Iranian carpet weaver recreates ‘Ardebil rug’

Press, 31 October 1984, Page 48

Iranian carpet weaver recreates ‘Ardebil rug’

NZPA-Reuter Teheran Mashallah Shatai, like many provincial Iranians of his generation, does not know exactly how old he is. But he is sure he was seven when he started weaving his first carpet. Mashallah, who thinks he is “about 50,” is one of an endangered species trying to keep alive the art of Persian carpets. He is from the town of Ardebil, close to the Soviet border and the Caspian Sea and one of the great carpetweaving centres in past centuries. One of the world’s bestknown Oriental rugs, known to experts as the “Ardebil rug,” is a centrepiece of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. The huge rug was one of a pair woven around A.D. 1540, possibly for Ardebil’s mosque, and its damaged

twin can be seen in the Los Angeles County Museum. Mashallah has been working on his present rug for four years and it will take two more to complete. Usually he needs only one or two years for a smallish rug, but this one is something special. Sitting cross-legged on his old wooden loom in the Teheran Carpet Museum, he is copying the design of a 400-year-old carpet from the renowned Kashan region, south of Teheran, the origin of some of the finest rugs made. The original rug is in the museum’s cellar, too worn to be displayed. An artist copied its design and Mashallah began recreating it in 1980. Mashallah’s rug, measuring 2.4 m by 1.7 m, will be worth up to $50,000, at least on the inflated Iranian market.

The original, if in good condition, would have been worth hundreds of thousands. The original was woven long before chemical colouring, so its 20 hues are all from natural dyes. Nowadays, most of the plants and vegetables once used for colouring are hard to come by. Of the 20 balls of wool hung from Mashallah’s loom, only eight were tinted by natural dyes. “When I was seven and starting to weave in Ardebil, I used to go out looking for pomegranates, vine leaves and walnuts, which we used for dyeing. We mixed the colour and dyed the wool ourselves,” he said. “It took myself and my four brothers and sisters about four months to weave a rug. I think we got 10,000 riyals (just over $100) for the first rug I made. But that was a lot of money 40

years ago.” Around Mashallah as he weaves are the museum’s antique rugs, magnificent but far from being the finest Persian carpets in existence. The best were removed by the former Shah, his family and wealthy Iranians before the 1979 Islamic revolution which toppled the monarchy. Most are now in museums or collectors’ homes around the world. The museum’s star attraction is a large rug from the north-west Iranian town of Tabriz, said to date from the late fifteenth century and the Safavid dynasty, when Persian carpet weaving was at its zenith. Also on show are dazzling examples of the “polonaise” type, woven in the Persian towns of Isfahan or Kashan but so-named because they were commissioned by the noble families of Poland in

the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. Incongruously prominent around the museum are portraits of Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the man who ended the centuries of monarchy and opulence which most of the carpets recall. A stark contrast awaits the visitor who walks up a few steps from the carpet display. There, on the first floor, is an exhibition marking the Iranian revolution and the continuing war with Iraq. Portraits of assassinated ayatollahs and “martyrs” of the revolution or the war adorn the walls alongside posters declaring “Down with America” and piles of paraphenalia, from boxes of matches to watches and cameras, given by Iranians to help the war effort.