Bukhara and Turkmen rugs

A market name, not a place of production

That is where to start: Bukhara is not a weaving centre. It was the great market and the shipping point of the region, in present-day Uzbekistan. The rugs arrived there from the Turkmen camps and oases of Turkestan, between the Caspian and the Amu Darya, and left again for Russia and then Europe under the name of the town that had sold them. It is exactly the same mechanism as for Shiraz.

The correct name is therefore Turkmen rug. The groups met with in the workshop are the Tekke, the Yomud and the Ersari, more rarely the Saryk, the Salor and the Chodor. These are not styles: they are tribes, each with its own repertoire, its palette and its way of knotting.

The gul, and whose it is

Turkmen design is not read like a Persian rug. There is no central medallion and no single composition: the field is covered with a gul, an octagonal or diamond medallion divided into quarters, repeated in regular rows across the whole surface, with a smaller secondary motif in the gaps between. Each group has its own, and that is how a piece is identified.

• Tekke: a regular quatrefoil gul, crossed by vertical and horizontal lines linking the rows; the densest and the most regular of the Turkmen rugs.
• Yomud: dyrnak guls, hooked diamonds, or kepse guls, comb-shaped, often set in a diagonal lattice, with a browner and darker palette.
• Ersari: the middle Amu Darya, larger formats, looser knotting, a broad gulli gul, more yellow and orange; these are the ones the trade long sold as Afghans.
• Saryk and Salor: the oldest and the rarest, often picked out with silk in the details; they do not come past often.

The palette is the second signature: a dominant madder red, from red-brown to blood red depending on the group, with dark blue, ivory, blackish brown, a little yellow and green over minimal areas. A Turkmen rug is a red rug. If it is not, or if it is pink, beige or pale blue, look closer: the colour has probably been altered after the event.

Knotting, wool, formats

The knotting is most often asymmetric, open to the right among the Tekke; the Yomud use both types depending on the group. Wool foundation, sometimes mixed with goat hair in the selvedges. The density can be high: in the order of 200,000 to 400,000 knots per square metre on a carefully made Tekke piece, more on old Salor pieces, far less on an Ersari.

The pile is sheared very short, which gives the design its crispness and the back its fineness. The ends are finished with a flat-woven band, sometimes plaited or embroidered.

Many of these objects are not floor rugs. Life under the yurt produced a whole family of utility pieces that turn up today framed or laid on the floor: the ensi, a door hanging often sold wrongly as a prayer rug; the chuval and the torba, storage bags hung on the wall; the pentagonal asmalyk, which decorated the flank of the camel in a wedding procession; the long tent bands. A chuval opened out and laid on the floor is still a bag: that is how it should be kept, and above all it should not be given fringes it never had.

The Bukharas that are not

Most of the rugs sold today under the name Bukhara have nothing of the old Turkmen about them. Two families come up constantly. First the Pakistani Bukharas, produced in large numbers around Lahore since the 1950s, at first by refugee weavers and then industrially: hand-knotted, wool or a blend, Tekke guls reproduced with perfect regularity, a ground often bright red or pink, cotton warp. Then the Afghan rugs from Aqcha and the surrounding region, derived from the Ersari repertoire and more rustic.

These are not fakes, they are other products. You recognise them by the mechanical regularity of the design, by the perfect uniformity of the colour from one end to the other, by the white cotton warp, and by the absence of any differential wear on a piece supposedly old. Better to know it before than afterwards.

What an old Turkmen rug is worth

The market draws a very clear line between two worlds. On one side, the tribal pieces of the nineteenth century, in natural dyes, with their pile, their ends and their selvedges: these are collector's objects, and the fine Tekke rugs, the Saryks and the old Salors are the top of it. On the other, the standardised production of the twentieth century, Soviet and then commercial, and the Pakistani Bukharas: decorative value, not collector's value.

What brings an old piece down: a chemical wash followed by a surface re-dye, a piece cut down, amputated ends, a pile worn to the foundation over broad areas. What holds it up: the wool, the colours and the integrity of the format. We say which world the rug belongs to at the valuation, even when the answer is not welcome.

In the workshop: the red, the short pile, the selvedges

Everything is decided on the red. Well-mordanted natural madder generally holds in the wash. The problem comes from elsewhere: some of the Turkmen rugs that passed through the trade were given a chemical wash meant to soften the red for Western taste, sometimes followed by a surface re-dye applied with a brush. That colour is not in the fibre, it is on it. It comes off in the first serious bath, and what appears then is the real colour of the rug. We test as a matter of course and we say so beforehand, never afterwards.

The very short pile is the second point. On a Tekke there is no reserve of material: wear reaches the foundation quickly, and a bald patch is not a question of appearance, it is a question of structure. Repiling is possible there but demanding, knot by knot, at the original density and with hand-spun wool; at too low a density the repair shows like a dressing.

What breaks first, as everywhere: the overcast selvedges and the woven ends. The flat band at the end and its plait have often been cut off by a dealer to simplify the piece. It can be reconstituted by reweaving, but a remade end does not replace an original end in a valuation, and that has to be known.

Finally the dark browns, dyed with iron, sink and open up before the rest, as on all wools mordanted the same way. And the wool is washed here as anywhere else: neutral soap, below 30 °C, rinsed to neutrality, dried flat.