Caucasian rugs

A production that stops, or nearly, in 1920

The Caucasus today covers Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Dagestan. Weaving there is village work: no manufactory, no designer's cartoon, domestic looms. The nineteenth century is the great period. Annexation by the Russian Empire, then the opening of the trade routes through Baku and Tiflis, carried a massive export to Europe and the United States between 1870 and 1910.

Then everything stops. War, revolution, then the Soviet collectivisation of production from the 1920s and 1930s turned village weaving into workshop production: standardised designs, synthetic dyes across the board, cotton foundations. It is not the same thing and it is not valued in the same way. Since 1990, rugs of Caucasian design have moreover been woven in Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and India. The break of 1920 is therefore the first question to ask, before even looking for the name of the village.

Four names that come up

The trade vocabulary turns on four large families, to which collectors add the names of villages.

• Kazak: south-west, towards the Armenian-Georgian border. Long lustrous pile, wide knotting, large hooked medallions on an open field, frank reds and greens. Well-known subgroups: Chelaberd, known as the eagle Kazak, Lori Pambak, Borjalou, Fachralo, Sevan.
• Karabagh: to the south, longer formats, a dense palette, and a family with floral decoration of French inspiration, roses and garlands, which comes as a surprise when you are not expecting it.
• Shirvan: east, in present-day Azerbaijan. Short pile, finer weaving, small formats, fields covered with stars, boteh and prayer mihrabs. Marasali is the name most often cited.
• Kuba: north-east, the finest and the most drawn of the families. Lesghi stars, the ram's-horn motifs of Perepedil, Zeykhur, long narrow runners.

Turkish knot, lustrous wool, small formats

Caucasian knotting is the symmetric Turkish knot, known as ghiordes, closed over two warp threads. It is the knot that gives the design its character: a symmetric knot draws a curve badly and an angle very well. The whole Caucasian geometry follows from it, down to the hooks and the stepped lines that stand in for Persian arabesques.

The wool of mountain sheep is long and lustrous, and it takes madder and indigo with a saturation you learn to recognise. The density varies a great deal: in the order of 50,000 to 120,000 knots per square metre on a long-piled Kazak, more like 120,000 to 250,000 on a short-piled Shirvan or Kuba. Old foundations are wool; cotton appears on late pieces from the eastern zone, which is a useful dating clue.

The formats are small: most pieces fall between 100 by 150 and 170 by 250 centimetres, with long narrow runners in addition. Large Caucasian rugs are rare, and that rarity counts in a valuation. The selvedges are overcast in wool, often blue, over several warps.

The design, and the woven date

Many Caucasian rugs carry a woven date, in Arabic numerals, in a cartouche of the border or in a corner of the field. It is most often given as a Hijri year; it is converted approximately by taking off about three per cent and then adding 622. A date of 1300 thus corresponds to around 1882.

That date is a clue, not proof. A figure is sometimes reknotted to age the piece, and an old date is sometimes copied onto a more recent rug. What is looked at next is the dyes, the foundation, the wool and the wear: those four things rarely contradict one another.

What raises or lowers the value

Raising it: being earlier than 1920, natural dyes, a pile still present, original ends and selvedges, a whole format. Lowering it: a piece shortened or with a border cut away, which is extremely common where a damaged rug has been trimmed to look tidy; a worn area painted over with felt-tip or ink, a procedure common in the trade and immediately visible in water; heavy restoration done in synthetic wool.

A Caucasian rug in poor condition is often worth restoring all the same, because the small format keeps the work in proportion: a ten-centimetre gap on a piece of 120 by 180 is not the same job as on a large drawing-room rug. We say so case by case, distinguishing what belongs to conservation from what belongs to putting the rug back into service.

In the workshop: small format, high stakes

Washing follows the rules for old wool: neutral soap, below 30 °C, between pH 5 and 7, rinsed to neutrality, dried flat. Two Caucasian particularities are added to that.

First the saturation of the colours. Madder and cochineal reds on ivory are the most contrasted thing in the whole of oriental weaving, and any migration shows at once. The colourfastness test is extended here to as much as an hour on an old piece. Then the ivory itself: it is undyed wool, and an alkaline product yellows it permanently. No household stain remover should go anywhere near a Caucasian ivory field.

Ageing produces two effects that have to be read correctly and not confused with dirt. The greens obtained by a yellow laid over indigo turn blue as the yellow fades, being the more fragile in light. The browns and blacks dyed with iron corrode, sink and open up before the rest of the pile. No wash brings back either one.

What breaks first is still the end: on a Kazak the woven band at the end has almost always gone, and the warps are beginning to run. Reweaving is done in hand-spun wool, dyed to match the existing abrash, never in industrial yarn. On a piece earlier than 1900, the workshop principle is to stabilise rather than rebuild: the wear is stopped, what is opening is closed, and what should stay visible is left visible. Painting over wear is something we do not do.