Afghan Ziegler Chobi Carpets Explore Subtler Styles

HANOVER, April 3, 2009 -- Ever since Afghan refugees in Pakistan began having success in the late 1980s with their modified Ziegler designs (left), they've been mercilessly imitated by other producers.

Nowhere is that clearer than at trade fairs such as this year's Domotex in Hanover, Germany (January 17-20). The halls of the fairground were filled with Zieglers, familiarly called Chobis, but only a portion of them were made by Afghans.

Small wonder, then, that Afghan weavers -- whether they remain in Pakistan or have returned to Afghanistan -- keep searching for something new. And increasingly, where they are going is in the direction of subtler, small-scale floral designs that look very different from the Chobi's previous bold patterns.

Colors, too, are changing. After starting out with simple contrasts of burgundy and white, and then experimenting with darker shades including browns, blacks and gold, the Afghan designers now are exploring an ever broader spectrum of hues.

The only thing not changing is the Chobi's original and still greatest strength: soft vegetal dyes. Indeed, it is from the Turkmen word for wood -- one of the main dye sources -- that the name "Chobi" derives.

Here is one of the new Ziegler designs shown by Afghan weavers at the Domotex show. It made it to the semi-finals in the awards competition for Best Traditional or Nomadic Design under 150 euros/square meter.

The judge's positive appraisal augers well for the future success of the new Ziegler designs. At the same time, it shows how self-confidently Afghanistan's commercial carpet industry is returning to the world stage after decades of disruptions.

The carpet is made by Kabul-based Hali Weavers, which calls it 'Mahal," or Palace. It is 3.6 meters x 2.6 meters, with 300 knots per square inch, and was woven by Oraz Geldi, a master weaver in Aqcha, northern Afghanistan.

Aqcha, like the other carpet centers of Andkhoy and Shibergan, is in the heart of the Ersari Turkmen belt, a famous weaving area for generations. In recent years, thousands of Turkmen weavers who fled as refugees to Pakistan during the Soviet-Afghan war and the subsequent civil wars and Taliban era, have returned to the region.

As they come, they have brought back the Chobi techniques pioneered in the Pakistani refuge camps and turned the northern Afghanistan into a major center for Chobi production. (See: In Afghanistan's Turkmen Rug Belt, It's Tradition vs. Globalization).

All this has helped make Afghanistan's carpet industry boom. By some estimates, carpets now account for a full 60 percent of the country's exports (not including illegal opium poppies). They are followed by dried fruit, fresh fruits, leather, marble and other stones.

But carpet producers say the industry still is far from being as big a revenue earner for Afghanistan as it could be. The vast majority of carpets still go to market via Pakistan, where they are marked 'Made in Pakistan' and where a large portion of the profits are siphoned off by brokers and shippers.

Raaz Hassan, an owner of Hali Weavers, is one of some 40 Afghanistan-based producers who came to the Domotex show. The delegation was sponsored by USAID, which is investing in helping the domestic industry make market contacts abroad.

What is needed to make Afghanistan a carpet powerhouse in its own right again? Hassan has two recommendations.

First, he says, the Afghan government needs to negotiate with more international air freight carriers to fly directly to Kabul. Currently, the state airline Ariana carries carpets at 60 cents per kilogram -- half the usual private cargo rate -- to Dubai. But its capacity is limited.

Second, he says, the government should introduce a rebate system like that used in Pakistan to financially reward producers for each carpet they export. He notes that in 1990 the Pakistani rebate was 18 percent and that helped boost export production so much that the government has been able to draw the rebate down to almost zero today.

"Pakistan grew its carpet industry into a major hard currency maker for the country," Hassan says. "But our government does not understand that logic."

He says Kabul almost ignores its export sector as officials concentrate on taxing imports at a rate of 5 to 20 percent instead. "They are content to collect the low-hanging fruit," he observes.

Meanwhile, Hassan estimates that 95 percent of Afghan weaving goes out to the world through Karachi or, more recently, Iran's port of Bandar Abbas. Not a happy situation but also, perhaps, not a permanent one.

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An Analysis of Business Opportunities in Afghanistan's Carpet Sector, 2007

Afghan Mark: Carpets Made By Afghan Women's Consortia

Hali Weavers

Books: Three Novels About The Oriental Carpet World (Fun, Epic, Poignant)

PRAGUE, March 20, 2009 -- It's strange so few novels are set in the world of oriental rugs.

After all, it is a place where so many opposites meet.

Things made by the world's poorest people become objects of desire for the richest ...

Sophisticated urbanites are awed by nomadic tribes people ...

Tradition fights for a place in modern life ...

And honest carpet dealers contend with highly unscrupulous rivals.

So, what a pleasure to discover a new novel set entirely in the carpet world that is now appearing -- in chapter-by-chapter installments and free-of-charge -- on the Internet.

The novel, "When A Dragon Winks" is by San Francisco carpet dealer and writer Emmett Eiland and has a lot of attractions. It is funny, rich with insights into the rug business, filled with eccentric characters, and -- perhaps best of all -- has a page-clicking plot.

Here is the link: When A Dragon Winks

New chapters appear every Monday.

Just briefly -- so as not to spoil the fun -- here are some of the main characters.

There is a young carpet store owner trying to get his start in San Francisco.

There is a con man who appears like a good genie in the young man's store and suddenly makes his business take off -- but seems to have ulterior business motives of his own.

And there is a socialite who has climbed as high as she can in the museum world but wants to go much higher.

Plus there is one more highly volatile ingredient: an ancient Chinese dragon rug rumored to exist but never seen -- a rug so valuable that, if it were to appear -- it could make or break anyone's fortune.

What are some of the behind-the-curtain peaks into the rug business this book offers? Here is one description of the young carpet dealer, Holden Carter, as he sits musing in his store:

"He had heard of an African tribe that was said to urinate in rituals on objects to make them powerful. In the West, rather than urine, it was age that imbued objects with power and value.

"Nothing made a piece of furniture more desirable than to uncover it in an attic where it had been stashed away for 200 years. Oriental rugs, he believed, owned their mystique — their fabled reputations as magic carpets and flying carpets — to the fact that often they survived long enough to become quite old. The older a rug, the more valued it was.

"Nevertheless, as Holden’s antique rugs grew six months older and then a year and finally two years older while going unsold in his store, rather than gaining in power and value, they began to lose their magic for him. It was hard to stay in love with rugs that had been passed over by so many shoppers."

It would be unfair to talk of rug novels and speak of only one.

There are least two other novels that are partly set in the rug world which have appeared in recent years and deserve mention.

One is The Rug Merchant by Meg Mullins.

Publisher's Weekly says:

"New York City teems with quiet desperation in this lucidly written but languid debut novel. The titular carpet salesman, Ushman Khan, has left his mother and his wife, Farak, in Iran in order to make a new start in America.

"Told from Khan's perspective, the narrative traces his subtle acculturation into Western life while he sets up shop and develops loyal customers like the wealthy socialite Mrs. Roberts. He plans for his wife to join him, but learns that she has divorced him for a Turkish salesman.

"Crushed, Ushman buys plane tickets to Paris he will never use and finds temporary, self-loathing comfort in a prostitute. Only when he meets Stella, a Barnard freshman, does he begin to see a way out of his isolation.

"Like him, Stella is an outsider struggling with loss and looking for connection, but Ushman must first resolve his conflicted feelings about women and sex and American culture.

"Originally developed as a short story that appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2002, this melancholy novel droops under the weight of a sympathetic but tentative, passive protagonist who can find no real solution to his profound alienation."

Another book is The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani.

A review by Publisher's Weekly describes it this way:

"In Iranian-American Amirrezvani's lushly orchestrated debut, a comet signals misfortune to the remote 17th-century Persian village where the nameless narrator lives modestly but happily with her parents, both of whom expect to see the 14-year-old married within the year.

"Her fascination with rug making is a pastime they indulge only for the interim, but her father's untimely death prompts the girl to travel with her mother to the city of Isfahan, where the two live as servants in the opulent home of an uncle — a wealthy rug maker to the Shah. The only marriage proposal now in the offing is a three-month renewable contract with the son of a horse trader.

"Teetering on poverty and shame, the girl weaves fantasies for her temporary husband's pleasure and exchanges tales with her beleaguered mother until, having mastered the art of making and selling carpets under her uncle's tutelage, she undertakes to free her mother and herself.

"With journalistic clarity, Amirrezvani describes how to make a carpet knot by knot, and then sell it negotiation by negotiation, guiding readers through workshops and bazaars."

Altogether, these three novels offer a wonderful library for people who like reading about carpets. And just like carpets themselves, no two of them are the same.

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When A Dragon Winks: official website

The Blood of Flowers: official website

The Rug Merchant: Synopses and Reviews

Great Gatsby! What Are Oriental Carpet Patterns Doing On Jazz Age Beaded Purses?

INDIANAPOLIS, USA; March 6, 2009 -- The "It" girls of the 1920s -- the Flappers -- did a lot to usher in the modern age.

They were the first to stop wearing the waist-constricting corsets that gave so many women before them the look of walking -- and fainting -- hourglasses.

They danced wild dances -- the Charleston and the Bunny Hug -- to ragtime and jazz taken from the previously ignored culture of Black America.

And they cut their hair short and smoked and drank like men, presaging the days when women would join the workforce and become financially as well as socially independent.

All this revolutionary behavior might seem whimsical until you think of what directly preceded it: World War I. The previous world order had ended in what -- politics aside -- was collective suicide. Many people believed it was absolutely necessary to try something new.

But what does this have to do with carpets?

One of the less well-known ways the Flappers anticipated modern times was also by being interested in "ethno" styles.

Their early ethno-look did not just include feathered headbands to liven up a party outfit -- already a step too far for many people today. It also featured beaded purses in a variety of designs inspired by oriental carpets and textiles.

The beaded carpet purses came in a huge variety of patterns. They ranged from Turkish prayer carpets, to Caucasian rugs, to Persian medallion carpets, to Turkmen tribal designs, to Indian textile motifs. But unlike most ethno products today, they were not made in the East as one might expect, but in the United States and Europe, particularly in France.

The story of these beaded oriental carpets was told recently by an exhibit of 70 such purses at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) in Indiana. The exhibit, entitled Shared Beauty: Eastern Rugs & Western Beaded Purses began May 31, 2008 and ends April 5 this year.

Niloo Paydar, curator of textiles and fashion arts at the IMA, says oriental carpet designs were not something originally associated with beaded purses, which have a long history of their own from the late 19th century through the early 20th.

Much more typical designs for beaded purses were chinoiserie, landscapes, flowers and occasionally people, and mostly these designs were taken from paintings and other arts of the period. Here is one such landscape purse (right).

In the 1920s, the demand for beaded purses reached its height. One reason may be that they were a perfect accessory for beaded evening dresses, which were an integral part of flapper-era costumes. This apparently created a desire for still more designs, and oriental carpet patterns suddenly joined the menu.

Paydar says the use of carpet designs was surprising because their patterns did not go particularly well with the patterns of the Jazz Age dresses, which were mainly art deco.

Still, their popularity may reflect the fact that during this same period Orientalism was still in vogue and eastern carpets were commonplace in western homes. The best-traveled could take package tours on the Nile or steamers to Istanbul or go on around the world from one European colonial possession to the next. Eastern motifs and the exotic associations that went with them were part of the times.

But precisely when the oriental beaded purses first appeared is hard to know.

Paydar says most beaded purses, which can be of glass or metal, offer very few clues to the date they were made. There are some trends, such as drawstrings being used earlier, and clasps later, for closing the purses, and some lining materials were used before others. But putting together a precise history of the purses is difficult indeed.

The 70 purses exhibited by the IMA come from a single private collection in California compiled by Stella and Frederick Krieger. The Museum juxtaposed the purses with rugs from its own holdings plus some more loaned by local rug collectors.

"I personally have an interest in exhibiting eastern and western designs alongside each other and talking about how they influence each other and how influence is not always west to east," Paydar says. "Who would have thought carpet patterns would have become a fashion accessory?"

She also says that the museum has found that exhibiting beaded purses, which are familiar to many Americans, is a good way to teach visitors about something that today is less familiar: oriental carpet designs.

That may seem ironic, given how popular both once were together. But over the decades things have changed. Oriental carpets are no longer a staple of American household furnishings but beaded purses -- in a whole variety of designs -- remain a very popular arts and craft item.

In the United States there is a huge community of bead purse collectors and almost every city has a bead society, Paydar says. Many enthusiasts make their own bead purses, so the tradition is very much alive today.

(Photos from top to bottom: Carpet Purse from Collection of Fred and Stella Krieger; actress Norma Talmadge; landscape purse courtesy Purse Treasures; carpet purse from Collection of Fred and Stella Krieger; Shared Beauty exhibit IMA.)

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Indianapolis Museum of Art: Shared Beauty -- Eastern Rugs & Western Beaded Purses

Purse Treasures: Geometric and Carpet Beaded Purses

The Jazz Age: Flappers, Music and Dancing

Can Europe's Tapestries And Village Rugs Survive The Global Carpet Competition?

HANOVER, February 19, 2009 – No-one is surprised anymore at how many Western consumer items are produced in Asia.

But it can be a shock to see how many Western handcrafts are rapidly going the same way.

All over Europe, there are merchants selling crystal vases and glassware that once were locally made but now are just as likely to be made in China. The same is true for Baroque porcelain figurines, pewter candelabras, and handmade lace. If store owners remove the “made in” sticker, many buyers never notice the difference.

The East's workshops are excellent enough, and low cost enough, that they not only successfully compete with Europe’s traditional artisans, they also are putting many out of business. The news in December that cash-strapped Waterford Wedgwood is ready to sell off its once star acquisition Rosenthal – the famous German porcelain and china maker – is just one example.

A recent walk around Domotex, the carpet world’s largest annual trade show in Hanover, Germany, shows that Europe’s textile heritage is also no stranger to the trend.

The carpet show brings together producers from Turkey, Iran, India, China, Pakistan, and Nepal. For four days, they meet and trade with the wholesalers who supply Europe’s retail stores and boutiques with the whole spectrum of low-cost to luxury-grade oriental carpets. The styles on show range from classical to tribal to contemporary styles, so one expects to see a bit of everything.

But what one does not expect to see is something like a Moldovan village rug – the kind that is filled with memories of Old Europe. And yet here is one hanging on the wall of an Indian carpet-maker's booth with its characteristic design of roses -- the same roses that Moldovan peasant women traditionally weave into their ankle-length skirts and colorful headscarves.

Standing near the Moldovan rug is its producer, R. K. (Raju) Rawat of Manglam Arts, Jaipur. He is an affable man in a checkered sports jacket who looks pleased when a visitor recognizes how much his rug resembles the originals.

Rawat, who produces about 50 Moldovan rugs a month, says he got the idea some five years ago. That was when he saw some genuine Moldovan rugs on sale at an earlier Domotex show.

"I was attracted by Moldovan designs because of their feeling of freshness," he says. "They make you think about roses and gardens, and everyone loves roses."

But the dealer says getting Indian weavers to reproduce them was not easy. "I found one particular village that was interested, and the weavers were very flexible, but it still took a few years because they had just some photos to work from, they didn't have the original piece in their hands."

He pauses and then adds proudly, "but they did it!"

Have the Indian Moldovans been well received? Certainly.

"We brought them to Frankfurt's 'Heimtextil' show where designers and architects come and they really appreciated them. Even people from Moldova come and say this is fantastic!"

Mr. Rawat is a businessman and perfectly within his rights to reproduce any design he likes. But one has to wonder. If distant weavers take over this bit of Europe’s heritage, how long will it be before the rugs’ real origins become first, irrelevant and, then, forgotten?

It is not just a question that interests Europeans. Vast amounts of Persian carpets are hand-woven outside of Iran and almost all Caucasian carpets today are woven outside of the Caucasus.

The foreign producers reformat and simplify the original designs to fit their own concepts of what the global market wants.

In the case of the Caucasian carpets known as Kazaks that are woven in Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, the market has grown so used to their deliberately harmonized styles that those few weavers still working in the Caucasus get little competitive advantage by sticking to their traditional and much more spontaneous patterns.

Thinking about such things prompts one to walk around the rest of the fair in hopes of finding some genuine Moldovan rugs on sale as Rawat once did. It’s a daunting task. Domotex is a huge trade show, with several aircraft hangar-sized rooms filled with hand-woven carpets.

The carpets sprawl across the floor space in a vast array of knee-high and thigh-high piles, so the vast hangars resemble a giant bazaar. The richest carpet producers have glass enclosures. Others simply sit among their wares.

Everywhere, muscular porters are flipping back carpets as buyers look on with calculators in hand. As sales are made, in lots of dozens of carpets at a time, the porters stack them, bundle them in black plastic, and haul them away.

It is like looking for a needle in a haystack but, amazingly, almost invisible among the mountains of oriental rugs, there is a little stack of Moldovans. They are at the stand of a Turkish dealer, Ozmelek Hali.

How did they get here? One of the salesmen tells what he knows.

Before the trade show, the company went around the Istanbul bazaar collecting them from other dealers because it knows the carpets interest some European retailers. The rugs came to the Grand Bazaar in the suitcases of Moldovan travelers, who sell them cheaply for cash.

The Istanbul salesman, who has the air of a hard-working family man, observes a moment of silence after what he has just said. Moldova is Europe’s poorest nation, with 20 percent of its population working outside the country and sending back money to support the rest. The rugs are as likely to be personal heirlooms as workshop pieces. One of them has an inscription -- the name Iornuvera M. -- and a date, 1964.

It's striking how detailed the original Moldovans are compared to the copies. They are old, many are coarse and with dull colors, but they are definitely interesting.

And, it seems, appealing. Soon, three Norwegian retailers stop by. They circle the stack of old Moldovans with the keen eyes of people who have spotted what they are looking for.

The two women and a man are partners in a small home-furnishings catalog company called 'Home and Cottage' south of Oslo. It’s the kind of company that specializes in supplying rough, unvarnished chairs and dressers that look like they were stored for generations in the family attic.

Kaj Roger, the male partner, says the Moldovan carpets fit well with cottage decors. "We have a lot of cottages in Norway," he confides, "and at the cottage it should be Old Style. It's a place to relax."

Does he mean the Moldovan carpets somehow represent good old days, a grandmother's weavings, memories of lifetimes past?

The three Norwegians, who are entering middle age, do not object to any of these suggestions. One of the ladies pulls out the latest Home and Cottage catalog. She shows a picture of a Moldovan carpet in mellow golden and rust colors spread across a rough wood plank cabin floor. Then she shows another photo of a carpet draped across an ocean steamer trunk. The pictures are contrived but comforting. Old, bygone Europe.

Rawat's fresh and more brightly colored reproductions are not likely to appeal to the customers of Home and Cottage. But there is every reason to believe he will find a market. There are many successful precedents right here at Domotex, and they are not hard to spot.

In the middle of the sea of carpets, there is a small island that serves as a landmark for visitors. It is a restaurant with a terrace of tables ringed by houseplants which manages to look like an outdoor Biergarten. The restaurant competes bravely against the outside caterers who move around the trade show with freezer boxes full of curries and pilafs for the carpet producers.

To have a stand around the restaurant guarantees high visibility, so some of the biggest Persian producers are there. But so is one of the strangest sights of all: a large enclosure full of French Baroque carpets and tapestries.

It is the stand of Renaissance Carpets, a New York-based producer. Inside, one whole wall is covered with a 12 by 24 foot (3.6 x 7.3 meters) tapestry depicting scenes from a 17th century boar hunt. It is amazingly detailed, with all the characters in period costumes.

A young salesman in a department store suit is standing nearby. He has come over from New York because, he says, the company's tapestries and Aubusson and Savonnerie carpets sell equally well in Europe and the United States.

Who buys them?

"People who have houses in a similar style," he says nonchalantly, as if lots of people in the 21st century live in Baroque manor homes.

And where are they made?

"In China."

The boar hunt tapestry, he explains, took three weavers seven months to complete, with a resident French artist overseeing the work. The cost is modest compared to the same piece woven in Europe. Just $ 18,000.

One can't help but admire the quality. If this is a copy, where is the original? In a museum?

"We own the original," the salesman says. The company bought it at an auction for $ 15,000. And with the purchase, it acquired the copyright.

One could ask more questions but suddenly there don't seem to be any left. If a copy can be this good-looking and inexpensive, there is no reason to insist -- except out of vanity -- that your replica French hunting tapestry should be woven in France. Who but an expert can tell if it is woven in China under a French tutor instead?

Or is that really enough? France today still has a viable tapestry industry that continues a rich cultural heritage. But as the market gets used to outsourcing, there is no certainty that it will have one forever.

One leaves Domotex with one's head spinning. Can art, whether it's in Europe, Iran, India, or Africa, be separated from its place of origin and history without simply becoming a commodity? And if it becomes a commodity, what can stop it from inevitably being reworked and simplified to appeal to the widest market, until its meaning and history are all but forgotten?

And, finally, if this is exactly what is happening with globalization, who should come to the rescue? The natural saviors are those who love the original carpets the most -- collectors. But collectors tend to collect carpets from the past, not the present. And doing so, they fail to support today's traditional artisans or guarantee the future.

Perhaps it's time to re-think the business of collecting. If the intention is to preserve carpets as a meaningful cultural patrimony, the efforts being made today may seem a lot less successful tomorrow than they do now.

(The photo at the top of this article is a detail from The Lady And The Unicorn tapestry series in the Cluny Museum, Paris.)

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Market Trends Make Maintaining Traditional Designs A Struggle

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

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

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

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

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

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

The conversation flows easily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Mr. Ezzabi is too charming to quibble with.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The oil men say it is beautiful."

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

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

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

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

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

And did he sell it?

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

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

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Mirzazadeh Carpets

Domotex 2009: Oriental Carpet Producers Brace For Economic Downturn

HANOVER, January 23, 2009 -- This time of year in Hanover, northern Germany, the sun barely appears before 8:30 and is gone by 4 pm. And all day long the North Sea wind hurtles into the city with nothing to stop it but the giant flags flapping over the city's sprawling fairground.

Still, hundreds of carpet producers and importers come here, bringing tons of oriental rugs from every corner of the world. They crowd into the fairground's hangers, employ an army of muscle men to stack the carpets in chest-high piles, and wait for thousands of European wholesalers to buy them.

The vast oriental souk is 'Domotex,' the carpet world's biggest trade show, and lasts for four days. During that time, producers and buyers strike contracts worth millions of euros. And they exchange information about everything from what retail customers want today to what they will buy tomorrow.

The talk is always a lively mix of business hopes and fears. But this year it is mostly about one thing: the economic downturn. All the producers, from Turkey, to Iran, to India are feeling the collapse of the housing market in the West because sales of home furnishings and carpets connect directly to the sales of new homes.

The connection is simple enough. When people buy new homes, they like to decorate them. But now the housing market slump that began in America is reverberating across Europe and people are trying to save or sell properties, not buy new ones.

Many producers predict the economic downturn will further polarize the carpet world into high-end and low-end producers. Mid-range producers, already under the stress of rising labor costs, could find it increasingly difficult to stay in business.

Habib Bayat is one of the partners of the high-end producer Bayat Nomad Gaminchi of Tehran and Los Angeles. He takes a moment to consider the trend as he and his daughter, who is also a carpet designer, show buyers their new collection.

The company’s stand, like those of the other top-quality producers at the fair, is a glass-walled enclosure that affords some refuge from the bazaar-like hubbub around it. Inside, like a showroom, the walls are hung with luxurious carpets in rich natural colors. One of them is already marked sold. It will be packed up by the muscle men and dispatched to a home on the other side of the world: Denver, Colorado.


Bayat says that the market downturn comes as many Iranian producers are struggling to retain weavers. “In the last three years, our pay to weavers has gone up two and-a-half times,” he says.

Even at the best of times, he notes, producers, cannot pass on such a sharp increase to the market. Now, with the economic downturn, the higher volume of sales that producers depend upon to offset higher costs becomes harder to achieve.

Why are weaving costs going up in Iran?

Bayat says there are two reasons.

One is an out-migration of weavers to other jobs, creating a bidding game among producers for the weavers who remain.

“In Iran, young people are influenced by what is on television, so girls don’t want to weave carpets,” he says. Instead, they want jobs in factories or in agriculture. People regard factory work as modern and guaranteeing a future – an image that traditional work does not have.

The second reason for rising costs is inflation. In Iran, inflation is in double digits, consistently cutting into the buying power of the rial.

Bayat, whose smaller rugs sell at $700 a square meter wholesale, serves a luxury niche that is unlikely to flee to lower-cost products. But even his company cannot afford to be passive. It stakes its future on a natural dye plant it built near Shiraz 16 years ago. To date, the plant has developed a palette of 140 vegetable dyes. That means continual R&D costs but gives the carpets a clear competitive advantage as they show off as many as 25 natural colors at once.

Most mid-range Iranian producers have no such strong capabilities to keep customers from looking for lower-cost alternatives. So, they worry, and one glance around Domotex is enough to see why.

All over the trading floor, there is a rising tide of competitors from India and China – weaving powerhouses that are able to make technically sound copies of Persian carpets. They can pass on their own lower domestic labor costs to consumers, and many consumers do not require Persian carpets to be woven in Iran.

At another stand, the Hamburg importer and exporter Djavad Nobari covers the floor with its specialty: over-sized Persian carpets. For two generations, the company has supplied 12-meter square rugs for European dining rooms and living rooms. But now, big rugs are not selling like they used to.

Shahin, one of the younger generation of the family-owned business, gives some statistics. “Four years ago, we brought 60 to 70 12-meter carpets to the trade show,” he says. “Now, we bring just 20 to 30.”

The biggest sizes that sell readily now, he adds, are 9-meter-square rugs. He says that reflects the slowing market – “2006 was the last great year” – and changing lifestyles. More and more European homes have high-gloss laminated floors that look nice with smaller, accent carpets. The days of covering dull, scuffed floors with room-sized rugs are ending.

Shahin, who was born in Germany, is fully in tune with European customers. So much so, that the current market downturn does not worry him as much as a longer-term cultural trend: the fading interest in oriental carpets among young people.

"The biggest problem in the Persian carpet trade is marketing,” he says. “We don't show customers how good a carpet can look in their homes.”

On his computer, he displays what he hopes will be the answer. It is a series of advertisements depicting contemporary living rooms with oriental carpets on the floor. The combinations are striking, including a curvilinear white Nain beside a geometric chrome and black-leather sofa.

It’s no longer enough for retailers to put a picture of a rug in the newspaper with their company logo over it, the dealer says. Carpet sellers have to make owning a carpet desirable -- desirable enough to weather market storms. And the current storm may be just the time to begin.

(Photos courtesy of Domotex and Djavad Nobari)

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Portrait Carpets: From Local Heroes To World Leaders, Every Picture Tells A Story

KABUL, January 9, 2009 -- The Afghan capital may be a good place to look for the sober-colored carpets of Central Asia. But the weavings most obviously on sale are portrait rugs, and they are as brightly tinted as movie posters.

Almost all the portrait rugs depict Ahmed Shah Massoud and they are everywhere – hanging from clotheslines in street bazaars and piled inside the cramped rug shops on Chicken Street.

The fact that the pictures are of Massoud, the famous Afghan-Tajik commander, isn’t surprising. Like every genre, portrait rugs – which deliberately mix art and politics -- have their rules. And Massoud embodies all of them.

The first requirement is to have a story larger than life. Massoud has that. As a mujahideen leader, he fought against the Soviets and later, when Afghanistan plunged into civil war, against many other foes, including the Taliban. Throughout, he kept the Afghan-Tajik heartland in the Panjshir Valley safe from enemies. His nickname was the ‘Lion of Panjshir.’

Massoud also meets a second requirement specific to posthumous portrait rugs. That is to have died an untimely death. He was assassinated by a team of suicide bombers posing as journalists just before 9/11. After 9/11, U.S. airpower enabled Massoud’s and other anti-Taliban forces to finally sweep to victory.

So, where in other countries fallen leaders live on in movies to become the stuff of legend, in Kabul Massoud lives on in weavings.

The Massoud rugs are clearly more about politics than about art. They are loosely made and priced low for the widest distribution. But the same is not true for all portrait carpets, which can be found in varying forms from the Caucasus, to Iran, to China.


In the former Soviet Union, governments and organizations spent and still spend small fortunes to create portrait rugs of astonishing technical skill.

Take this portrait carpet of Lenin, one of the most popular figures for Soviet propaganda carpets. The Turkmen weaving is of museum standard and one can only guess whether it was commissioned for a meeting hall, mausoleum, or the private villa of a powerful party boss.

Another popular face on Soviet portrait carpets is Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit the Earth. His rugs were highly popular in Soviet homes at the height of the space craze in the 1960s and 70s.

In Iran, portrait carpets have a long association with the pre-revolutionary dynasties. Common faces during the Shah's era were the Shah himself and, oddly enough, John F. Kennedy.

For that matter, in Iran politicians don't just appear on carpets, carpets also appear in politicians' speeches. Ayatollah Khomeini, the former Supreme Leader, is a case in point.

"None among you is content with his own carpet,” he once complained publicly to other politicians. “Each one among you seeks to stretch his legs on his neighbor's carpet."

Perhaps one of the most unexpected people to ever appear on an Iranian portrait carpet is a young American who taught at the American missionary school in Tabriz early in the 1900s.

The teacher, Howard Baskerville, was a fervent believer in democracy who sympathized with Iran's Constitutional Revolution against the despotic Qajar monarchy. When royalist troops besieged Tabriz in 1909, he joined his students in the fighting. He died at age 24.

"The only difference between me and these people is my place of birth, and this is not a big difference," is how he explained why he was risking his life in Iran’s struggle.

After his death, carpet weavers in Tabriz wove his portrait as a gift to his mother in America. He was buried in the city's Armenian cemetery and today there is still a bronze bust commemorating him in the Tabriz Constitutional House.

How difficult is it to weave a top quality portrait carpet?

Those who do it say it is the most difficult form of carpet making of all.

Kamil Aliyev, the living master of portrait weaving in Azerbaijan, has produced the likenesses of state visitors ranging from Indira Gandhi, to Bill Clinton, to Vladimir Putin.

He told Baku's Azerbaijan International in an interview in 2002 that to get a face right an artist must keep track of dozens of colors on a knot by-knot basis -- as this picture of a weaver at work shows.

He added: "being able to look at thousands and thousands of threads takes an enormous amount of concentration and patience."

Aliyev, who apprenticed under Azerbaijan's carpet expert Latif Karimov, says portrait weaving also takes a tremendous toll on the artists' eyes. And that may be one reason it is losing popularity among younger artists.

"I've enjoyed my life's work but I'm afraid that after me, the tradition of making these portrait carpets will die," he told the magazine. "It seems there is no one in Azerbaijan right now who can carry on my legacy. Today's youth who graduate from the carpet institute aren't trained to draw portraits."

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Unexploded Ordnance: Portrait Rugs

Soviet Propaganda Carpets

Wikipedia: Howard Baskerville

Azerbaijan International: The Portrait Carpets of Kamil Aliyev