Bakhtiar Persian Rug 6' 4 x 4' 3

Structure of Origin:

Structurally, Bakthiari 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.

History of Origin:

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 established weaving workshops in many of their villages, which subsequently became towns. Though initially the workshops 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.  

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