I began an explanation of the workshops but was interrupted by shrieks from outside. Zamireh’s mother had obviously returned and Zamireh leapt up and threw herself at her as she entered the main room. Everyone talked at once, the girls recounting family news and neighbourhood gossip, the mother doling out gifts for each daughter. After ten minutes or so I coughed politely and explained that I would come back at a more convenient time. There were protests from Zamireh’s mother, particularly when the offer of work was mentioned.
‘No, no! Please sit down. Look! Zamireh is a clever girl. She understands business. See! We have three looms, she works hard every day and her sister Shirin is also good. Of course they will work for you! Take them, they are yours.’
Zamireh and Shirin just beamed. I asked Zamireh where she had learnt her skill and she leapt up to take me down the street to her usta. This generic term applied to anyone who was a master or expert in something, whether plumbing or wood-carving. Ulugbibi, her usta, wasn’t there. Instead I talked with her mother-in-law, who had been weaving for decades and had herself trained Ulugbibi.
The following evening I returned, discovering that Ulugbibi’s sister-in-law was also the museum ‘wifie’ at the Zindon jail. Neither she nor her own sister had married, and they lived at home. Ulugbibi herself was a pretty woman in her early forties. Judging by the way her sisters-in-law looked at her, I sensed that this was not a harmonious household and it came as no surprise when Ulugbibi jumped at the opportunity to work with us and escape the house. She would also have the prestige (and increased pay) of being one of our two weaving ustas.
I’d already found the other usta, trained by Zulhamar, my Uzbek mother.
‘She’s very docile and hard working!’ I was assured. I visited her house, also in the neighbourhood near the Grandfather Gate and typically squalid. A squat, cylindrical mother of two, Safargul wore a black and magenta acrylic cardigan over a neon-green house dress. She didn’t say much, but having seen her work – and on Zulhamar’s recommendation – I offered her the position of our second weaving usta.
Soon I had four dyers, two weaving ustas and eighteen weavers. Then there was Madrim, who was to be our dye usta and was already operating as assistant director. The last looms were completed and hauled into the madrassah and now we were ready for our first gathering.
We began with a tour, starting with the dyeing room, with its cauldrons and gas rings. At this stage the walls were glowing white, although they would soon be spattered in a rainbow of colours. We moved on to the different weaving cells and the girls who already knew weaving nodded approvingly at the monolithic double loom Zulhamar had purchased for us. I ran through a list of rules, emphasising that stealing would be met with immediate dismissal, there would be no bribe-taking, we would pay wages promptly on the last Friday of each month, and no boys were allowed to loiter here pestering the younger weavers. The weavers listened with downcast eyes, a few suppressing a smile at this last rule. We were not to refer to ourselves as a business or factory, as this would rouse the appetites of bribe-hungry officials. We would be known as the Ghali Maktab, meaning ‘carpet school’. Our Bukharan trainers would arrive that evening and we would begin training the following day. Were there any questions?
* * *
As I’d expected, it had proved difficult to find the Bukharans accommodation, as they were determined not to waste money in a hotel. Fat Miriam from next door had eventually agreed to take them, as she needed the money. She’d been the second wife of a man who had deserted her when she lost her looks, and was now dependent on a son in Russia from whom she hadn’t heard for a while. If the Bukharans didn’t mind sharing, she would give them a room, although the window looked out on Khiva’s only two camels. They belonged to a fat, jolly man with a melon belly who charged tourists for posing on or beside a camel – and the camels spent each evening at Miriam’s house just a short walk away. She fed them and mucked out their stall, selling the wisps of camel wool to local women who twisted them around cardigan buttons to ward off the evil eye.
Our trainers, Ulugbeg and Fatoulah, arrived and were unimpressed with both the camels and the accommodation. Ulugbeg went for an evening walk to check out the local girls and see if they were as beautiful as all the girls in Bukhara. He casually mentioned at this point that he was now engaged. Fatoulah was tired and went to bed, and I returned home to prepare myself mentally for our first day of training. Fatoulah had given me a wad of photos, graph-paper designs, and some articles in English written by Jim that I wanted to look through.
The following day our training began. Ulugbeg preened and flirted with the prettier apprentices as he distributed pieces of graph-paper with simple motifs on them. The weavers’ first task was to copy these designs into notebooks. Most of the girls managed well and over the next few days graduated to harder designs. Those who had woven before found it easiest. The purpose of this exercise was to familiarise the apprentices with how carpet patterns work and how to read a design.
I scanned the courtyard where girls sat on corpuches, hunched over their notebooks, scribbling. The boys were busy with Fatoulah and Madrim, weighing out skeins of silk to be dyed. Four of the cells were now crammed with looms, and the storage cells were full of bales of silk and sacks of natural dye ingredients. The whole place buzzed with activity and it felt as if everything was finally coming together as an actual workshop.
There was no time to sit back and relax, though. We needed six beautiful Timurid designs ready before we started weaving. Jim had left some completed designs with the Bukhara workshop but these wouldn’t be enough. I had no background in carpet-designing – but then I had no background in starting a carpet workshop, and yet the beginnings of one were forming outside.
It was time for me to explore the world of carpet designs and Timurid miniatures.
4
From calligraphy to carpet
The scene is of a meadow – a rich tapestry of shrubs and flowers with barely room for grass to grow. I recognise dandelions with their jagged leaves and yellow flowers, and what appear to be wild strawberries. My eyes wander to a grey poplar standing tall as it juts out of the picture frame past swirls of Persian poetry in flawless calligraphy. It fills the top right-hand corner of the page with beautifully detailed, individually painted leaves. Behind the tree, a stream snakes across the vellum, flowing from a spring nestled in the base of a rocky outcrop that sweeps above the meadow like an arid wave.
In the foreground, a turbaned black eunuch stands guard over his mistress with a perfume bottle in his hand. Maidservants sit on the grass, having laid out a platter of cool sherbets in tall copper vials. One plays a nai flute, another a tambourine. There is also a lyre player and a musician who claps and sings. Their mistress Shirin is unaware of the music, her mind on other matters. She stares, transfixed, at a portrait found nailed to the tree. The portrait is of a handsome young man, Husrov, and the artist is obviously a master. Out of the picture frame, and unknown to Shirin, the artist Shapur remains hidden in the undergrowth, watching.
It is Shapur who has set the wheels in motion for a tragic romance as familiar today in the East as the story of Romeo and Juliet is in the West. Blessed with the ability to evoke images through both paintbrush and the spoken word, Shapur has intoxicated Husrov with his description of Shirin, a virgin princess. He has never met her, but already the fires of love burn strong in his heart and he commissions Shapur to paint his portrait, capturing the essence of his soul and his love for Shirin.
As Shirin gazes at the portrait of Husrov, she feels a stirring of passion in her bosom. Never has the essence of a man been so cleverly captured. She has fallen in love, not with a man, but with a painting.
* * *
And so have I.
I stare transfixed at this magnificent illustration from the medieval Persian poet Nizami’s Khamsa, painted half a millennium ago (see colour
plate 10). Running a magnifying glass slowly over the page, I discover more detail, hidden from the naked eye, marvelling at each individually painted leaf, each fold and crease of the handmaidens’ robes. But my eyes rarely stray for long before returning to the carpet that Shirin sits on.
Although part of it is obscured from view, enough can be seen to appreciate its stunning design. The border immediately marks out the rug as being from the time of the Timurid dynasty in 15th-century Persia. Gold interlacing motifs that were once letters of Kufic script, now evolved into stylised motifs, adorn a rich crimson background. The field design (the area within the central rectangle framed by the border) is made up of tessellating hexagonal star-flowers. The balance of colour is masterful and yet it flouts many of the conventions of colour in practice today. Each flower is framed in orange, containing a green centre pierced with a yellow circle, and surrounded by a blue hexagon. These hexagons are entwined in a complicated geometry of white interwoven threads on a vivid red background. They create a pleasing interlaced-knot effect and tessellate in six different directions to join up with other star-flowers.
Sadly, over time, this style of carpet design suffered from the caprice of fashion, as arabesque medallion designs from the later Safavid dynasty eclipsed the more geometrically staid Timurid carpets, leaving no trace of them except in illustrations to poems and epics. But I see these pictures as blueprints, ready to be woven to life once more.
* * *
Most of my journey into the world of miniatures took place eight months after the carpet workshop opening, back in England. Ironically, despite the famous Bukhara school of miniature painting, there were far more books on miniatures, as well as actual originals, in Britain. Cambridge University Library was a short bike-ride away from my parents’ house, and I holed up there, combing through anything I could find on the subject, quickly realising how little I knew. Even my assumption that the term ‘miniature’ referred to size was wrong. The name actually comes from a reddish-orange pigment, minium, that was popular with Persian and Mogul miniaturists.
For the miniaturists themselves, it must have been a risky business, painting representative art in a culture where all images of living beings were considered idolatrous. Miniaturists were not considered artists in their own right, but an extension of the manuscript workshops that included calligraphers and makers of calf-skin vellum pages. Their work was unsigned and anonymous, although some – determined to leave their mark – would hide a tiny signature somewhere in each illustration. These workshops developed a highly structured process for painting miniatures. Apprentices would spend months repeating the form of a horse, a tree or a prince in love. These standardised images were then assembled together to form an overall picture. The approach to painting was much closer to that of functional crafts, aiming for excellence and detail without the need for expressions of individuality.
The religious stricture on representative art was not simply ignored by the miniaturists, who feared the bouts of fervent iconoclasm they could provoke. Instead, self-imposed restrictions were introduced to appease Islamic conservatives. The centre of a miniature, for example, would never contain a human being, as only Allah could ever occupy this position. Many miniatures portrayed religious events, including scenes from the Bible and the Koran. In one, Potiphar’s wife pats a particularly attractive Timurid carpet, attempting to entice Joseph onto it. He flees her seductions, his head – as with all depictions of Prophets – aflame with a fiery halo. In the case of Mohammed, the most venerated of Prophets, his face was always covered with a curtain, as to attempt his likeness would be a terrible wickedness.
Particularly helpful for us was the convention that miniatures should be painted from the perspective of a minaret. This resulted in a curious blend of bird’s-eye view and side-on perspective. It meant that carpets would appear on the page as simple rectangles without receding perspective, in exquisite detail, making the perfect colour blueprint.
The prohibition on representative art affected all artisans, whether workers of stone, metal, wood or cloth. Instead, artisans found their expression in arabesque swirls, maze-like interlocking letters and a myriad of geometrical designs. Nor were these designs restricted to one medium. Dazzling calligraphy and intricate arabesques from the frontispieces of Korans and other manuscripts would inspire masons building a new mosque or madrassah to imitate these same embellished arabesques in tile and mosaic work. These buildings would, in turn, end up in painted form as miniaturists copied them into their depictions of courtly or religious life. I noticed that sometimes the same designs that appear in Timurid carpets are found in other miniatures as ceramic wall-tiling.
I wanted to find out more about Timurid carpets. They followed the tradition of most carpets, consisting of a central field design framed with a border. I was learning how to spot their distinctive fields, typically consisting of repeating guls, interlaced with banded knots rather than the later medallion design most associated with classical oriental rugs. The main giveaway that a carpet was Timurid was in the border, which consisted of stylised letters, evolved and embellished to appear like Celtic knots in some cases. I preferred Timurid designs to their more floral successors, but what had led to this transition in carpet patterns? Had the freer style of calligraphy led some miniaturists to experiment with new carpet designs in their pictures, which were then copied by the carpet-weavers themselves, or had this transformation occurred first with carpet-weavers and been merely mirrored by the manuscript illustrators of the time? There was no definitive answer or even much scholarly work on the subject, though a footnote in one carpet book mentioned an article on Timurid carpets and I tracked it down at the University Library. Heaving the dusty hardback edition of Ars Islamica (1940) onto a table – noticing that it had last been taken out five years previously – I paged through to the essay on Timurid carpets by an American, Amy Briggs.
She refuted the suggestion that Timurid carpets were merely works of a pen and had never actually been woven. If the Timurid tilework, carved wooden doors and buildings – many of which are still standing – had been painted in faithful realism,
then why would the carpets have been mere experiments in geometrical calligraphy and not a rendering of the real thing?
There was no actual proof, though. While the tiles, doors and buildings of the 15th century had survived, these carpets hadn’t withstood the constant tramping of feet and the scourges of moth and damp. In fact, there was just one known carpet fragment from the Timurid era, now part of the Benaki Museum collection in Greece. Jim had given the Bukhara workshop a photo of the fragment and a graph-paper design that we had improved.
I loved the Benaki fragment’s striking interplay of burgundy and gold and was excited at the prospect of reviving it. The ustas had assured me that the absence of a third colour would make it fairly easy to weave. The only drawback was that we weren’t sure what its original border had looked like, experimenting instead with a border popular in many Timurid designs.
Amy Briggs made mention of the fragment in her essay, and the unique era in carpet design that flourished during the Timurid period. I wanted to discover more about Amir Timur, its founder.
Timur means ‘iron’ in Uzbek, and as a barbarous warlord he didn’t seem an obvious patron of the arts. Known in the West as ‘Timur the Lame’ – the result of an arrow wound to his leg – later corrupted to Tamerlane, he was born in 1336 near Samarkand, in the south of modern-day Uzbekistan. I’d been there a number of times and climbed the turret of the crumbling White Palace he’d had commissioned. Despite its dilapidated state, enough mesmerising Timurid tilework remained to keep me entranced for quite some time as I climbed the uneven stairway, causing a major blockage of Uzbek schoolchildren trying to squeeze past me and continue their noisy ascent to the top. Here again were the same interwoven knot patterns so characteristic of Timurid carpets, and bands of tiled Kufic script in relief mimicked the carp
et borders.
Like his predecessor Genghis Khan, Timur excelled on the battlefield, with a penchant for mass annihilation. He ruled by terror, so that even the most heavily fortified city would quake at news of his approach. He ordered towers of skulls assembled outside the cities he wished to punish, and – I read, eyes widening – would build towers out of the living bodies of prisoners, cementing them together with clay and brick into weakly writhing structures. Reputed to have killed more people than Stalin and Hitler combined, he seemed an odd choice as national hero of Uzbekistan, particularly as he’s famed for saying: ‘If you see an Uzbek, kill him.’ In fact it was the Uzbeks who eventually drove the Timurid empire into oblivion, although they weren’t the same people as the hotchpotch of ethnicities within Stalin-drawn borders referred to as Uzbeks today. Nonetheless, the new Uzbek state, desperate to forge an identity after Soviet rule, decreed Timur to be the embodiment of Glorious, Independent Uzbekistan.
I had been to the Amir Timur Museum in Tashkent – an enjoyable piece of national propaganda linking the glorious reign of Timur with that of President Karimov. My favourite feature of the museum was the impressive domed ceiling. I would point out to guests the quotes from Timur in both Uzbek and English that rimmed it, drawing their attention to one – ‘In justice is our strength’ – in which the gap between the words ‘In’ and ‘justice’ wasn’t quite wide enough.
A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road Page 8
