Middle East - Anthony Ham [60]
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CARPETS
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Your first order of business if you’re buying a carpet should be to read Oriental Rugs Today, by Emmett Eiland, an excellent primer on buying new oriental rugs.
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Carpets are among the most accessible art forms in the Middle East – you’ll find them adorning storefronts across the region wherever there’s a fair chance of a tourist passing by. That said, your relationship to these icons of Middle Eastern travel is more likely to be as a prospective purchaser rather than casual admirer: however averse you may be to the idea, you’re likely at some stage to find yourself in a carpet shop. Resistance is futile.
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The Root of Wild Madder: Chasing the History, Mystery and Lore of the Persian Carpet, by Brian Murphy, is a travelogue through the countries of finest carpet production and a buyer’s guide to quality, interwoven with stories told by individual designs.
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As it’s likely to be one of the major purchases of your trip, a little knowledge can go a long way. Carpets are made with Persian knots, which loop around one horizontal thread and under the next; or Turkish knots, looped around two horizontal threads, with the yarn lifted between them. For more on the art of buying a carpet, see the boxed text, below.
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CINEMA
Middle Eastern film stands at a crossroads. On one level, a small, elite company of directors is gaining unprecedented critical acclaim, picking up awards at international festivals and inching its way into the consciousness of audiences around the world. But the industry as a whole has spent much of the last two decades in crisis, plagued by a critical lack of government funding, straining under the taboos maintained by repressive governments or fundamentalist religious movements, and facing unprecedented competition from Middle Easterners’ unfettered access to satellite TV channels from around the world. All of this comes at a time when these same satellite TV channels, which face no such constraints, have fostered politically aware audiences with a newly acquired taste for diverse opinions and subject matter.
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Carpet-Buying 101 John Vlahides
Due diligence is essential for perspective carpet-buyers. Though you may only want a piece to match your curtains, you’ll save a lot of time and money if you do a little homework.
A rug’s quality depends entirely on how the wool was processed. It doesn’t matter whether the rug was hand-knotted if the wool is lousy. The best comes from sheep at high altitudes, which produce impenetrably thick, long-staple fleece, heavy with lanolin. No acids should ever be applied; otherwise the lanolin washes away. Lanolin yields naturally stain-resistant, lustrous fibre that doesn’t shed. The dye should be a vegetable-based pigment. This guarantees saturated, rich colour tones with a depth and vibrancy unattainable with chemicals.
The dyed wool is hand-spun into thread, which by nature has occasional lumps and challenges the craftsmanship of the weavers, forcing them to compensate for the lumps by occasionally changing the shape, size or position of a knot. These subtle variations in a finished carpet’s pattern – visible only upon close inspection – give the carpet its character, and actually make the rug more valuable.
Dealers will hype knot density, weave quality and country of origin, but their importance pales in significance compared to the crucial matter of finding out how the wool