Oriental rugs

This section brings together the origins actually encountered in the homes of Brussels and Brabant: the great Persian centres first — Tabriz, Kashan, Isfahan, Qom, Heriz, Bijar — then tribal production, Caucasian rugs, Anatolian kilims and rugs from the Maghreb. Each entry describes a production, not one particular object.

What the name of an origin really tells you

An origin denotes a technique before it denotes a style. Tabriz, Heriz and Bijar use the Turkish knot, known as the ghiordes or symmetric knot: the yarn straddles two warp threads and comes back out between them. Kashan, Isfahan, Qom and Nain use the Persian knot, known as the senneh or asymmetric knot: the yarn encircles one warp and passes around the other. This detail is invisible from the front, is read on the back, and separates two entire families of rugs.

The rest follows: a foundation of cotton, wool or silk, a density running from ten thousand knots per square metre on a high-pile Berber to more than a million on a Qom silk — and zero on a kilim, which has none, a high or a low pile. A Bijar and a Qom are two unrelated textiles, even though both go on the floor and are called Persian rugs.

Why that changes what can be done in the workshop

A rug is not washed according to its design but according to its material and its construction. A Heriz with a high pile on a thick cotton foundation takes a full bath and firm brushing in the direction of the pile. A silk Qom does not: silk loses its lustre under friction, marks with water and will not take the same mechanical treatment.

Restoration obeys the same logic. Filling a loss in a Bijar means recovering a packing that almost no other rug demands, and a slack repair sinks underfoot. On a low-pile Kashan, over-generous repiling stands proud and shows. The origin decides the operation, how long it takes, and sometimes the answer — which is sometimes no.

How to read an entry

Every entry follows the same path: where the rug is woven and since when, how it is built, how it is told apart from a copy of the same design, what makes its value, and what the workshop watches for on it. The density ranges are deliberately wide: one and the same centre produces very ordinary and very fine work under the same name.

For one particular rug, these pages are no substitute for an examination. The back, the fringes and the fastness of the colours have to be looked at closely, and a photograph is not always enough. If the question is value, see the free valuation; if it is care, the guides deal with day-to-day matters.