Qom rugs

A centre born in the twentieth century

Qom is a holy city in central Iran, about one hundred and thirty kilometres south of Tehran. It has no old tradition of knotting. Workshops set up there around the 1930s, with weavers from other regions and designs borrowed from every Persian repertoire. The consequence is direct and worth stating at the outset: there is no such thing as an antique Qom. A rug presented as a nineteenth-century Qom is either a misattribution or a deception.

In one generation the city became the centre of Iranian silk. Today the bulk of its production is entirely in silk. There are Qoms in kork wool, often very fine as well, but they are met with less often in Belgium. Many Qoms are in fact not intended for the floor: the small formats meant for the wall, between 80 × 120 and 150 × 200 centimetres, account for a significant part of production.

Silk: what it is, what it is not

The knot is Persian, asymmetric. The density is very high, commonly 400,000 to 1,000,000 knots per square metre, silk usually running around 600,000 to 800,000. On an all-silk rug the warp and the weft are silk too; on a wool Qom the foundation is cotton. The pile is extremely low, of the order of two to four millimetres.

Telling real silk from its imitation is the most useful question to ask, because the difference in value is considerable. Silk changes tone according to the angle: the same rug looks light seen from one end, dark from the other. It is cool at first contact and then warms under the hand. It is light for its bulk. Viscose, sold under the names art silk, bamboo silk or artificial silk, shines harder and more uniformly, stays cold, makes the rug distinctly heavier, crushes and whitens along the folds.

The test that destroys nothing is the wet-thread test, provided you use a thread that has already come loose rather than pulling on an intact fringe: wet viscose loses almost all its strength, silk does not. The flame test also tells silk from viscose, but it means tearing a thread out of the rug: we do not do that on a client's piece. Note finally that mercerised cotton also shines: a so-called silk rug, very heavy and very shiny, of Indian or Chinese manufacture, is almost always viscose or mercerised cotton.

A borrowed repertoire

Qom invented no design of its own, and makes no secret of it. There you find the garden compartmented into panels, known as khesti, rows of boteh, prayer mihrabs, hunting scenes, vases and roses, Shah Abbas palmettes. The palette is light and contrasted: ivory, sky blue, pink, gold, with very worked gradations that the density makes possible.

Two markers are useful for dating. Gilt metal threads, frequent in the field or the borders, belong to recent production and indicate the period rather than the quality. Cartouche signatures are common, and as everywhere else they are imitated.

What makes the value of a Qom

Material comes first: all silk, silk pile on a cotton foundation, or kork wool — these are three different objects. Then the density, counted on the back. Then the fineness of the design, which is judged by the number of shades used and the crispness of the outlines. Then the condition, and this is where Qom differs from other origins.

On a wool rug, a fault in condition can often be repaired without showing. On a silk Qom the fault is optical. A pile crushed under a furniture leg does not always lift again; a water tidemark stays; a lustre dulled by rubbing is not given back. Condition therefore weighs more heavily in the valuation of a Qom than in that of a Kashan of the same surface area. The general principle is set out in the guide valuing a rug.

Silk in the workshop: what is done, what is not

Silk has neither scales nor lanolin. It therefore does not felt, which removes the major risk with wool. In exchange, it is sensitive to alkalinity, to heat, to ultraviolet light and to friction. Above pH 8 the fibre loses its polish and becomes fragile. Brushing, even gently, breaks the lustre at the surface: that is a permanent and immediately visible loss.

Washing is therefore done cold, with a neutral soap, in a short bath, without brushing, with measured extraction and a rapid and perfectly uniform flat drying. The main difficulty is not the dirt but the tidemark: silk marks at the edge of a damp area. A stain is never treated locally on a Qom without washing the whole surface — the protocol is set out on the silk rugs page.

What breaks first: the pile crushed under furniture, the silk fringes, and the sheen lost to rubbing or to a vacuum cleaner with a rotating brush. What can be restored: a silk fringe is rebuilt in silk, a loss is reknotted at the original density if the shade can be matched, a tear is repaired. What cannot be restored: a lustre burnt by an alkaline product or by years of direct sun. There is no treatment that gives a dulled silk its sheen back, and we do not pretend otherwise.

One last point, a practical one. A silk Qom is not a rug for traffic. A bedroom, a wall, the top of a piece of furniture, a little-used room: that is where it holds up. In a Brussels corridor or hallway it wears out in two winters.