A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road (9 page)

‘Problem,’ an officer would declare, pointing at my passport gravely.

‘Problem? No problem,’ I would reply, smiling innocently. ‘Everything good. Thank you, now I going.’

The officer would size me up, weighing the time it would take to inform me of my supposed offence – assuming that I understood the rules of bribery and knew that I should be the one to offer a ‘gift’ (prevented from leaving until I had done so). This was usually considered too much like hard work. My passport was tossed back through the window and we could continue.

This was a far better
course of action than getting lippy – which had once cost me a complete search of all my belongings, emptied onto a table in the roadside booth. I had only avoided a strip-search by abject apology and calls for international friendship and understanding. Policemen wanting to put me in my place would often reprimand me for wearing a seatbelt.
This was a reckless danger for, if we crashed, how
would I easily free myself?

Whether it was checkpoints, metro stops or even the bazaar, the important thing when accosted by police was to avoid their booths, where the mitigating influence of a crowd was absent. I’d once been caught urinating beside a rubbish-tip in the Osh bazaar in southern Kyrgyzstan. The police, ignoring the local urinators who always used this spot, considered me a
prime opportunity and were keen to take me to their booth and extract as much money as possible.

I protested loudly, expressing my shock that, as a guest, no one had told me where the toilets were, and what were guests in this country supposed to do when they needed to ‘rest’? Was this the hospitality I should expect, to resort to urinating in dirty places and then to be fined for it? A
crowd formed, and with the nation’s hospitality called into question, I was escorted to the public toilets – not much better than the rubbish-tip – and allowed to go.

* * *

Back in Khiva, Madrim oversaw the final stages of madrassah restoration while I set about identifying apprentices. I had given a lot of thought to the subject of employment, wanting to get it right. We would make
dyeing a job for the men, as it required heavy lifting and we wanted to give men employment as well as women. More challenging was how to create a workshop that ran on ethical principles. I knew that Uzbek businesses survived only by greasing the right palms. So much money was lost in bribes that employees were often not paid on time, if at all. I wanted our workshop to be seen as a school or a
charity, and I wanted to find apprentices seen by the community as needy.

I met the official responsible for government pensions and explained that I wanted to identify widows, orphans and disabled people who would be capable of learning carpet-weaving and dyeing. I was given a long list which he then went through, crossing off the names immediately of those he considered incompetent, dishonest
or too remote. This whittled it down considerably. There were no phone numbers – most of them didn’t have phones – so I would have to track them down.

The first house I visited was home to a girl paralysed from the waist down. She was, apparently, already a carpet-weaver. Her father welcomed me in and we sat down on dirty corpuches as I ate the obligatory mouthful of bread. Bread was sacred:
never thrown away, dropped or placed patterned-side down. It was also a symbol of friendship and always broken, never cut, and offered to all guests irrespective of how long they visited for. Even if I called at the door of a neighbour to let them know that someone had called them on our phone, they would appear with a round of bread and expect me to break off a chunk before running to take their
call. This particular bread was crawling with flies and far from appetising and the home looked poor and barely held together.

With a brittle smile I explained the purpose of my visit; but instead of enthusiasm, the girl’s father seemed unhappy to allow his disabled daughter to work. Who would bring her to and from work? Who would take her to the toilet? Who would be willing to sit in the
same room as her?

At this point another daughter, bringing tea, spoke out.

‘Father, I could take my sister to work each day. Perhaps there is also work for me. You know that I can weave well.’ She looked up, smiled quickly and hurried back to the kitchen.

Her father paused for a moment and then made up his mind.

‘Just take my first daughter. She’s strong and healthy and
it will be good for her to leave the house.’

Her name was Umida, which means hope. It was only months later that I heard her story from one of the other weavers. She’d been married but her father-in-law kept trying to rape her. No one else in her husband’s household was willing to help her, so she had run away. As a divorced woman her only chance of remarrying was with another divorcee.
Employment at the workshop gave her status and kept accusations of sponging off her family at bay.

Next on my list was a disabled boy called Davlatnaza. He lived in the walled city, not far from the madrassah, in what I’d initially assumed was a shed for animals. The crumbling old house was dingy and dirty. His mother and father were overjoyed that I might consider giving work to their disabled
son. After all, he had recently married and should have more to offer his wife than a disability pension. His young wife silently emerged at this point, wearing a headscarf as required of all married women, and served us tea from a cracked old teapot. She was Russian and had just left the orphanage. Men with disabilities were unlikely to find wives, but orphanage girls – assumed not to be
virgins – were available for anyone. I asked her if she too would like to join her husband in working for us. She nodded, unable to speak in the presence of her mother-in-law, and scuttled away.

Sanajan was a widow in her late thirties with three children to care for, having lost her husband in a car accident years ago. She was already a weaver and would be happy to join us. Another house
visit within the walled city yielded a young deaf boy who signed up for work as a dyer. His sister, Nazokat, was already a weaver and also signed up. In the old neighbourhood beside the Grandfather Gate, I eventually located Toychi. A dilapidated but beautiful iwan with a cracked wooden pillar led to a small hovel. Here, a formidable matriarch clutched me to her bosom at the news that I might give
her poor son work; his father had died less than a year ago. Toychi, dark, playful and impudent, simply sat and smirked until chastened by a withering look from his mother.

My list of workers grew. Needing more skilled women, I decided to hunt down some portrait carpet-weavers. There were sisters, I was told, who lived next to the pool outside the Grandfather Gate: they wove portrait-rugs.
I could ask anyone, and they would provide me with directions.

I approached a basic little house with music drifting from a room with three looms inside, and was welcomed by a thin, cheerful and slightly cross-eyed girl in her early twenties who grinned and introduced herself as Zamireh. She was very happy that day, she explained, as her mother would be arriving back from Russia. Zamireh
ran a small carpet-making business and was responsible for her five sisters and a brother while her mother was away. She hadn’t seen her mother in almost a year. As one of the few remaining employment options, trading was becoming increasingly popular. The men – like Zamireh’s father – would go to Russia as manual labourers, and the women would trade.

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 carpet 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.

Near the Amir Museum was the Amir Timur metro station, where the police patrols were particularly voracious for bribes. Beyond the metro was the Amir Timur park and in the centre of it a huge statue of Timur on horseback, replacing a smaller statue of Karl Marx that was taken down after independence. Timur appeared everywhere, and regular low-budget
TV costume dramas depicted his strong but fair rule over glorious Uzbekistan.

However, I knew very little about the real Amir Timur and the role he had played in the creation of Timurid miniatures. I discovered that when he wasn’t massacring large swathes of his enormous empire, Timur focused his efforts on transforming his capital, Samarkand, into a breathtakingly opulent demonstration
of wealth and grandeur. The city was built by slave-artisans, the only survivors of his many conquests, and they brought with them a variety of artistic traditions. Here, in the series of tombs known as the Shah-i-Zindah, are the most exquisite tiles in Central Asia, and again the same
naqsh
or patterns found in Timurid carpets weave their way into the ceramic tiles, which are also 15th-century.

This still didn’t explain Timur’s interest in miniatures. He was, after all, a man who liked to think big, whether building or butchering. According to legend, he was once approached by the master calligrapher Umar Al-Aqta, who had devised a minute ‘dust’ script that allowed the entire Koran to be written on a book the size of a signet ring. Timur was unimpressed. The calligrapher, keen to
impress the Amir, realised that it was all about size. He returned some time later with a cart groaning under the weight of a huge Koran, the like of which had never been seen before. Now he was talking the tyrant’s language and was promptly welcomed into the court and lavished with favour.