Kashan rugs

A silk town that became a wool town

Kashan lies in central Iran, on the western edge of the great desert, halfway between Tehran and Isfahan. Under the Safavids, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was renowned for its fabrics and its silk rugs. Then the activity died out, and for nearly two centuries the town ceased to be a weaving centre.

Production revives at the end of the nineteenth century, and that revival rests on wool rather than silk. The pieces from that period are woven with a wool imported from Europe, very fine and very soft — what the trade calls Manchester Kashans. Silky pile, indigo blue or deep madder red ground, a spare and confident design: they are few in number and are recognised by touch. The bulk of what circulates in fact dates from the 1930s to the 1980s, a period during which Kashan wove for export in very large quantities.

That abundance is the central fact for anyone wanting to sell. A living-room Kashan from the 1970s in good condition is found in a great many houses, and supply weighs more heavily on what can be got for it than the intrinsic quality of the rug. A Kashan from the end of the nineteenth century belongs to another market. Both carry the same name and the same design.

The design you can describe with your eyes shut

The classic Kashan comes down to a few elements that are always the same. A central medallion in an elongated lozenge, extended above and below by two tapering pendants. Four corner spandrels that take up the medallion's design in the angles. A field sown with fine scrolling stems, palmettes and flowers, never geometric. A wide main border of palmettes linked by an undulating stem, framed by two or three narrow borders.

The palette is just as stable: dominant madder red or deep indigo blue, ivory for the design and the spandrels, a few light blues, very little green. There are ivory-ground Kashans, more sought after, and Kashan prayer rugs with a mihrab. These are variants of one and the same vocabulary, not distinct styles.

The warning lies in that very regularity: the Kashan design is the most copied in the East. Indian, Pakistani, Chinese and Romanian production takes it up line for line, and a private owner who identifies their rug from the design alone is often wrong.

Under the fingers and on the back

Kashan uses the Persian knot, known as the senneh or asymmetric knot: the yarn encircles a single warp thread and passes around the other. This knot suits curves and floral designs, which explains the repertoire. Warp and weft are cotton, and the two wefts introduced between each row of knots are unevenly tensioned, which pushes every other warp slightly down. The back then shows rows that are somewhat flattened rather than well-opened lozenges.

The usual density lies between 200,000 and 500,000 knots per square metre, with finer pieces beyond that. The pile is wool, often kork, cut fairly low — of the order of five to eight millimetres. A Kashan with good wool has a greasy handle and a lustre that changes with the angle of view: that is the first sorting, and it is done by hand before anything is counted.

Faced with a copy of the same design, four points are usually enough. The foundation cotton of a Kashan is matt, that of Indian copies frequently mercerised and shiny. The wool of the copies is softer, whiter at the base, and the whole rug is more supple in the hands. The colours of Indo-Kashans readily tend towards salmon pink and pinkish beige, which do not belong to the Persian repertoire. Finally, a chemical wash leaves a uniformly softened surface, without the bath-to-bath variation that a Persian rug always keeps.

Why two Kashans of the same size are not worth the same

The gap comes down to four things, in this order. Age and wool: a pile from the end of the nineteenth century does not have the handle of a wool from the 1970s, and that is felt before it can be demonstrated. Density, which is counted on the back and not by touch. Condition, that is, the pile height measured at the base of the tuft, the integrity of the selvedges and the fringes, and the presence of old repairs of varying quality. Format, finally, a large rug that has stayed square being rarer than a small rug of the same quality.

What counts for little, on the other hand: the certificate issued by a shop, the label sewn on the back, the original purchase price and the reputation of the design. We look at the rug, not at its paperwork. The procedure is described on the free valuation page.

What the workshop watches for on a Kashan

Madder red is the sensitive point in washing. On a red ground with an ivory design, a dye bleed shows in a second and becomes very hard to put right, because the pigment migrates into the neighbouring light fibres and settles there. The colour fastness test is therefore run for longer on an old Kashan than on a dark-ground rug, and we fix before putting it in water. The wash itself remains that of any wool: neutral soap, below 30 °C, rinsing until neutral, dried flat.

The low pile is the other point of attention. It wears faster in traffic areas and reaches the foundation sooner than a high-pile rug. A Kashan whose field is letting the weft cotton show cannot be put right by simple repiling: it first needs weft reweaving, then reknotting over it at the original density.

Fringes and selvedges often give way before the field, because the rug is moved by its edges and catches under doors and furniture legs. A fringe repaired in time is rebuilt cleanly. A fringe that has already eaten two centimetres of knots means the edge has to be reknotted before the fringe is remade: that is not more difficult, it is longer, and it is said beforehand.