Hi Martin,
*In
"Through Russian
Central Asia" written by Stephen Graham, who visited Turkestan in
1914, page 59, I have run into this commentary:
"
.....on the roofs
of the mosques (of Tashkent) are thousand of red poppies in
bloom...."If poppies even infested the roofs of buildings, they
surely were not seldom in the fields of Turkestan, as you guessed.
Graham's following remarks about Bukhara ( A Russian protectorate
which, in 1914, still had its own puppet Khan, unlike Tashkent, Kokhand
and Samarkand which had been integrated in the Russian Empire and had
already a sizable Russian population), could also be relevant for your
present focus on the origin of "Beshir" rugs and bring water to your
mill.
- When Graham visited Bukhara it was still a genuine
«one-thousand-and-one-nights» city, a unique remain of the past still left
quasi-untouched by European influence. The Russians had built their proper
settlement several kilometers outside the walled old city. Despite the
facts that the trans-caspian train reached it since the 1890’s, and that
all the real power was already in Russian hands, Europeans made themselves
rather inconspicuous in old Bukhara.
Thus business with Russia
(including exporting rugs) was certainly not yet a priority for the
population.
- Graham mentions having seen many rug shops in the
bazaar,
but also rug weavers of different ethnic origins, at work.
He mentions specifically the "Sarts" (meaning the Tadjiks, indigenous to
Bukhara, to which former Persian slaves had been assimilated) and Turkmen.
This remark, Martin, confirms your countryman O. Olufsen's notes, who
visited the region about twenty years earlier ("
The Emir of Bukhara and
his Country" ), who also mentioned that many rug-shops (concentrated
in their own large bazaar) displayed rugs
from a number of ethnic
origins of which Olufsen names half a dozen, including Turkmen ("the
best" in his opinion), but also Afghan, Kirgiz (the most basic), Persian
etc..
The statement, found in a number of rug books, that
Bukhara was not a center of rug production, is mainly based on J. Wolf's
assertion: The man, an exalted, hardly trustworthy clergyman, was lucky
enough to come back, with his foolish head still at its usual place, from
a self-imposed «mission»*to Bokhara in 1844-1845. He had hardly any time
(nor interest) for Muslim everyday-life while traveling to and fro
Bukhara. (Bukhara streets and bazaars weren’t safe at the time for anyone
trying to peddle Bibles to the natives while trying to save two British
officers from Emir’s gaols).
IMHO the whole concept of "Middle Amu
Darya" rugs and "Beshir" rugs might just be one more example of rug lore,
an empty label, invented "di sana pianta" as Filiberto would say, to
cover-up Rugdom’s ignorance about which people really wove these rugs and
where. Reading Richard E. Wright ‘s very interesting paper «Bukhara and
its Ersari» is highly recommended for anybody looking for objective
informations about this topic.
I may err, but it seems very likely
to me that the Khanate of Bukhara (to which some northern fringes of
today's Afghanistan and the banks of the Midddle Amu-darya belonged during
the whole nineteenth century), was actually producing rugs in several of
its regions, including in Karshi (Olufsen dixit) and in the capital itself
(Graham fixit) and woven, mainly for local usage, by several distinct
ethnic populations, which still today produce rugs with clearly distinct
styles.
Among them, of course, the Turkmen: mainly Ersari clans, but
possibly also clans of the Salor-, Ata- or Saryk-tribes, living mainly
(but not exclusively) near the banks of the Amu-darya. Their links to the
khanate are well documented*(see Yuri Bregel’s «
An Historical Atlas of
Central Asia»).
But, next to the Turkmen, other rug makers were
probably also found among Uzbek clans (the ruling class in the khanate, in
part settled, in part semi-nomad), Khirgiz nomads (the main wool producers
in the khanate), probably some Sarts ( So-called «Mountain Tadjiks» or
urban ones as Graham's remark implies), perhaps also Karakalpaks (near the
border with the Khiva khanate).*
It would seem logical to me, that,
until the end of the nineteen century, at least, Bokhara (and two or three
larger cities of the khanate, like Karshi) were the main rug emporiums,
because they were the main markets. The Russian railway (Caspian
Sea-Bukhara-Samarkand) made also the capital the most logical place, as
export center to Tashkent, Samarkand, Russia or, later, Europe. The
existence of another emporium, Beshir, lost somewhere on the Amu-darya
banks, an obscure small city never named by any visitor, distant from the
railway which crosses the Amu-Darya at Charjuy,( a well known city with a
sizable bazaar) and from the main local markets makes truly no marketing
sense to me.*
Browsing through a pretty large collection of pics of
extant "Beshir" rugs, I got the strong feeling (under the control of much
more knowledgeable people here on Turkotek) that the palette and/or the
*motifs are often much closer to the work of Persians (Tadjik are Persian
folks*and the region was at least as often part of Greater Persia than
independent), or Kirghiz / Uzbecks than to the work of Turkmen .
-
This is particularly true for "Beshir"
prayer rugs: 19th century
visitors, among them O’Donovan, claimed that Turkmen had no Mosques, at
best only low mud platforms with neither wall nor roof, and had no use for
prayer rugs, unlike Ottoman and Persians.*
Besides, the palette of
"Beshir" prayer rugs (Much white in the field, about as much as red, with
saturated blue, green, orange accents in the small motifs), is alien to
the traditional Turkmen palette (with its dominant red, brownish red and
indigo, while white and yellow are much less important). Neither are the
small motifs typically Turkmen (pomegranates, poppies?, etc..).
-
It is also true for your beloved "Beshir" cloud band rugs (I love them
too): Sure, they share the strong dominance of a saturated red and indigo
palette with typical Turkmen rugs, but they also share it with Kirgiz- and
even with many Uzbek rugs.
*Worse, they show a sovereign contempt for
strict geometry, which is just as un-turkmen as can be.
*Besides,
Safavid Persian miniatures (sixteenth and seventeenth century) show
examples of Persian rugs with "cloud band" motifs, other can be seen in
Dutch paintings (seventeenth century), even though with a different
palette (No red/indigo dominance).
*I do share your suspicion,
Martin, that the "Beshir" cloud-band rugs were woven by non-turkmen people
with a passion for poppies
and a strong interest for sky and
stars. This could point the finger towards urban Tadjiks again (they were
the
educated class in the Bokhara khanate, with a quasi-monopoly
for religious-, administrative- and commercial jobs) or to Turko-Mongol
clans still keeping some old traditions (the main deity for
thirteenth-century Mongol tribes was Téngri, the Great Blue Sky): The
fourteenth-century Il-khanid Mongols were tolerant and curious for other
religions, but also rather pragmatical, when finally adopting Islam. IMHO
it is quite possible that some Uzbek- and/or Kirgiz- clans kept
pre-Islamic beliefs under a thin Islamic layer, and that these old
traditions kept influencing their weavers.*
Best
regards
Pierre
