Bijar rugs

A Kurdish town, a way of packing the weave

Bijar is a small town in Iranian Kurdistan, north-east of Sanandaj, in a mountain region with hard winters. The weaving there is Kurdish, at once village and urban, and documented since the nineteenth century. The English-speaking market nicknamed these rugs the iron rugs of Persia, and for once the nickname describes a technical reality rather than a sales pitch.

What makes a Bijar is neither its design nor even its knot: it is the way it is packed down. The pieces circulating in Europe run in the main from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1980s, with a clear break in the middle. The older ones have a wool foundation, the more recent ones a cotton foundation. The stiffness does not come from that but from the packing down: it is that which varies from workshop to workshop and from period to period.

How that rigidity is obtained

The knot is most often Turkish, symmetric. The density is moderate — of the order of 90,000 to 250,000 knots per square metre — and it is not the point. On a Bijar, counting the knots tells you little.

The point is the construction. The warps are strongly depressed: every other warp is pushed down behind the next, so that the knot sets itself in depth instead of spreading out at the surface. Between the rows several wefts are introduced, one of them thick, and the whole is packed down with a heavy metal comb while the wool is kept damp. As it dries, the weft tightens and locks everything in place. The resulting rug is about twice as thick as an ordinary Persian, very heavy per square metre, and rigid enough to stand almost upright when set on one side.

The pile is in local Kurdistan wool, dense and springy, of medium height. It is a rug that does not crush under furniture and that recovers its shape, which is the pleasant counterpart of its stiffness.

Herati, floating medallion, French roses

The most common repertoire is the Herati sprig, known as mahi: a rosette inscribed in a lozenge, framed by four curved leaves, repeated across the whole field. It is met with on its own, or surmounted by a central medallion that appears laid over it. The variant known as the floating medallion, where the medallion stands out against a plain red or navy field, is particularly sought after.

One family stands clearly apart: the gol farang Bijars, with bouquets of roses of European inspiration, born of the fashion for Aubusson and Savonnerie rugs at the end of the nineteenth century. The general palette remains that of Kurdistan: deep navy blue, madder red, ivory, rust.

Recognising a Bijar takes no expertise. You lift a corner. The weight and the stiffness cannot be imitated: an Indian copy of the same Herati design is supple, light and folds without resistance. It is the one Persian origin that is identified by hand before it is identified by eye.

What makes its value, what destroys it

The value is read on the age, the quality of the wool, the frankness of the dyes, the regularity of the packing and the condition of the pile and the foundation. Old Bijars with a wool foundation are rarer and more sought after than recent pieces with a cotton foundation. A well-preserved plain field counts for more than a crowded one, because the slightest fault would show on it.

What destroys a Bijar comes down to one word: the fold. A rug this rigid does not fold, it breaks. The warp snaps along a straight line, the break runs right across the rug, and the pile then comes away along that line. It is clean damage. The foundation can be rewoven and reknotted over, but the line stays perceptible underfoot and visible in raking light, because it would mean recreating a packing that is never quite reproduced by hand.

The rule that follows applies to every move, every period of storage and every transport, without exception: a Bijar is rolled, in the direction of the pile, around a large-diameter tube. It is never folded, not even in half long enough to carry it to a car. That is why we collect these rugs ourselves. The subject is dealt with more fully in the guide storing a rug without damaging it.

A Bijar in the workshop: heavy, slow, demanding

In washing, the difficulty is first of all physical. A Bijar soaked with water weighs several times its dry weight; it is handled by more than one person, wrung out without ever being folded, and dried necessarily flat on a rigid surface. The drying takes longer than on an ordinary rug, because the water lodges in a packed mass of wool from which it does not come out on its own. A badly dried Bijar keeps moisture in its foundation, and that is how you get a smell that returns in every damp spell, and then mould.

Chemically, Kurdish wool is robust and the wash follows the usual protocol: neutral soap, below 30 °C, between pH 5 and 7, rinsing until neutral. Old madder reds call for the same fastness test as anywhere else, and on a navy ground with an ivory design a dye bleed is spotted immediately.

In restoration, the work is slow. A loss is rewoven and reknotted, but the thickness has to be rebuilt, or the repair sinks and is found underfoot before it is seen by eye. Repiling on a Bijar takes more material and a great deal more packing down than on any other rug, and there is no short cut. The selvedges, very thick, are overcast again without trouble. The fringes are rebuilt as normal. A moth attack is treated as elsewhere, with the advantage that the density of the pile slows the larvae down — see the moth-damaged rug page.

What cannot be restored, to finish: the break along a fold line across the full width, in its appearance. It is consolidated, the rug is made usable and stable, it is stopped from getting worse. It is not made to disappear, and we prefer to say so beforehand rather than after.