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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then, after forcibly settling all these families and, in the meantime, executing some 20,000 Polish officers held in prison camps, the Soviet leaders suddenly changed their strategy. As the war began with Germany in the summer of 1941, they decided to raise an army instead from among the thousands of still interned Polish soldiers. And to improve the mood, they granted an “amnesty” to all Polish deportees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

Related Links:

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

An Unforgettable Journey, by Maria van der Linden

Wikipedia: Anders’ Army

Polish deportees in the Soviet Union, by Michael Hope

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

The Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw

Selling Persian Carpets On Italian TV Is A Passion

ROME, February 22, 2008 -- Germany and the United States are the countries that buy the most Persian rugs, each year taking about 50 percent of Iran’s exports.

But it is Italy, the third biggest consumer, which seems to love them the most.

It is only in Italy that Persian carpets appear night after night on their own television shows, sometimes on two channels at once.

The shows are for telemarketing but, because carpets are beautiful and because Italians are unabashedly public in their adoration of beauty, the shows have become national institutions. On the air for decades, they have their own recognizable stars whose one-man performances attract not only carpet buyers but just-lookers of all sorts.

The king of this commercial theater is Alessandro Orlando, whose full name composed of two first names is enough to be memorable by itself. He appears on the Telemarket Green Elephant satellite channel, which also sells everything from porcelain to paintings to antique furniture. Alessandro sells those, too, but he reserves his most passionate performances for carpets in general and Persian carpets in particular.

As the show begins, he is sitting or standing alone in a cocoon of carpets. They are hung on the walls beside and behind him. They cover the floor beneath him. He is pensive.

“Over the past 100 years, there have been only five names of master Persian carpet makers known the world over,” he begins. “Mohtashem, Hadji Jalili, Habibian …”

“The most famous of them is Usted Fatollah Habibian. So famous that three years ago Iran, recognizing his work as part of its national patrimony, forbid removing any remaining Habibians from the country.”

Now, Alessandro looks directly at the camera and the pace quickens.

“But tonight, we have something extraordinary. No museum, no gallery in Europe has ever assembled the kind of collection of Habibians we have here, on these walls. There are only two Habibians in London’s V&A, a couple in Tehran’s carpet museum …”

Then, just when the camera pulls back and begins showing the carpets on display, Alessandro does what makes his show – and Italian telemarketing – so sui generis. He doesn’t begin selling, but pauses instead to launch into a full 15-minute homage to Habibian, his career, and his art.

That includes: Habibian’s birth around 1900, his early years aspiring to be a musician in Nain, the city’s rich tradition of weaving that shifted his attention to design, and finally his discovery of a new way of wrapping six strands of silk into a single fiber which, Alessandro says triumphantly, makes his carpets “as absolutely indestructible as they are beautiful.”

There are photos of Habibian on screen, sitting in a room of carpets. Alessandro has become his voice. “A true master can only produce 500 carpets in his lifetime because he is a perfectionist," he says. "We live in a world of false artists, false because they imitate the masters. They are good but they are ‘copyists’ … you will never find two Habibians that are the same, any more than two Picassos.”

When the selling finally does begin, the mood becomes much more businesslike. But Alessandro has set the stage so well that the prices of the goods on sale raise doubts only among collectors. For the rest, the tag of just 5,250 Euros for a six-square-meter designer carpet is a dream come true.

Alessandro's superlatives ring out and, in the background, so do the phones.

“A white diamond to put in your salon!”

“An enchanted garden!”

“A palace constructed from a carpet!”

“Mama … a Habibian!”

By the time it is over – a full hour later – Alessandro has sold enough to put noticeable gaps in the wall of carpets behind him. Muscular arms that briefly appear on camera pull the sold pieces down and take them away.

Alessandro himself is exhausted. He has walked the equivalent of several kilometers within his small studio, knelt on carpets, draped ones he likes over one knee, draped ones he likes even more over one shoulder, and generally proven that the church of art in Italy is every bit as impassioned as evangelist churches in America.

What does Alessandro look like? He is simply the man you would find standing beside you at the counter of an espresso bar, with a rumpled suit and no briefcase. His most prominent features are his black hair, which contrasts vividly with his graying temples, and his black eyebrows which rapidly change expression. He is Everyman.

There are lesser stars of Italian telemarketing, which runs 24 hours a day. But no others rise above their on-screen roles. There is a more intellectual type who whispers footnotes of art history, there is a more physical type who comes on strong like a boxer, and there is a hypnotic type who intones over and over: “with this investment you will never lose.”

There is even a man who dresses in a brocaded jacket like a yacht captain, but he sells antique dressers and commodes, not textiles.

The telemarket programs have been on the air so long that thousands of people have circulated through them as off-screen prompters whispering carpet dimensions and prices to the showmen or as delivery boys taking the goods to customers.

Hadi Dadashian, an Iranian-American who lives in San Francisco, worked with a telemarketer while he was a student in Rome decades ago. He still remembers a delivery to Gina Lollobrigida.

“When we got to her apartment it was very late at night,” he says. “She was all alone and she opened the door herself.”

He recalls that the actress lived in a fabulous setting but looked sad and was watching all-night TV. She gazed for a long time at the carpet she had ordered and several times ran a red toe nailed foot over it to check its softness. Then she accepted it, like a bouquet of flowers she had bought to cheer herself up.

#

RETURN TO HOME PAGE

#

Related Links

Alessandro Orlando

Alessandro Orlando: “Meravigliosa!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEfU1I3gKBQ&feature=related

Alessandro Orlando: Too Busy To Speak
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95PQ3NBGuPU&feature=related

Fatollah Habibian

Barry O’Connell: Habibian Nain Rugs
http://www.spongobongo.com/em/em9653.htm

As Costs Rise, Iran's Carpet Producers Look Abroad

HANNOVER, Germany; January 22, 2008 --

Rising production costs are causing some Iranian producers to move operations to India and Pakistan, where labor is less expensive.

Particularly feeling the squeeze are companies which try to weave the highly ornate styles that traditonally have made Persian carpets so famous.

Those styles include Hadji Jalili -- a highly complex design originally produced in Iran from 1880 to 1925 by a renowned Tabriz workshop of the same name.

Today, producers say, recreating that level of detail using highly skilled weavers in Iran is prohibitively costly. A Hadji Jalili is woven with dozens of colors, making its production an extremely time-consuming and painstaking process.

One company that set out to recreate the Hadji Jalili carpets in sizes suitable for mansion rooms -- where they traditionally go -- soon found itself looking to the subcontinent instead.



"If we wanted to produce this quality in Iran, it would cost four to five times as much," says Kambiz Jalili, an owner of the U.S.-based firm Hadji Jalili Revivals who attended this month's Domotex carpet fair in Hannover, Germany.

He adds, "The majority of weavers even in an area of India accustomed to making very fine and very intricae designs refused to weave these because in every rug we have anywhere from 16 to 30 colors and there may be eight colors which are so similar that it is extremely difficult for the weaver to distinguish between the yarn colors and it is very easy to make mistakes."

The complexity of the rugs puts them at the high end of carpet prices -- about $ 1,750 per square meter retail. By the time they are woven large enough to fit a palace ballroom, the retail price becomes about all the market will bear.

Asked if his customers truly are palace owners, Jalali says "they better be, to be able to afford them!"

Producing a quintessentially Persian carpet outside of Iran may seem like an extraordinary example of global outsourcing.

But as Iran's economy grows with high oil prices -- which today are around $ 100 a barrel -- Iranian producers say they increasingly find themselves struggling at home.

Sadegh Miri is one of the owners of Tehran-based Miri Iranian Knots. He says that over the past 10 years, the cost for weavers in Iran has gone up "300 to 400 percent."

Miri has remained successful by focusing on antique collectors. That is another wealthy clientele which will buy new rugs of classical quality if antique ones cannot be found in the dimensions and colors they seek.

It is high-end business like Hadji Jalili Revivals but, due to the labor costs, one restricted to much smaller carpet sizes. Miri's retail prices, which reflect the differences in the Iranian and Indian production markets, range from $ 2,500 to $ 7,500 dollars per square meter.

Does the multi-generational company fear that one day it will have to relocate?

Miri brushes off the suggestion with a laugh. "If that day comes, I will stop working," he says. "I will stay in Iran and continue until the market decides."

But Miri does predict that much of Iran's lower-end carpet production will eventually follow the global migration to lower-cost lands.

"In the future, only the high-end carpets will survive and the commercial end will go to India and China because we can't compete with them regarding the prices," he says. "Even now, many Iranian producers have gone and they are in India or Pakistan and they are producing there."

Not just labor costs are rising, so are the costs of materials.





Hossein Attaran of Tehran-based Carpet Heritage says that particularly affects producers who use natural dyes and handspun wool. Those are the materials an increasing number of carpet makers bank upon to revive flagging customer interest in their industry.

Attaran says decades of mass carpet production using synthetic dyes and machine-spun wool have flooded the market with low-quality pieces from every carpet-weaving country. That has left buyers jaded and looking for less artificial products.

But as interest in organic carpets -- those colored with plant-based dyes -- grows, so do the prices of the materials themselves. Madder root, a source for red dyes, has shot up from 70 cents a kilo a few years ago to $ 4 a kilo today. Handspun wool today costs $ 10 dollars a kilo, or five times more than machine-spun wool.

That creates pressure to convince the public the difference is worth it. And in Iran it only adds to the difficulties of persuading buyers to buy expensive Persian carpets from their homeland rather than lower-priced look-alikes from elsewhere.

Carpet Heritage this year presented a new line to emphasize the long history of art and culture unique to Persian carpets. Its limited edition of "Persian Poem Carpets" has a quatrain from Omar Khayyam subtly and elegantly woven into the border of each piece.

"Bringing the two forms, poetry and carpets, together shows a very traditional way of Persian thinking about how we should appreciate life," Attaran says.

Iran’s hand-woven carpets are one of its biggest export commodites after oil. The country exported some $400 million of hand-woven carpets in 2006, the latest figures available, with the United States and Germany as the biggest destinations. The carpet industry directly or indirectly employs some 1.4 million people.

#

RETURN TO HOME PAGE

#

Related Links:

News:

Reuters: Iran carpet traders hope quality will trump rivals
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSDAH24617320070917

Reuters: Five facts about Persian carpets
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSDAH24627320070917

RugArt: Annual Rug Production At 6m Square Meters
http://www.rugart.org/news/shownews.asp?id=3418&temp=english

Zawya: Persian Rugs Still On Top
http://www.zawya.com/Story.cfm/sidZAWYA20071227042009/SecMain/pagHomepage/chnIran%20News/obj4D013B07-9736-4570-BBD1F1C13DD6B6E1/


Haji Jalilis:

Barry O’Connell: PersianCarpetGuide: Guide to Haji Jalili Tabriz Rugs and Carpets
http://www.persiancarpetguide.com/sw-asia/Rugs/Persian/Tabriz/Hajji_Jalili_Tabriz_Rugs.htm

Omar Khayyam:

Wikipedia: Omar Khayyam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khayyám


Contacts:

Hadji Jalili Revivals
http://www.hjrrugs.com/

Miri Iranian Knots
http://www.mirssg.com/english/head.htm

Carpet Heritage Company
http://www.carpetheritage.net/index.php?page=welcome.php

Advice:

How to Buy an Oriental Rug and not Get Taken on a Carpet Ride
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/moneymag_archive/1997/05/01/225684/index.htm

How Traditional Are Iran’s Modern Gabbehs?

HANNOVER, Germany; January 17, 2008 --

Is it true that as life gets more complicated, designs get simpler?

There is one enduring example. It is Iran’s gabbeh carpet – today very simple, and very popular.

Gabbehs were not always the minimally decorated, sometimes single-color canvases they are now.

Originally, gabbehs had boldly colored, complex designs. Until the mid-1900s, they still looked more like tribal kilims than like modern abstract paintings.

Nejatollah Hakakian is a Hamburg dealer with many years in the rug business. He dates the change in the gabbeh’s design – and its rise to popularity in the West -- to just a few decades ago.

“Twenty years ago they started in Iran to do gabbehs with less and less designs and with tone-on-tone colors. So they changed from highly decorated carpets to more or less nothing in the field, with just a border around it, and sometimes not even a border,” he says.

“The rule today is three to four colors only, no more, when a normal Iranian carpet has seven to 17 colors. Now the Pakistans and Indians do the same, making carpets with almost no design. Mainly you just see the tone-on-tone colors.”

That simplification has had the effect of making gabbeh patterns, which have a centuries-old history among Iranian nomads, easy to mistake for Western contemporary designs. And it has made the carpet almost a household fixture throughout Europe and, increasingly in the United States.

Hakakian says he once asked a venerable German carpet dealer why European buyers did not prefer the many more complex workshop and tribal carpets Iranian producers could offer him instead.

The reply was one of the best insights Hakakian says he ever received to selling in the West.

“You Iranians are hungry to see grass that is green, but we are full of it in Europe,” the dealer told him. “We need calm and quiet, so the less design you have, the more of your carpets we can sell.”

But if the gabbeh has a heritage of rich, complex designs itself, how much of its contemporary look is still faithful to its past?

A great deal, according to Mahsa Heidarian, whose family company of the same name just won an award for Best Traditional Nomadic Carpet at the Domotex 2008 trade show in Hannover, Germany.

The winning gabbeh’s design very much resembles geometric abstract art.

The Heidarians, based in the west-central Iranian town of Shahr-e-Kord, say they won by letting their nomadic weaver add her own personal touches to a design inspired by a nomadic masterpiece from the past.

"In nomadic carpets, we don't tell the weavers anything, because it is like abstract art, it has to come out of herself to be artistic," says Mahsa Heidarian. "We just try to choose the right person to do it, who knows the tradition of making nomadic carpets."

She adds that finding the right person is not always easy. "A problem is that there are increasingly fewer nomads in Iran who have a traditional weaving knowledge base," she says. "People are increasingly settling down."

The Heidarians say the simplified patterns of modern gabbehs are obtained by magnifying just one or more of the small parts found in a traditional gabbeh. Thus, just a medallion can be expanded, or just part of a field, into a whole carpet design.



"This simplification responds to the Western market's preferences for abstract art but it is also true to tradition, because the simple element is there already," says Mahsa's husband, Arash.

He draws parallels with African art, whose spare lines so interested Europe’s abstract artists at the beginning of the last century. "There is the same immediate rapport between abstract art and nomadic art," he says.

One might argue that the rapport for modern buyers -- not all of them artists -- must go deeper than just recognizing familiar abstract patterns in a nomad's work.

Perhaps there is a longing in all modern societies for simpler things, and the art of tribal peoples -- which is the product of more elemental lifestyles -- helps to satisfy it.

True or false, gabbehs have done well exploring that possibility.

In the early 1990’s, gabbeh producers gained still more interest in the West by turning their backs on synthetic dyes in favor of natural dyes made from local plants, instead – the nomads’ traditional way of coloring the carpets. The return to nature was so successful that the carpet was one of the main attractions at the 1992 Grand Exhibition in Iran.

Authors Murray L. Eiland and Murray Eiland III note in their book ‘Oriental Rugs’ that “the next year there was such a boom in new gabbehs that it had created a wool shortage throughout the country.

The gabbeh’s marketing also got a boost from Iran’s film industry when prominent director Mohsen Makhmalbaf agreed to do a movie centered on the carpets and the Qashqai nomads who weave them. The drama, simply titled “Gabbeh,” was commissioned by an organization dedicated to the export of handicrafts, but it won prizes both at the 1996 Cannes and New York film festivals.

Gabbehs are hardly the only weavings to grow simpler over the decades and become more popular with Western buyers in the process.

Hamburg dealer Hakakian points to carpets woven by Tibetan refugees in Nepal as another example.

"The Tibetan carpet was the first with no design, just one or two colors, no flowers, no medallion. There was a high demand for that until about two years ago. The Tibetan was almost only white or off-white. Gabbeh went with darker tone-on-tones, terra cotta, blue, black, red."

Hakakian says that the Tibetan and gabbeh producers are keenly aware of each other and learn from each other's successes. The main difference between them may be in how rooted they remain in their own traditions.

The Tibetan refugees were encouraged to weave by Swiss aid agencies which helped them resettle in Nepal in the 1960’s. Today, joined by many Nepalese, the refugees are a major weaving pool for Western interior designers.

The gabbeh weavers have never had to leave home. And while some are amenable to design suggestions, the best still stick closely to their own interpretations.

#

RETURN TO HOME PAGE

#

Related Links:

Gabbehs:


Barry O’Connell (JBOC): Guide To Gabbeh Rugs
http://www.persiancarpetguide.com/sw-asia/Rugs/Persian/Gabbeh_Rugs/Guide_To_Gabbeh_Rugs.htm_Rugs.htm

JBOC's Gabbeh Rugs
http://www.squidoo.com/Gabbeh-Rugs

JBOC’s Notes: Notes on Lori Gabbeh Persian Rugs
http://www.spongobongo.com/em/nm/eme9916.htm

Jozan: Persian Gabbeh Rugs
http://www.jozan.net/distrikter/gabbeh.asp

OldCarpet.com: Gabbeh Carpet Properties
http://www.oldcarpet.com/gabbeh.htm


Tibetan Carpets:

Jacobsen: Tibetan and Nepalese Weaving in Nepal
http://www.jacobsenrugs.com/nepal.htm


Contacts:

Hakakian Brothers
http://de.sireh.com/n/33/nossites_gebr_hakakian_gmbh-hamburg/

Heidarian Carpet
http://www.heidarian.com/html/Process.htm


Advice:

A Magic Carpet Ride Purchasing a Handmade Tibetan rug -- Without Getting Rolled
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/moneymag_archive/2003/05/01/341270/index.htm

Nomadic Felt Carpets Seek A Place In Western Homes

HANNOVER, Germany; January 16, 2008 – Almost all the space for exhibiting handcrafted carpets at the annual Domotex trade show in Hannover (January 12 – 15) is devoted to woven rugs.

But at one stand, an Italian textile design house is displaying something one rarely sees at carpet shows. It is a roughly-textured felt mat as big as a sheet and its surface is brightly painted with an abstract design. The look is similar to a painting in a modern art gallery.



Even the Italian textile house 'Weave,' which produced the felt is not sure whether it is a wall-hanging or a carpet. But the Turin-based group is confident it can find a place in the market for home furnishings.

The inspiration for the product came during a trip to Nepal. While visiting a cooperative development project, one of the company’s owners was struck by some small felt purses being made for tourists.

But when the Italians asked the felt workers to try making a large felt carpet using local designs the results were unsatisfactory. So, instead of trying to recreate traditional motifs from Nepal, the Italian company asked the local producers to just make 60 large white felt carpets instead.

“We decided to make plain felt, plain white, and then bring them over to Italy and get an artist to paint on them. And from there we have had a very good feedback,” says Amanda Smythe, who is one of Weave’s representatives.

The positive feedback includes a nomination at Domotex for the carpet with the best modern design – an astonishing feat considering the low-esteem in which felt is held by most carpet connoisseurs. In the end, the felt creation did not win the prize but the company plans to go ahead with preparing more felt pieces.

In most of the world, felt is still used for inexpensive cushioning in packing cases, or for inexpensive – but itchy -- blankets and jackets, or simply as floor pads to protect more expensive woven carpets.

But where felt is still used as artwork, it has a long tradition.

In Central Asia, felt carpets are still placed on the floor of a yurt, where the thick wool helps insulate the tent from the cold ground beneath.

In Iran, too, felt was once the preserve of originally nomadic Central Asian groups like the Turkmen. Over time it also moved into homes, where room-sized pieces were used as floor covering to fill the gaps between more cherished woven carpets. But today, felt making is almost a lost skill and Iranian carpet shops barely stock it.

Still, pieces of new Iranian felt occasionally show up at Western carpet shows. That is thanks to periodic efforts by dealers to rescue what is almost a dying art.



Abolfazi Ramezani, who is based in London, displays several felt carpets that he has commissioned with contemporary patterns that resemble colorful, abstract paintings. But unlike the Italian-designed felts, the colorful designs are not painted on. Instead, they are applied in the traditional, back-breaking way, which is by kneading pieces of colored felt into a larger felt background.

Ramezani describes what the traditional process entails: “It is very hard work to get the wool to this density. They heat up the wool with very hot water and then, with their elbows, they go on and on and on to make them harder, and harder, and harder, and then they lay the design on top of that and they put hot water on it and they carry on rolling them, over and over again until the design actually gets stuck under the plain wool.”

Ramezani says dealers from Japan and Spain seem to particularly like the felt pieces, because “they are different than any other oriental carpet you see.”

One reason the felt-made carpets are striking is that they usually have different designs applied to the front and back. And the prices are affordable. At wholesale, they range from 70 to 130 euros per square meter – which is at the low end of handmade carpet prices.

Can the market for felt carpets grow larger?

The answer lies in part with Western retailers who, for now, seem barely acquainted with the art form. But it also depends on whether felt producers will continue to make such a labor-intensive product once the standard of living in their home countries rises.

And, says Ramizani, there is still one more player to consider, one that is neither a producer nor a buyer – though it certainly is a consumer.

That player is the humble moth.

“I have been told the moth has a special interest in this quality and they immediately start eating up the wool,” says Ramezani.

He notes that old felt pieces from Iran show considerable moth damage – attesting to their attraction for one of mankind’s most faithful house companions. Making felt less tasty could be one of the first challenges for anyone seriously trying to broaden the market.

#

RETURN TO HOME PAGE

#

Related Links:

Central Asian Felt Carpets: Kyrgyz Shirdaks

Alibaba: Kyrgyz Felt Rugs