Europe’s 19th-Century Discovery Of Caucasian Carpets

TBILISI, Sept. 19, 2009 -- In the 19th century, the West discovered one of the world’s great mother lodes of carpets: the Caucasus.

It was a late discovery as far as Caucasian carpets themselves were concerned. They had been there for millennia and debate rages today over whether some of them appear in Renaissance paintings.

But for home-owners of the mid 1800s – when western interest in carpets as furnishings was at its height – Caucasian carpets were a discovery not unlike finding a new planet.

What made the discovery so extraordinary was both the immense variety of Caucasian carpets and the fact that, previously, the region had been seemed so remote to most Europeans that it was well off their mental map.

It was not that people did not know how to locate the Caucasus -- the mountainous land between the Black and Caspian Seas that is home to Christian Armenians and Georgians, Muslim Azeris and many other peoples.

It was just that over the preceding centuries the region had become exclusively the backyard of two great Eastern powers.

The Caucasus was fought over by the Ottoman Turks and Safavid Persia throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. And it was only the fact that local Christian nobles and Muslim emirs managed to retain some independence while swearing allegiance to their powerful neighbors that they avoided being swallowed by them.

In distant Europe, that meant most people thought of the Caucasus in terms of Turkey and Persia, without realizing the region had its own unique artistic traditions.

But by the 18th century, things began changing dramatically.

Russia was moving south and, by the mid 19th century, had annexed the entire region. And suddenly, the Caucasus was not part of the East but part of the world’s biggest European empire.

The carpets that began flowing west via Russia were Kubas and Shirvans, from cities of the same names near the Caspian Sea, in present-day northeast Azerbaijan. This is a Shirvan from the end of the 19th century.

The carpets caused a sensation because their finely drawn ornamental features perfectly matched Europeans’ decorating tastes at that time.

To many Europeans, they appeared to be a welcome new variety of Persian carpets, which had similar high-knot densities and delicate ornamentation. Persian carpets were already so popular that European importers for some time had been investing in looms in northwestern Persia to try to satisfy Western demand.

But, in fact, the Caucasian carpets had a totally distinct weaving tradition behind them. And that tradition – of which Europeans were now just seeing the tip of the iceberg – contained a variety of styles that was nothing short of incredible given the relatively small size of the Caucasus region.

How wide is the range of Caucasian designs? Here is a Kazak rug from several hundred kilometers west of the Caspian, in an area roughly where the borders of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan meet today. Instead of ornamentation, its emphasis is on geometry and graphic design.

The boldness of the Kazaks' patterns and colors did not conform to the mainstream decorating tastes of the 19th century, and there was originally little European interest in them. But a hundred years later, when Western rug tastes shifted from decorative to abstract designs in the 1960s and 70s, collectors would rediscover them with a passion.

Where does the huge variety in Caucasian carpets come from?

The answer is in the region’s incredibly dense mix of ethnicities, cultures, and religions. Some of its peoples long pre-date the earliest recorded history, while others arrived later in wave after wave of invaders.

The constant waves of new invasions might have leveled the pre-existing cultures in a region less mountainous than the Caucasus. But the Caucasus chain is the highest in Eurasia apart from Himalayas, and is honeycombed with hidden and isolated valleys that serve as refuges.

Here is a photo of a small Georgian village today that gives some idea of the terrain.

Still, if hidden valleys suggest that groups could be so insulated that their culture existed separately from others, this was never the case in the Caucasus anymore than in the Alps.

Instead, overlying the individual cultures, a shared regional culture developed across the mountains. And in carpet weaving, the shared culture became so strong it often was impossible to know by which people a specific carpet was made.

In the Transcaucasus – the area on the southern slopes of the Caucasus mountain chain -- the principal population groups are Azeri, Georgian, Armenian, Kurdish, and Persian-speaking Talish.

Caucasian carpet expert Zdenka Klimtova writes in her 2006 book ‘Caucasian Rugs’ that all of these peoples in the 1800s and early 1900s were involved to a greater or lesser extent in weaving rugs and kilims.

The Azris, Kurds, and Talish wove both for home and commercial use. Klimtova notes that "most of the commercially produced rugs are assumed to have been created in the homes of Muslim Azeri Turks, who constitute the majority population of today's Azerbaijan."

Here is a photo, circa 1910, of a master weavers’ studio in the Kuba district, in present-day Azerbaijan.

By contrast, Kilmtova says, the Georgian and Armenian women wove almost exclusively for home use, with the Geogians weaving almost exclusively kilims.

This picture is of an Armenian woman surrounded by textiles in the late 19th century.

In the North Caucasus – on the northern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains -- there are still more population groups, too many to list. Among them, the peoples of present-day Daghestan were and are the best-known weavers.

What all the Caucasian weavers shared in common was a preference for bold colors and a love of abstractions rich in symbolism.

Their use of abstractions to represent both plants and animals is something that distinguishes their work from both the Turkish and Persian weaving traditions.

Whereas Turkish weavers will sometimes depict carnations, tulips or apple blossoms faithfully enough that they can be recognized as real plants, the abstractions on Caucasian rugs bear no relations to specific flowers.

And whereas Persian carpets often feature fully recognizable lions or fairy-tale beasts, the animals that appear in Caucasus carpets are only zoomorphic shapes.

In fact, the Caucasian weavers’ abstractions of animals are so complete, that zoomorphic forms even can appear on Muslim prayer rugs, a thing never seen in other Islamic areas.

The weaving style of this mountainous region has still other striking characteristics, particularly a love of sharp contrasts.

Richard E. Wright and John T. Wertime describe it well in their book ‘Caucasian Carpets and Covers’ (1995):

“Another major quality is contrast, created in numerous ways: the juxtaposition of certain colors (for example blue and yellow), the use of white (both as highlight and background), and abrupt changes in scale, that is, substantial size differences between adjacent motifs. The heart of Caucasian art is contrast in color and form, linked to brilliance of color.”

The origins of this artistic tradition are lost in time, but it is not hard to imagine they come from living in the mountains themselves, with their strong contrasts of altitude, light, and nature.

As Wright and Wertime put it, “Villagers and nomads of all ethnic origins shared a common world; they drew from the same design reservoir and portrayed the world as they saw it.”

This picture is of a Georgian woman standing upon a kilim. The picture was taken by the Russian traveler and photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii at the turn-of-the-last-century.

The Western traders of 19th century who first brought Caucasian carpets into department stores in London, Paris, New York and elsewhere did not even try to distinguish between the multiple designs of the carpets or the many peoples of the Caucasus who wove them.

They simply gave all eastern Caucasian carpets a common brand name: “Daghestans.”

That was a nothing more than the name of one region where the importers knew many Caucasian carpets could be purchased. Specifically, the purchase point was the ancient walled port city of Derbent, in Daghestan, on the Caspian Sea. It was a prominent export station for goods of all kinds from the Caucasus northward to Russia.

But, in fact, the carpets sold in Derbent came from a much wider region, including Kuba, the biggest commercial weaving center in the Caucasus at the time.

Still, the traders’ practice of giving Caucasian carpets all-encompassing generic names that lumped together dozens of styles continued for many years.

Another brand name, used as late as 1900, was “Genje.” It, too, is just the name of a trading center, now called Ganja, in western Azerbaijan. The bazaar of the town, photographed circa 1910-11 is shown here.

John Kimberly Mumford, a rug expert writing in 1900, described the use of “Genje” as a brand name this way:

“In Constantinople, as in the American market, miscellaneous bales of rugs, all measuring between three and five feet in width, and six and eight feet in length, are jobbed under the name of Ghenghis, or, as the bills of lading have it, ‘Guendje.’ They are made up of the odds and ends of Shirvan, Karabaghs, Mosul and other secondary fabrics of the Caucasian class which usually come from Elizavetpol, the old Armeno-Persian name for which was Gandja.” (Quoted in Ralph Kaffel’s 1998 book ‘Caucasian Prayer Rugs.’)

Such use of fanciful brand names went on for decades because the European importers themselves rarely traveled to the region. They even more rarely had any direct contact with the weavers, who often were in remote villages.

Nevertheless, with time, the Western traders eventually did become familiar with the nomenclature used by local rug merchants. And that became the basis for the European market's beginning to distinguish between the Caucasian rugs' many styles and origins.

The local rug merchants whose terms Western traders eventually adopted were located in Tiflis (today Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia), which was a major collection point for Caucasus carpets moving west through Russia’s Black Sea ports.

Here is a photo of rug shop in Tiflis at the turn-of-the-last-century.

The Tiflis dealers divided the carpets of the Transcaucasus – the source of the vast majority of exported carpets -- into three broad categories.

Western region: Kazak and Ganja rugs with bold geometric patterns, thick wool, and high piles.

Eastern region: Kuba, Baku, and Shirvan rugs with minute motifs, fine wool, and low piles.

Southern region: Karabagh, Moghan and Talish rugs.

There was an underlying genius to the system, because these categories to some extent mirror the different climates of the Transcaucasus region.

The west has a harsh climate where thick carpets are desirable for insulation from the cold ground. The thick yarn and long piles needed for that, in turn, allow only the weaving of large and rectilinear geometric motifs.

The east has milder climate, particularly along the Caspian Sea, allowing carpets to be more decorative. The weavers could use thinner yarn, and that allows a higher knot density and more intricate designs.

And the system has another bit of genius, because it implicitly recognizes the often subtle influences of neighboring cultures upon the designs.

The southwest weavings, with their powerful geometry echo, to a greater or lesser degree, the distinctly geometric patterns of Ottoman rugs dating from the 15th and 16th C in neighboring Anatolia. An example is the Kazak Karachop design, shown here, which is reminiscent of Large Pattern Holbein carpets.

By contrast, the northeast weavings with their detailed ornamentation show the influence of Tabriz, the great weaving capital of the Azeri Turk area of northwest Persia.

That same ornamental influence can be seen in the weavings of Karabagh, in the south. There, where rugs were woven by Armenians, Azeris, and Kurds, the designs are more ornate, frequently have floral motifs, and are more decorative than in other parts of the Caucasus. The picture below is an example.

But if the Tiflis merchants’ nomenclature gave a good framework for identifying the large categories, and even many sub-styles, of Caucasian weaving, it still was filled with large groupings of rugs under single place names that tell little about who wove what and when. Sorting out those details is the task of modern researchers and it remains an imposing one.

It is fascinating to think how many millennia of mountain life stand behind the designs and for how long – despite so many conquests and upheavals in the region – the weaving tradition remained distinctly its own.

In fact, the biggest challenge to the tradition did not come until the 19th century, just as Europe was discovering Caucasian carpets and beginning to understand their uniqueness.

The challenge was from Russia, the region’s third major neighboring power after Turkey and Iran and a country which, until then, had exerted almost no influence upon the region’s culture at all.

The occupation of the Caucasus by imperial Russia and subsequent life under the Soviet Union would drive the Caucasus’ carpet culture close to extinction. But how that happened is another story. (For more read: Russia And The History Of Caucasian Carpets.)

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Russia And The History Of Caucasian Carpets

MOSCOW, September 5, 2009 -- The only western nation ever to incorporate a major rug producing region of the east within its borders is Russia.

In fact, Russia incorporated two: the Caucasus and Central Asia. And the experience had not only a dramatic effect on the international rug market and Russian culture but a nearly fatal effect on the carpet producing cultures themselves.

The first region to be incorporated was the Caucasus.

In the 1700s, the Russian Empire began moving into the Caucasus and by 1830, after wars with Turkey and Iran, it was in control of ‘Transcaucasia’ -- the area on the other side of the Caucasus mountain chain from Russia (today's Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia).

The conquest of the North Caucasus -- directly bordering Russia proper and including Chechnya and Daghestan -- took considerably longer. It involved continual battles and suppressions known in Russia as the Caucasian Wars, which lasted from 1817 to 1864. Unlike in Transcaucasia, it also involved the mass expulsion of peoples – hundreds of thousands of Circassians – to Turkey to clear the way for Russian settlement.

By a strange coincidence of history, Russia’s move into this ancient and mountainous region, with its myriad cultures, happened at a time when Romanticism was at its height in Europe. So, despite the grim realities of subjugating fiercely independent peoples, the experience set off a wave of “Orientalist” Romanticism in Russia not unlike that epitomized by Byron in Britain.

What did Russian “Orientalism” look like?

A good summary is provided by Russian researcher Oleg Semenov in an article entitled “Oriental Carpets and Russian Interiors in the 19th Century” ('Oriental Carpet & Textile Studies,' Part 1, 1987).

He notes that “to Russians, the Caucasus was a mysterious country, the symbol of a free and natural life, dear to the young and romantic. One recalls the heroes of Pushkin, Lermontov, or even of Tolstoy’s 'Cossacks.'”

The new fascination with the east could be seen in everything from literature to interior decorating. The Caucasus offered a new, larger-than-life stage for young Russians and they seized the opportunity to break with the restrained fashion of their parents – Classicism – and idealize spontaneity, instead.

At home, the French Classicist style of spacious interiors with highly polished floors, symmetrically arranged furniture, and European Savonnerie carpets, was out. The new look, making heavy use of the Caucasian carpets and other art objects flowing back as war booty, was restive, tousled, and exuberant.

“Now the oriental carpet draped the wall or served to display weapons,” writes Semonov.

“Often there was a special divan, smoking room or a bathroom in the men’s part of the house, in which all furnishings were oriental in style. Here it was possible to hang a large carpet on the walls, and to use one to cover a wide ‘Turkish’ divan. Caucasian weapons, hookahs, chibouks (wooden pipes), brass jugs, and low tables with engraved trays embellished the furnishings. The international character of Classicism gave way to a choice of items which created a stylistically solid ‘Oriental’ image for a specific room.”

The displays of carpets and weapons from the Caucasus went along with a cult of gallantry that idealized the individual bravery of Eastern warriors in battle compared to the already ruthlessly efficient organization of Western armies. The cult itself was a holdover from the Napoleonic wars, when officers still sought to distinguish themselves as a warrior class from the growing use of masses of conscripts that marks the beginning of modern warfare.

The model of romantic gallantry, along with the knowledge that it was doomed in the modern age, was exemplified by the book 'A Hero of Our Time' in 1839 by Mikhail Lermontov (shown here).

The hero of the story, a duelist and an immoralist was, in fact, an anti-hero in the full sense of the word who outraged the literary critics of the day. But he was Byronic in his fierce individualism, and he saved his contempt not for the mountain warriors, whom he fought but admired, but for modern society around him. (Lermontov himself, dubbed the “poet of the Caucasus,’ was killed in a duel shortly after his only novel was published. He was 27.)

All this may help explain how the carpets and other material culture of the Caucasus could come into Russian homes on equal terms with Western furnishings even as the people who made them were being subjugated.

This 1894 picture of “Horsemen of the Caucasus” is by Russian artist Franz Alekseyevich Roubaud (1856 - 1928), who was famous for panoramic paintings.

Carpets from the Caucasus remained largely unknown in Western European homes until much later: almost the end of the 19th century.

The reason was the Russian Empire’s protectionist policy of favoring domestic trade over foreign trade.

At one point, merchants trying to export carpets and other goods through Russia’s main Black Sea port of Odessa were required to deposit with authorities a sum double that of the product’s estimated value. The sum would only be reimbursed once the contents of the bales were verified at the port. That imposed impossible capital requirements on the would-be exporters.

At another point, Moscow required that all products for export from the Caucasus be routed first to Tbilisi for customs clearance and tax assessment, whether or not it was the shortest route to market. That too, discouraged foreign trade. (These measures were noted by the French traveler Xavier Hommaire De Hell, who visited the region in 1847.)

As Richard E Wright and John T Wertime, note in their 1995 book ‘Caucasian Carpets & Covers,’ even as late as 1852 the number of rugs and related textiles exported from the Russian Empire was negligible.

But that situation changed in the following decades, as new political and social changes swept Russia.

This time a major part of the story was the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. The freed serfs, who represented slightly less than half of all peasants, were allocated land but in fact often did not get not enough to make ends meet. So, the government launched a program dubbed “Kustar” (Russian for ‘Artisan’) to encourage peasants across the empire to produce handicrafts to supplement their agricultural earnings.

In the Caucasus, the Kustar program sought to dramatically boost home weaving by providing villagers with wool and patterns and taking care of sales. The target was the booming market for Caucasian carpets in Russia and then, as Tsarist officials began encouraging foreign trade, exports to the two great carpet trading centers of the time: Istanbul and London.

The export efforts got a further, huge boost in the 1880s with the completion of the Trans-Caucasus railroad and soon tons of carpets were moving toward Russia’s Black Sea ports.

By the beginning of the 1880s, Europe began to be aware of Caucasian carpets, say Wright and Wertime. The carpets got full exposure at the Paris World Fair (Exposition Universelle) in 1878 and they became a popular addition to Victorian-era homes.

Semenov offers some figures to show how suddenly exports of carpets from Russia exploded.

“Carpet making, which had been a craft, in the second half of the 19th century developed into a marketable branch of manufacture,” he writes.

“Russia became not only one of the most important consumer countries but also a major exporter of Oriental carpets. In 1873 carpet exports from the Russian Empire amounted to 12,914 puds (1 pud = 16 kg) valued at 922,917 rubles; by 1874 they had grown to 17,781 puds at a value of 964,675 rubles.”

He continues: “The volume of exported carpets continued to increase until the outbreak of World War I. The major proportion exported – 90 to 94 percent – was of the more expensive Caucasian carpets, while cheaper Central Asian rugs were mostly brought in for the home market.”

Unfortunately, the story does not end there.

With the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Russian civil war, and the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922, Russian society again changed on an epic scale. And the effects were nearly fatal for the carpet producers at both the village and manufactory level.

White Russians poured out of the country after losing the civil war and many of them brought their valuables, including carpets, with them for sale. Istanbul’s grand bazaar was suddenly overloaded with the same carpets that had furnished Russia's 'Orientalist' interiors of the Tsarist era and many of these now flowed West in a booming business.

But in now communist Russia, the carpet market was finished. Luxury goods were to be despised, even if they were secretly collected, and interior design styles conformed to the new rules.

Semenov, writing during the last decade of the Soviet Union, describes the new mood as a return to more austere and rational style. And perhaps reflecting his times, he approvingly contrasts modernism with the luxurious disorder of the 19th century, when people “scattered carpets over the divans, arms-chairs, walls, and floors."

“Such an abundance of carpets exerted an aggressive influence on the interior’s creator, leaving him no room to think or speak. The carpets, as it were, ‘swaddled’ him, ‘wrapped him up’ from all sides. Their bright colors, unhurried rhythms of design, and originality of texture allowed him only a limited emotional range of somewhat passive, lethargic, stylistically ‘Oriental,’ moods. On one level, harmony between the house owner and his actions gave way to languor and comfort, but beneath the surface subjected him to stress and drama; an intrinsic conflict between the individualistic, subjective man and the habitat he had created. The carpet was no longer a treasure, but a luxury object and this resulted in economic, aesthetic, psychological and even moral and ethical consequences.”

Soviet officials may have had little use for the Tsarist era's love of carpets, but they did not put an immediate end to the Kustar program. The state continued to support carpet weaving as an export commodity.

However, the support shifted from helping weavers who worked at home, and mostly used patterns traditional to their areas, to funding of manufactories receiving and fulfilling orders on a central-planning basis.

The result was that orders for rug with patterns long identified with one region of the Caucasus were routinely given to weaving centers in other regions with very different local traditions. The weavers made mistakes. And over time the sense of unique origin and local lineages that gave Caucasian rugs a special cachet in the Western market eroded away.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Western interest in the region’s weaving has revived. But it is still an open question whether carpet making in the Caucasus -- after so many decades of neglect -- can eventually return to its once famous heights. (For more, read: Can Caucasian Carpets Make A Comeback In The Caucasus?)

(Photos top to bottom: Detail of Shirvan carpet, late 19th C; Lithograph of Mt. Elberus, the highest peak in the Caucasus range; Russian interior, men’s study, 1880s; Mikhail Lermontov, portrait; "Horsemen of the Caucasus" by F.A. Roubaud; Kustar pattern for Derbent rug, 19th C; Russian Pavilion, Paris World’s Fair 1878; Bolshevik poster “You … Have you signed up as a volunteer?”; Intourist travel poster for Caucasus.)

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