Very Fine and Rare Persian Bakhtiari Carpet

Very Fine Persian Bakhtiari carpet handwoven from wool in Iran.

The name Bakhtiari can apply either to a place or a tribal group. Geographically, it refers to the province west of Esfahan called Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari (‘the four valleys and the Bakhtiari country’), one of the most beautiful and fertile areas of Iran, in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. In that latter half of the 19th century its main landlords were the khans of the Duraki family of the Haft Lang Bakhtiari, one of the two major moieties into which the Bakhtiari were divided (the other was the Chahar Lang). Wealthy through land and livestock, the khans began to build great, lavishly furnished palaces for themselves in the 1870s and 1880s; then in the early-20th century they were made immeasurably richer by the discovery of oil in their winter pasture lands in Khuzestan. They estab lished weaving workshops in many of their villages, which sub sequently became towns. Though initially the work shops probably wove carpets and rugs exclusively for the khans’ own use, their commercial potential soon became obvious and by the 1930s those in the leading centres of the Chahar Mahal – Shahr Kord, Shalamzar, Ghafarrukh, Chahal-i Shotor, Shamsabad, Farah Dombeh, Saman – as well as significant factories in some 70 other villages, turned this area into one of the most productive weaving districts in Iran. Structurally, Chahar Mahal carpets are all fairly similar: symmetrically knotted with cotton foundations; some examples have their cotton wefts dyed blue. A small group of distinctive rugs (from a Bakhtiari district outside the Chahar Mahal and slightly further west in Esfahan province) have blue cotton wefts and are asymmetrically knotted, usually with two or more medallions on the long axis. There is also a distinctive group of large carpets, often referred to as ‘khan carpets’, which have an inscription cartouche giving details of the particular khan who commissioned the carpet and sometimes added details such as the date of manufacture, the town where it was woven and even, on rare occasions, the name of the particular workshop or master weaver.

For further information please contact us and our team will be pleased to assist you. All pieces in the collection are under the auspices of Essie Sakhai, one of the world’s foremost experts and collectors of fine handmade Persian rugs and carpets.