Syria: Love Affair With a Humble Carpet

posted on: Dec 2, 2010

Yaser Al Saghrji is emotional about his work. He grew up in his uncle’s shop amid piles of bright, textured kilims and carpets in Damascus’ ancient souks.

Then the focus was on carpets and those rich enough to afford them. Dealers didn’t know much about kilims or take them seriously. “Not a single complete kilim I know predates the 17th century,” says Al Saghrji. Scouring rural villages all over the region for weavers and heirlooms, Al Saghrji discovered that women weaving carpets for the market would produce kilims for their homes with leftover wool.

“A woman would weave the most rational carpet in the world, with colours perfectly muted for the market and the design symmetrical. Then she would weave the craziest, flashiest kilim, with the most irrational, asymmetrical shape for her house. This is what she loves,” says Al Saghrji. “So you cannot but love kilims – they are personal.”

Carpets are interwoven vertical warps and horizontal wefts that are then knotted. The collection of knots makes the carpet. For kilims, the warps and wefts are woven into flat narrow strips, to be sewn together and shaped into household items such as dowry bags, salt bags and rugs.

“I once saw a beautiful kilim that had a patch of very rough work,” says Al Saghrji. “The weaver explained that her nosy neighbour came into her house, found the loom, and worked the piece and left. It was impolite to take it apart, so she finished it in the same quality.”

The Syrian dealer now runs a small shop near the Umayyad mosque, crammed with the multicoloured kilims. He has displayed Syrian kilims at the Khan Asaad Pasha exhibition hall, and is working on a book.

He is fascinated with the kilims from Syria’s fertile region of Afreen, in the Kurdish north-west. “They are made of wool and fibres like goat hair. It could have ornaments done in cotton, brocading, shells sewn in for the evil eye, human hair tufted in, pieces of a wedding dress tufted in or feathers from their favourite chicken sewn in.”

But there are only two elderly weavers left. The younger generation has flocked to the big cities such as Aleppo and Damascus for urban work instead. Al Saghrji says Suzukis and suitcases have replaced labour-intensive kilim horse covers and dowry bags.

Rebecca Murray
The Guardian Weekly