Strong Sales But Low Investments Spell Trouble For Afghan Carpet Producers

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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Isfahan And The Safavids' Design Of The World

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

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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The World's Most Famous Museum Carpet: The Ardabil

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

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

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

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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