 | Illustration 1, detail |
I was traveling in Eastern Turkey looking for villages where specific local types of rugs might still exist. My search was rewarded one day when I halted for the night in a village in the Yalnizcam Mountains near the Soviet border. Almost every house in which I was invited possessed one or more rugs of a particular type which in the bazaar are known as Kars Kazaks. To my delight, I did not see any of the new type of Shield Kazaks being made for export. I saw old and new rugs and beautiful fragments, most of which were the same type: a central field composed of octagons with stepped latchhooks with a star inside (Illustration 1, detail).
| Illustration 1, detail |
I inquired why I saw only two looms in the village. I was informed that the women made rugs before and after marriage. When the dowry was complete, a need to weave no longer existed. Nevertheless it appeared that production had declined, and no one seemed concerned about it. None of the rugs I saw showed any commercial influence, but the latest rugs did have poor colors and simplified compositions.
The entire village was inhabited by Turkomans. Most of the old women still wore a high and round red coiffe and behaved with an astonishing authority. The men behaved in a natural and relaxed way. I was happy that they insisted that I should be their guest for the night. In contrast to Kurdish villages, there were no fierce dogs here. The atmosphere was peaceful, perhaps because the neighboring valleys were also inhabited by Turkomans.
In our conversation I discovered that these Turkomans had conserved a strong ethnic identity. They told me that they differed in social customs and religious beliefs from both Turks and Kurds. With the Kurds they sometimes had communal problems.
The Turks they associated with were the Seljuks, with whom they had fought fierce battles. Long before the Seljuk invasions they had arrived in these areas, coming from the Samarkand region as nomads. Their present village was very old, but other Turkoman villages had emerged with the arrival of refugees from the Caucasus in the 19th century and after 1918.
The assertion that they had arrived in Transcaucasia in small groups before the Seljuks is not incompatible with historical sources. Studying the history of the Turko-Mongol peoples, one comes to understand that besides the great invasions and conquests, brought about by powerful leaders, there were small tribal factions who lead an autonomous nomadic life and who migrated and "invaded" peacefully. There are even reports of nomads being welcomed by kings into whose territory they had migrated. Considering these facts it is possible that the first Turkomans entered the northern Caucasus in the wake of the Khazars as early as 500 A.D.
In composition, pattern, and texture the rugs in the village can be related to certain Transcaucasian rugs known as Kazak and Genje. It occurred to me that these Kazak and Genje rugs would in fact have been knotted by Turkomans and ethnic groups other than Armenian and Azeri Turks in Transcaucasia.
The Turkoman village rugs had the same nomadic feeling as the more coarsely woven and bold Transcaucasian rugs which I never had been able to associate with either Armenians or Azeris. The oldest fragments were bright and had many colors.
N. Gorgunay in his book1 shows a photograph of a rug with stepped hooks inside an octagon, made near Ararat. Due to censorship, the author nowhere mentions an ethnic group. The boy holding the rug does not have typical Kurdish features. But significantly Gorgunay, when describing this particular rug, names the octagon with stepped hooks and star inside, a "Turkmen aynali" or Turkoman mirror. He even refers to Turkomans as an ethnic group.
Unfortunately, I found Gorgunay's book after my visit to the Turkoman village and had neglected to ask these Turkomans what they called the central motif in their rugs. The Turkoman aynali rugs seen in the village were definitely Turkoman. So what are the other Turkoman aynali patterned rugs from the Transcaucasus? The following morning I drove away from this hospitable Turkoman village with two fine Turkoman aynali rugs.
Illustration 2 |  |
The same day I found two interesting kilims. One came from the Cildir Lake area and was made by Kazaks. When I asked if these Kazaks were immigrants from Transcaucasia, nobody knew for certain. They could not specify if they meant Kazaks from Central Asia who had come as refugees from the Soviet Union or former inhabitants of the town of Kazak in Transcaucasia. The price of the kilim was normal and the word Kazak had been pronounced after I had paid. They seemed quite sincere.
.In Masudi, translated by Minorsky2, I found a reference to a Kazak tribe or people in his Muruj al Dhahab written in 943 A.D. Masudi writes: "There follows on the Alan a nation called Kashak, which lives between Mount Qabkh and the sea of Rum." According to Minorsky the name Kashak designates the Cherkess -- Kasog in old Russian and Kasas in Ossetian. Was the kilim made by Cherkess? Another reference to Kazaks, perhaps the earliest, is from Firdausi around 1000 A.D, who writes about the depredations caused by a Kazak khan and his Kazak nomads. At the beginning of the 19th century, Kazaks of the Smaller Horde split away and entered the Astrakhan Government. They became known as the Bukejew or Inner Horde.3
Considering the many migrations and invasions, sometimes grouping different tribes, the romantic view of "wild Kazak horsemen in Transcaucasis" may after all not be so fantastic. By the time of the first census by the tsarist administration, the Transcaucasian Kazaks may well have been absorbed by another ethnic group or just simply been listed as Tatars.
 | Illustration 3 |
 | left |  |
Several 19th century travelers, ignorant about carpets, praised and wrote highly about the bazaar of Tiflis and proudly mentioned their bargains, not knowing that they were mostly dealing with carpets imported from Persia. Perhaps dealers in Tiflis had the same mentality as dealers in Kabul, who could not understand why a foreigner did not become enthusiastic over the fine "dead" Mauris and instead chose a rug made by nomads.
I suppose, therefore, that the names given to Caucasian rugs were not very accurate. I do not mean that names such as Kazak and Genje are wrong. As place names to situate rugs, they may to some degree be correct. In the 17th-18th century there is mention of a Kazak Khanate. Genje as the capital of a khanate was an important commercial center with a market that was visited chiefly by nomads, most probably Kurds, Terekemes, and Turkomans. We should not do away too quickly with these names. If some of the classic appellations are fantastic, so are many of the new names given to rugs by L. Kerimov (see The Azerbaijan Carpet, by David R. Milberg )
The Transcaucasian nomads seem not to have been remembered when the names were passed out or invented for their rugs -- this, not withstanding the fact that being nomads they must have done a lot of weaving. I suggest that Kurds, Terekemes, and Turkomans were responsible for a far greater number of Transcaucasian rugs than we generally assume.
Illustration 6 |  |
In the History of Sharvan and Darband2 we find several references to the presence of Kurds in Transcaucasia, showing that Kurds were not newcomers. In 970 A.D. the Kurdish Shaddadids became kings of Arran (Genje). On page 35 we read that when the Ghuz Turks invaded Shirvan in 1066 A.D., they looted the settlements of the Kurds. In 1065 A.D. Kurds had raided Kuba. There is the anecdote of an Arab marrying the daughter of a Kurdish chief in Azerbaijan and becoming their chief. The village of Kurdiyan on the Gardaman River corresponds to Kurdivan or place of the Kurds.
We get an interesting insight into the composition of the different ethnic groups when we look at the statistics for Muslim and Christians in the Khanate of Erivan around 1828.5 We learn from the statistics that the population was composed as follows: one-fourth Persians, one-fourth Armenians, one-fourth Kurdish nomads -- Sunni Kurds near Garni Bazaar and Shia Kurds south of Lake Sevan -- and the remaining one-fourth Turkish speaking Tatars, of which half were nomads.
This means that 37% of the total population was nomadic, 25% Kurdish nomads and 12% Tatars. The production of textiles by these nomads must have been considerable. More than probably there were Turkoman and Terekeme tribes among the Turkish speaking nomads. After the Russian conquest in 1828, about half of the Kurdish nomads emigrated to the region of Kars and Kagizman. Historical sources quoted by R. Grousset*6 inform us that in the 17th century Qajar and Afshar Turkoman tribes dwelt in the vicinity of Genje to defend the Persian Empire.
Barthold7 tells us that around 1670, Kalmuks deported three Turkoman tribes from the Mangishlak Peninsula to the Caucasus. This may be of some interest to persons who have a problem with Turkoman emblems found in Herki textiles or who see a Turkoman origin in a particular type of Kagizman rug.8 There were more Kurds, Turkomans, and Terekemes in Transcaucasia up to 1920 than rug books generally lead us to believe.
Let us look for more material to substantiate the presence of these groups.
Ernest Chantre9 in 1881 writes about large encampments of nomadic Kurds near Gok Tchai or Lake Sevan and Mount Ararat. The Ararat Kurds moved freely into Turkey, Russia, and Iran. He also reports settlements of Kurds in Karabagh and Zangezur.
P. von Stenin,10 in his notes on the Erivan Government, writes that the Kurds near Erivan were half nomads and that their chief occupation was sheep breeding.
Gustav Radde11 in 1890 describes on several occasions encampments of yurts in Karabagh. As Kurds seemed to live in black tents, it is probably that these yurts were inhabited by another ethnic group than Kurds.
Also Feilberg,12 obsessed by black tents and yurts, mentions travelers who viewed yurts in Transcaucasia. But he does not quote his sources.
Erich Zugemayer traveling in Transcaucasia13 mentions several times viewing splendid carpets. On page 22 he shows the photograph of a Kurdish girl in Etchemiadzin, standing in the background is what connoisseurs in general would identify as a Shirvan kilim.
The distance from Erivan to Lake Sevan is only 70 kilometers. Zugemayer travels to the village of Sagalu, southeast of the Lake, and says that the village is inhabited by a majority of "Tataren, teils auch Armenier und einige Kurden" ("Tartars, some Armenians and a few Kurds"). This may let us ponder the possibility that one and the same type of rug may have been knotted by all different ethnic groups living in the same village.
As Mount Ararat in 1904 lay within the boundary of the Russian Empire, Zugemayer decided to climb it. From the village of Afshar (now Sadarak) he journeys to Kamarlu, an Armenian village (now Artashat), and then on to the large Sardar Bulak encampment of Kurds. Another traveler14 in the area in 1876, mentions "a tribe of Turkoman gypsies, near Kamarlu, named Moutroupp by the Armenians."
From Rosita Forbes15 we learn that until 1930 refugees from the Caucasus still crossed the Aras River in great numbers into Iran and Turkey. Many of them were Kurds, who continually reinforced the Mount Ararat Kurdish Government of Sheikh Said Naqshbandi. Not until the Soviet Cheka supplied the Turkish army in 1930 with the materials to make poison gas, which was being prepared by Germans at Bayazit, could the Turks occupy the eastern slopes of Ararat.
Kars-Kagizman and Ararat rugs are related to Transcaucasian rugs. I have handled several Kars rugs, which showed so little or no difference with Transcaucasian rugs that a definite ascription was impossible. Historically and culturally the Kars-Kagizman-Ararat region can be viewed as belonging to Transcaucasia. The ruins of Ani can be reached from Kars in about 30 minutes by car. Erivan is less than 20 kilometers from the actual international border.
Recent research has enabled the delineation to a certain extent of Armenian and Azeri cultural spheres in regard to Transcaucasian textiles. Cloudband, Eagle, and Kasim Ushag types can be attributed to Armenians. A number of Shirvan types can be ascribed to Azeris. Borjalu prayer rugs, showing a prayer stone in the mihrab, were most probably knotted by Shia Karapapakhs. These stones, made from clay collected from places considered sacred, are used by Shias while praying.
But what about the coarser types of Kazak and Genje rugs? Or the Turkoman aynali types, which we may assume do not belong to either Armenians or Azeris?
A study of the rugs knotted by refugees from Transcaucasia can help us in identifying the ethnic origin of more rug types. Apart from all the problems and uncertainties, it can be important to consider that certain Kazak and Genje rugs may have been knotted by Turkoman, Kurd, Terekeme or Karapapakh peoples. Further field research in the Turkish-Russian border region can throw more light on this problem.
