the Gate of Felicity. Here was the sultan’s inner realm with those who lived closest to him, including the harem, with his wives and concubines and their children, and his retainers.

This retreat, known as The Abode of Bliss, was in fact a miniature city where more than 3,000 people spent their entire adult lives.

They spent their lives in splendid, luxurious isolation. But the isolation was not intended to cut them off from the world so much as to produce people who totally identified with the court and would be loyal to it throughout their lives.

These people were the royal pages, for whom court life was a school and who later would be sent out to govern the vast reaches of the empire.

In the early days of the empire, the sultan chose the boys who would become pages from outside the Turkic population, with its strong clan system. That was yet another way of creating an isolated group loyal only to the throne.

Gia Maria Angiolello, a young Venetian who served as a translator in the palace from 1473 to 1481, describes the Sultan’s pages this way:

“Sons of Christians, in part taken in expeditions with foreign countries and in part drawn from his own subjects … after they have been in his service a certain time, when in the opinion of the lord he can trust them, he sends them out of the palace with salaries which are increased as he thinks fitting.”

The “sons” initially were part of the tribute which the Ottomans exacted from conquered peoples, particularly in the Balkans and Caucasus, to create the Janissaries, the Sultan’s most rewarded and loyal troops.

Shown here is an Ottoman miniature of Janissaries battling the Knights of St. John in the siege of Rhodes, 1522.

The Janissaries, too, were an isolated group outside the clan system and the boys who would fill their ranks spent their childhoods on special farms in Anatolia where they became Muslims, gained strength, and learned to fight.

Both the pages, who were raised in the palace, and the Janissaries were the “kul,” or slaves of the sultan.

It was a privileged position, so much so that even after the tribute system was abandoned, the status of kul and the opportunities it offered passed from father to son. And over time many free-born Muslims also bribed or negotiated their way into the Sultan’s household to gain the same status

As Angiolello remarked in his early observations about pages, “there are few that do not accomplish their duties, because they are rewarded for the smallest service to their lord, and also because they are punished for the smallest fault.”

Wheatcroft notes that after the pages finished their training, they were given wives from among the harem women who were also slaves of the Sultan. This became a further bond to the court, because both “shared the common experience of palace life and even the unique dialect spoken in the Abode of Bliss.”

When the couple was dispatched to the provinces, it modeled its own household on the Ottoman court and spread that court culture farther.

Here is a painting of an Ottoman house in Cairo, before the influence of Western styles, by Frank Dillon (1823-1909).

Did the system work well? Yes, and for centuries.

As Wheatcroft puts it, “When the Conqueror built the Abode of Bliss on Seraglio Point, he created more than a building. The palace was the apex of Ottoman society: all power flowed from it, carried forth by the sultan’s servants sent to govern in his name.”

In this system, the arts were not only decorative but also helped create a frame of reference agreed upon by the court’s members. The shared style, like everything else, reinforced loyalty to the group and distinguished them from those outside the walls.

All the procedures within the palace were codified in kanunname, or law codes that even specified the dress for every rank of the ruling class.

Pictured here is the Sultan leaving Topkapi Palace for Friday prayers in one of the capital's mosques circa 1810 by an unknown artist. The once-a-week outing was the only time the Sultan appeared in public.

The advisers to the Sultan, the viziers, wore green. Chamberlains wore scarlet. Religious dignitaries wore purple and mullahs light blue. The master of horse dressed head-to-foot in dark green.

Court officers wore light red shoes. Those who worked in the Grand Vizier’s office, located just outside the palace walls, wore yellow shoes. And among non-Muslims, Greeks wore black shoes, Armenians violet, and Jews blue slippers.

Topkapı Palace gradually lost its importance at the end of the 17th century, as the Sultans preferred to spend more time in their new palaces along the Bosporus.

In 1856, Sultan Abdül Mecid I decided to move the court to the newly built Dolmabahçe Palace (shown here), the first European-style palace in the city.

By then, the Ottoman Empire was changing rapidly and its court life was becoming more European as well.

But how that happened is another story.

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