Clinging to the Art of Carpet Making

KHUCHNI, Dagestan -- Emerging from a dark room in her cool home high in the mountains of Dagestan, Asli Isayeva rolled out half a century's worth of dust and memories onto the dining room floor.

It's her prize possession: a carpet with an image of Moscow's Kremlin wall superimposed onto a Soviet star. The tapestry of yellowed woolen threads declares "Pobeda," or "Victory," to all those who can get her to display her handiwork, a term project for the carpet weaving school she attended as a young woman in the 1940s.

Isayeva, 76, lives in the Tabasaran region of southern Dagestan. She is one of 5,000 women who have carried the region's tradition of carpet weaving through the Soviet period into modern times.

Holding on to traditional crafts, like carpet making, has been an uphill battle since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The centralized system, supporting the making of carpets in Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Dagestan for resale elsewhere in the Soviet Union, is no more.

Isayeva was once the director of a collectivized carpet-making factory in Khuchni, but it, like four others before it, closed down in 2001 because its owners could make more money using the building as a warehouse.

Isayeva has largely abandoned the painstaking work because of her arthriarthritis, but others, including her daughter-in-law, continue to make carpets on private looms.

They have, however, largely turned away from the traditional methods, substituting modern yarns for hand-spooled thread made with natural vegetable dyes. The Museum of Visual Arts in Makhachkala, Dagestan's capital, is trying to revive the traditional skills, with help from a grant from the Soros Foundation, but with limited success.

Isayeva's daughter-in-law, Lyudmila, an ethnic Russian from a Cossack stanitsa in the northern lowlands, makes carpets on a neighbor's loom.

Like so many other townswomen, she no longer makes the ornate wall rugs the Tabasaran people are famous for, weaving practical seat covers instead. A set of six will sell for 1,000 rubles ($35) in Derbent, 35 kilometers away on the Caspian coast.

"It's a sad thing," Lyudmila said. "Most people make carpets for themselves or as gifts, because there is nobody to sell them to."

Isayeva interrupted her to say that there are always buyers for older carpets. She used to have one with a portrait of Stalin that would fetch a pretty price today. "But when they denounced Stalin in the 1950s, we poured blue ink all over his face. We were afraid," she said.

Carpet weaving is strictly a female occupation. For most of the year, Khuchni's men are away in other parts of the country working at construction sites or plowing fields, because unemployment in the town is high.

On the road from Derbent to the Tabasaran region drivers pass the local gray labor market, where anyone in need of an extra pair of hands can find them for a couple of hundred rubles a day. The market isn't much more than a crowd of men standing by the side of the road haggling, but it's indicative of the state of the local economy.

So when the occasional carpet dealer from Derbent, Makhachkala or even Moscow passes through Khuchni with a few private orders, it's a big event.

The Isayevs' neighbors, the Kuznetsovs, got lucky the last time that happened. A family from Makhachkala ordered three carpets with a portrait of Imam Shamil, a legendary warrior who ruled much of Chechnya and Dagestan in the 19th century.

"Nowadays people want carpets with portraits of famous people or family members," said the Kuznetsov family matron, Maya-khanum. The thorny designs and geometric patterns Tabasaran carpets used to be known for are now more often used only on the carpet's border. They play second fiddle to the carpet's main subject, in this case Shamil.

Kuznetsova, 54, and her daughter Ayshat have spent most of the past three months weaving the carpets, painstakingly moving up the loom a millimeter at a time to piece together Shamil's face.

When they have finished Shamil -- revered for fighting off the Russians -- the carpets will fetch 3,000 rubles apiece.

Carpet weaving in Tabasaran will probably never achieve the Stakhanovite tempos of the past. At its peak, Isayeva's factory wove 5,000 square meters of carpet per month. But to traditionalists, what is more important is that local women return to traditional methods of carpet making.

Although carpets are still made by hand, as they always have been, factory-made threads and artificial dyes have taken away from the carpets their longevity and depth of color.

"People have been steadily moving away from using the old, pre-Revolutionary weaving methods," said Dzhamilya Azialova, who restores carpets at the Museum of Visual Arts. The carpets are losing some of their originality as well, she said. "People used to pay much more attention to detail. No two parts of a carpet were symmetrical, but now they are.

"A carpet made the same way one would be made at the beginning of the 20th century costs three times as much as one made from modern materials," she said. "So no one will buy it, even though it is more beautiful and better quality."

Last year, the museum began a project to resurrect traditional carpet making skills. But it is easy to see why women in Tabasaran opt for Turkish factory-made threads, since dying hand-spooled thread alone can take weeks, Azialova said.

For instance, to extract shades of burgundy, often used in Dagestani carpets, you need first to find the madder root, which grows in some parts of Dagestan.